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Published: August 29th 2009
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Malawi
June 21 - June 26 Once we left Zanzibar we had some long drive days to get to the Malawi border. 500km on dirt tracks in a HGV unsurprisingly takes a fair few hours. To pass time on the truck we listened to iPods through the speakers (if I never hear Akon again it will be too soon) read, played ridiculous games like Mafia (don’t ask) and dozed.
Now our original 12 had joined up with another group we were all expected to pitch in with cooking and cleaning duties. Cooking duty involves getting up at stupid o’clock to set up breakfast - usually cereal and toast but sometimes eggs. Obviously there are no toasters so to make toast we had to put slices into a hand-held rack that we would hold over the flames of the fire. This took a steady hand and was quite tiring but we sure do appreciate toasters a lot more now. And washing up is a chore in itself. This involves pouring water from the kettles into three plastic bowls. One has washing up liquid in, the middle has Milton and the third is just plain water. We had to rinse all
Island
This is where we rowed to on the kayak our pots in each bowl before flapping them dry by waving them about. A tee towel would’ve sped things up.
On Simon’s first night of cooking, once we had crossed the border into Malawi, his group did bbq chicken and mashed potato. It took them one-and-a-half hours to peel the potatoes and Simon got blisters! Needless to say I didn’t have any sympathy.
We then headed to a campsite on the shore of Lake Malawi for three nights. By now camping fatigue was kicking in and we spent £10 each to upgrade to a double room with en suite. Bliss. Although I could’ve done without the geckos that lived in the room too. The site was really good fun and had a bar with a darts board and a pool table so we did quite a bit of socialising. One evening we had a pig roast which was as fresh as could be seeing as how they bought the pig to the site and killed it moments before preparing it for the spit. Thankfully I didn’t witness this Lord of the Flies episode but Simon tells me the person who bought the pig asked them if anyone wanted
to kill it! Could you imagine? It would’ve sent me vegetarian for the night which would’ve been a shame because the pig tasted so good. Watching the skinning and gutting of the pig didn’t put Simon off though.
Lake Malawi is beautiful. The lake is very deep but a lovely blue colour and as it’s so vast it was just like being at the sea. We spent our days chilling out and topping up our tans. We did hire a kayak to row out to an island in the middle of the lake but didn’t jump off the 30ft rocks into the lake like some of the more daredevil-types among us. Simon also went on a horse ride that ended with a bareback ride/swim in the lake with the horses. It looked a lot of fun and I know Simon certainly enjoyed it. They even got to see a huge python be killed by the people who run the stables because they are known to kill the horses. This is the only snake either of us saw in Africa apart from a very tiny one that was in a bar in Zambia.
Malawi is well known for wooden
Horse riders
Renee, Nikki and Ang ready for their ride chairs which are handcrafted with everything from the big 5 carved into them to a map of the continent. We stopped at a roadside market where there were many carpenters making anything you can imagine from wood. They are really talented and we ended up with a fruit bowl with the big 5 carved in. The men who make the chairs and other items were very keen to trade items like clothes, pens or books in exchange for their goods. One even asked for the top off my back. They are very persistent but friendly with it but after a half hour of being beckoned into stalls with cries of ‘sister, I give you best price’ and ‘you can look with your hands’ we were ready to hit the road.
We headed to the border crossing into Zambia which would be our fourth country in less than three weeks.
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