Luuveellyy Jahbellyyy Journey through Zambia/Malawi

Zambia

Lusaka- After being in land of few people and large open spaces, it was incredibly overwhelming just to cross the streets of Lusaka, the capital of Zamibia, forget exploring the city. Basically, the it was the entire population of Namibia squeezed into one crazy, real, bustling city. After adjusting to the number of people around me though, I loved Lusaka—complete with a Subway, hideaway Indian places where the aunty just put whatever came to her that day in a thali, and very few tourists, it seemed like a great place to live. The first day, we simply walked around trying to find some local food and markets—in addition to mangoes, there were all kinds of vegetables and crazy orange mushrooms. It was also kind of hard to adjust to the currency. 6000 Zambian kwacha is one US dollar. AHHH! Its impossible to think in thousands all the time—2000 kwacha is really not a lot of money but it sure felt like a lot. Fortunately it got progressively more manageable as we passed through Southern Africa.

Also, because there weren't a lot of tourists around, we got a lot of interesting comments—it was five girls and one guy with a big cowboy hat walking around, so it was pretty much impossible to blend in.

Some great comments in Lusaka:

“Five (girls) to one (guy) --you are overloading!” (Overloading=commonly used to describe when taxis and combis stuff too many people. This happens in namibia all the time.)

Shayna: “Can we all ride in your taxi?” (5 people)
Taxi Driver: “You are fat. Taxi is small.”
Shayna: “is that a no?”

We also saw an awesome modern art museum in lusaka and after searching for a long time, found the local food restaurant that we were looking for—it wasn't that much different than caprivian food, but they did use a lot more vegetables and every table had hot sauce on it, so it was definitely enjoyable!

From Lusaka we travelled to the border town of Chipata. We got on a bus leaving at 4 am, but it broke down in a random village just outside of Lusaka. It was kind of fun to walk around the village, and mango trees were everywhere, but toilets were hard to find. ACK. We did meet a guy from namibia who was on our bus!

Once we got to Chipata, we were pretty much lost—it was really late and we needed to find a place to stay. There were bike taxis of disputable reliability offering to take us around—actually i don't think the bikes themselves were unreliable, but it was raining, muddy, hilly, and we all had huge backpacks on, so we opted to walk rather than kill any unsuspecting bike taxi drivers. We ended up staying in this guesthouse and finding an awesome local food place that had really good vegetables. It was interesting to see that the town had such a large muslim population though—the mosque was about the nicest thing in chipata. Anyways, it was just a temporary stopover (later we discovered a pcv resthouse was there and we missed it :-()and the next day we set out to find a taxi to take us to the border—we ended up finding an awesome guy who loaded us ALL in one taxi with all our bags. He had to go find rope to tie up the trunk and then played hip hop music all the way to the border—on the way we saw people holding up canisters of black market gas, which is apparently much cheaper in malawi.

Once we got to the border, there were tons of people trying to exchange money for us—little did we realize this was our only chance to do this, since no one in malawi would exchange the inferior zamibian kwacha for the malawian kwacha (not that much better, but at least we were using 100s instead of of 1000s. 150=1 US dollar). Our taxi driver, having become friends with us since we were in such close quarters with him in the overloaded taxi, fervently defended our right to a fair bargain and we got a pretty decent rate for the remainder of our zamibian kwacha, before we walked across our second border to malawi.

Malawi

We got to the capital of Malawi, Lilongwe in pