Malawi, Dar Es Salaam & Zanzibar

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Arriving in Malawi the border crossing was a little less crazy than before. There were guys desperately trying to sell us drinks whilst we tried to figure out what the entry form was asking us. Some countries ask the bizarrest of questions, I remember the visa form for Kenya asked what your father’s occupation was. Malawi’s was just confusing English. We headed onto Kande Beach on Lake Malawi, here on this beautiful spot you could see why the lake is called the calendar lake. It extends 365km up and down by 52km wide. David Livingstone nicknamed it the lake of stars because fisherman used to use lanterns when they went fishing at night.

We went for a village tour of Kande seeing how they prepare their staple meal of Kasava, which gives off a very strong smell when drying, almost like fish. We also stopped by a hospital where there is one nurse who is also the midwife. The amount of work one person has to do was quite crazy and when you are the only one, I can imagine you would need a very calm head. Then was a visit to the school, which was a very different sort of crazy- even before getting to the school, children were running to us from all sorts of directions. There are 1800 children in this school being taught by 10 teachers. That’s almost 200 children for one teacher!!! We went into one class where the kids bombarded us and took us back to their part of the classroom-I actually had to be rescued by another guy in our group as we were leaving as there were kids everywhere and you couldn’t see some of us. For some children who don’t often see white people it must have been an intriguing experience as one kid rubbed her hands on my arm as if to see if white skin feels different, which was amusing.

Later we headed out for some dives into Lake Malawi which was great to see. This was my first dives since Fiji and it was great to be diving in fresh water for a change, despite the biodiversity being less than I had expected. I wondered if the lake had been overfished. On our second dive we found an old VW car sunk down there, this could have been just a dive prop to make up for there not being as many species in the water to see, but it was good to get back into the water and dive again.

Next was to a place in the North of the country called Chitimba. This was still on lake Malawi although the beach and water wasn’t quite as nice as Kande, plus you got more hassle on the beach from people trying to sell you stuff. We tried a local pub here and sampled a very cheap beer called Chibuku, people drink this if they want to get drunk fast but can’t afford beer and food, although it did look like it came in packaging that would be from a skanky fast food place. It was pretty gross. The next day some of us decided to embark on a hike up to Livingstonia, a town in the hills that some of David Livingstone’s fellow team helped to build. It was at this time Livingstone was ill from malaria so he never made it up to Livingstonia and so this is why this place was named after him. The trek was 30km in total and was extremely knackering considering the heat and the steepness of the climb. I hope Machu Picchu won’t be as bad. The town itself was interesting with the hospital and that Livingstone’s friends built. This hospital is the closest around, so people from Chitimba have to either climb the 30km if they are ill, pay for transport to take them up the extremely rocky path or wait until Monday where they can get the public ambulance which will take them to the hospital for free. Not much of a choice but at least there is one. Conveniently there is a witchdoctor that has stationed themselves a quarter of the way up the hill as competition. It is surprising how popular this was as an option, but in dire straights comes pretty drastic decisions I guess. On our way down we checked out a beautiful waterfall and managed to take a dip into one of its pools to cool off before eating a nice lunch at a mushroom farm, with a very swanky composting toilet with a view overlooking Chitimba and the lake. On our way down we came across some students from Livingstonia University- oh yes believe it or not Livingstone’s crew built one of these as well, although it is very focussed on religion as well as education. These guys had gone down the mountain earlier that day to get drunk on the cheap beer food before heading back up with no water at 4pm. How they managed to get back up before sunset with no water is amazing (if they actually managed to)!

Finally it was across to Tanzania. The next two days we had drives of around 12-15 hours to go, leaving our campsite at 5am and then 4am. The second of the two drives was to Dar Es Salaam where we crossed over the harbour to our campsite. This was a drama in itself with a massive cram onto the boat, on the other side an old fishing vessel which was now used to ferry locals to Zanzibar was beached across the same area where we needed to port. The captain decided to use our little boat as a tug boat for this ferry, after a long time and a few bumps into the other boat it was decided to let us off, finally on the sand bank!! We then took a tuk-tuk, which was pretty tame in comparison to our campsite and then flopped in the pool with ciders, relieved we had actually made it!!

The next day that same boat was there to pick us up, it was just as crazy to get across with a stampede to the ferry resulting in people pretty much getting dragged along in the crowd. This would not be a journey for children, disabled or the elderly as instead of queues and only selling a limited number of tickets it is simply a case of buy a ticket and good luck….. maybe see you on the other side.

Fortunately the ferry to Zanibar, an old Australian catamaran that went to and from Tasmania took us over in 2 hours. Zanzibar is split up into two islands, the main island (Unguja) is home to 1 million people with another 300 000 on the other island (Pemba). The main religion is Islam, similar to the rest of Tanzania. Our first stop was two nights at Kendwa on the north of the island. The beach here was amazing and again I decided to go diving. We ended up doing 3 dives of around 1 hour each. The currents were strong and the wildlife was amazing. I did see some species like invertebrates I recognised from Fiji such as spiny sea urchins and blue starfish-there were lots of these and many fish species such as parrotfish, stingrays, wrasse, barracuda etc. After the second dive we had to rescue a sinking local boat who had taken in water. They were very grateful although it seemed that their priority was rescuing their boat rather than themselves, we say items are replaceable, here this is their livelihood and without it they would be stuck for money. After that we had one of the best dives I have had, a drift dive which took in 3 dive sites that would normally take an hour each to swim, in 30 minutes due to the drift being so strong. We got so close to blue spotted stingrays and saw them hiding underneath rocks with just their tail sticking out. They must have got a shock as we glided past at speed. Most of them probably thought they had just imagined us. We also saw a green turtle which was epic and incredible to see him just get up and calmly swim away almost oblivious to the current.

The next day we stopped off at a spice farm to do a spice visit, here we were introduced to a guy named Butterfly who climbed up coconut trees for fun whilst singing. He did this simply by tying a loop in a rope and putting his feet through it. He made it look so easy, but it must have taken years to master. All the spices were quite interesting to find out, what I remember from the tour is pretty much every single spice is an aphrodisiac for men or women (and sometimes both) and that Chanel number 5 perfume is the biggest scams going. This perfume is made from the leaves of a traditional Zanzibar tree mixed with coconut water and that is it!!!! They had their own which they were selling for £3 which was exactly the same thing, except it didn’t have Chanel number 5 printed on it. I wonder if there is a traditional Wirral plant that I could do the same with and make a fortune?? Nettles, brambles- would they work?

Our final destination in Zanzibar was in the capital called Stonetown, where Freddie Mercury lived as a child until 18. It is incredible to think that if there hadn’t been political unrest in Zanzibar when Freddie was 18 then his family wouldn’t have moved to the UK and Queen would probably never had existed. I felt Zanzibar could have had more Queen focus, it seemed they were almost embarrassed by him. It is sad that countries like Uganda in Eastern Africa still think in the dark ages towards people who are different and I wonder if Zanzibar is the same. It is especially surprising after how the rest of the world- West, East and middle East all treated African’s as different and developed the slave trade because they felt African’s were different to us. Zanzibar at this time was a big port for the slave trade, however even this Stonetown doesn’t have on show as much as I thought it would. We did see a little of it but I am not sure if Stonetown wants to look ahead or keep to its traditions. It was hard to figure out. One interesting building though was the House of Wonders museum which was part of the shortest battle in history, lasting 38 minutes between King Sultan and the British in 1896.

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