America is too much violence.

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After a brief, boozy farewell at Doogles on Thursday night, we leave Blantyre in high spirits - me, ready after ten weeks in Malawi to move on to wider and wilder pastures; and the others - Marie and Eline from the Kabula Lodge; Richard and Melise, two ex-pat friends - at the start of a ten-day holiday to the Mozambican coast. Spend enough time as a freelancer and you begin to forget what it’s like to live a life of early-morning commutes, workplace politics, nine-to-fives. In short, you forget how much of the world lives. But now, with the others giddy at the prospect of a ten-day jailbreak, and the girls free from the hospital’s headaches, even I’m infected by the holiday mood. Ten days! Imagine the luxury, after daily wake-up calls at half-past four; after rice and beans five days a week in the hospital canteen; after the same faces at Doogles and Blue Elephant, the same rumors and back-biting, the same whispered intrigues. The girls are excitedly chattering as they cram their swimwear and sunblock into their backpacks. Eline has decided, as a point of principle, to pack a pair of sandals as her only footwear for the holiday. Even her toes, it seems, want to enjoy their taste of freedom for the next ten days.

My own role in the jailbreak will be brief: after sharing the potential trauma of the border crossing, and packing into a chapa for the trip to Cuamba, we’ll be going our separate ways. With just ten days to spare, the others are hell-bent on making it to Ilha de Mozambique - a UNESCO World Heritage Site sitting on a tiny sliver of island off the coast - and they’re unfazed by the fact that a full six of their ten days will be spent in transit. I admire their resolve, when they could’ve just as easily been whiling away this week on the beaches of Cape Maclear. At the same time, I don’t envy them in the least. Still, after what amounted to a two-week holiday of my own in Blantyre - a domesticated fortnight of cooking and cleaning and canoodling with ex-pats, while more or less pretending I was somewhere far from Malawi - it’s time to get back to traveling in earnest. In Cuamba, a busy junction town some three hours south of the border, the others will spend a single night before shipping off on the 5am train to Nampula. By Monday, they should be on Ilha de Mozambique. With any luck, by then, I’ll have already gotten started on a Mozambican adventure of my own.

It’s a wet, ash-gray afternoon when I leave Blantyre, a sad parting with a town I’ve grown awfully fond of these past two weeks. I’ve picked up a tent at Game - a $50 splurge that, I hope, will pay for itself after a few nights of camping on the coast - and have even managed, in a fortuitous stroke of luck, to find a copy of a book about Livingstonia that I’d been looking for since September.

At the minibus station in Limbe, waiting for the others to arrive from a half-day at the hospital, I pass an hour with the Limbe youth - the marginally employed congregants of public places, directing new arrivals to the proper minibus stand while swilling 10 kwacha packets of Malawian gin. They are, all things considered, a swell bunch. One of the older boys, boozily introducing himself as Steven, wants to talk about the prospects of the new Obama administration. “It is a very good thing that he does not discriminate,” says Steven. “He chose Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense, and he is a Republican. I am happy to see that.” I wonder if one in 10 Americans would know that same fact.

An old, toothless crazy - drunkenly lurching through the mud to reach me - begins an impassioned plea in Chichewa which goes on for some minutes. I agree with some points, disagree with others, all the while explaining in English that I have no fucking clue what he’s saying. Either way, I make a favorable impression. He gives me a little bump with his ashy fist before staggering into town.

Through some confusion with the others, I’ve managed to come to the wrong minibus stage. The drizzle has turned into a steady downpour, everyone ducking into idle minibuses, frowning up at the sky. Marie calls to say that they’re soaked, they’re boarding a bus to Mangochi, they’ll meet me there. Having spent the past hour waiting for them - and having watched a Mangochi-bound minibus sputter from the station just minutes before - I’m none too pleased at this intelligence. Seeing my growing ire, a helpful young conductor offers to walk me to the main bus station just down the road. He’s a sweet, soft-spoken kid; he’d dropped out of secondary school when he couldn’t afford the fees, but now, as he begins to earn an income, he hopes to return - maybe to some day be a journalist. He shepherds me onto a minibus, wags his hand, and then trudges back into the rain. It’s moments like this that I’m really going to miss about Malawi.

It is a hot, cramped ride, and it’s approaching dusk when we reach Mangochi. By some strange stroke of fate, I’ve managed to make it a solid hour before the others, though they’d left me for sodden dead in Limbe. Vindicated by the transport gods of Africa, I find us some rooms in the OK Resthouse - a shabby hotel for which the word “OK” might actually be undue praise - then I have a cold Coke and wait for the others to turn up.

Outside the guesthouse, a wiry teen is reading the paper. He looks up and rustles the pages and asks where I’m from. I say that I’m from New York. America.

“America,” he says. “Black man in White House.” He seems awfully pleased with this formulation.

Though he’s never been to America, Rashid has traveled around southern Africa - to Zimbabwe and South Africa and Mozambique. He would like to visit the States some day, to see Miami and New York and Alaska.

“How is Alaska?” he asks.

“Big. Cold.”

“It is colder than California?”

I say that it is.

“But what about Schwarzenegger, he is the governor there.”

“You really read the paper, huh?” I ask.

“You know Terminator 3? He was naked in that movie,” says Rashid. “I think that man does not respect himself.”

It is a fair estimation that, before president-elect Obama arrived on the political scene, the California governor was our most closely followed politician abroad. (Certainly the only one that young Malawians have seen in the nude.) Rashid is curious about America, but he’s not too sure he could find the courage to visit.

“Africa is peace,” he says. “But I think America is too much violence.”

Strange for most Americans to realize how often I’ve encountered this perception abroad, in places - Africa and the Middle East - that they might avoid for just the same reason. Malawi, we both agree, is a peaceful and friendly place. And Mozambique? Rashid shakes his head.

“Mozambique has too many robbers,” he says. “They are not afraid of police. They say, ‘We have nothing. We are already dead.’”

With this sobering report, I see a few familiar white faces approaching through the gloaming. I give Rashid a little fist bump, razz the others about their five-hour slog from Blantyre, and usher them into the OK. The rooms are scruffy and improbably hot - the day’s warmth having apparently been stored for safe-keeping through the night - but no one feels too compelled to complain. Relieved to stretch their legs after the long ride, to be just a short drive from Mozambique, the others’ spirits are high. We find some cheap eats and then, in homage to two of our traveling companions, exchange gifts in celebration of the Dutch holiday, Zwarte Piet.

It is one of those oddly Dutch creations, “Black Pete,” in which friends and loved ones swap presents during an obscure dice game whose rules, in this instance, Eline seems to invent on the fly. Better still, most Dutchmen will spend the weeks leading up to Black Pete fretting over the poem - poem! - they’re expected to present on the big day. On Black Pete itself, the highlight is invariably the arrival of the eponymous guest-of-honor, who is not unlike the American Santa, should the American Santa decide to come shucking and jiving under the mistletoe in blackface. Nothing seems to evoke a sense of nostalgia in the countless Dutch I’ve met like the memory of cousin Arno or Uncle Joost, face slathered in shoe polish, sending the kids into hysterics while cavorting across the living room. (I’ve been told that his dusky skin tone represents the soot clinging to Black Pete’s face as he slides down the chimney, but I suspect the historical origin has more to do with the fear of Moorish conquests in 16th century Rotterdam. You be the judge.) Say what you will about the Dutch, but I suspect Captain Cook, sailing the South Pacific three centuries ago, wouldn’t have discovered a stranger tribe shrinking heads on the shores of Papua New Guinea.

Still, it is a fine celebration, and it manages, in its own peculiar way, to stir my own wistfulness at the thought of another holiday season far from home. I have no idea where, exactly, I’ll be on Christmas Day - somewhere on the north coast of Mozambique, most likely - but I’m grateful to have, however briefly, the company of my Blantyre family before we go our separate ways.

In the morning Melise makes arrangements for a pick-up to take us to the border. We toss our bags into the back, doing our best to avoid the rank, fly-studded bundle which almost certainly contains a bloody goat leg. At seven the day is already brutally hot, and we’re grateful to hit the open road, wind roaring past our ears. It is a beautiful drive through farmlands and villages, children rushing out to the roadside to wave at our dust. Men toss their bicycles and baskets into the back, climb in, joke and argue, climb back out, pedal down some narrow dirt road. We climb a series of switchbacks until a great green bowl spreads below us, the lake shining like a silver plate in the distance. With the arrival of the rains in southern Malawi, the scenery is lush, striking, and I’m sorry to be leaving the country now, when it’s as lovely and pastoral a place as you could possibly hope to see.

A commotion follows our pick-up as we slow to a crawl in Chiponde, the scruffy border town from which I’ll be leaving Malawi behind. It is three kilometers to the border post in Mozambique, and another four to Mandimba, from which we’ll be able to arrange onward transport to Cuamba. Forty sweating bodies have crowded around the truck - push-bike boys hoping to pedal us across the border - and they’re grabbing at our backpacks and sleeping bags, hoping to win our business. Each tries a different tactic - look desperate, look winning, look friendly, look aggrieved - and those we choose grin broadly, having won the day’s mzungu jackpot. With a few apologies and waves we’re on our way, pedaling our bumpy, dusty way to the Mozambican border.

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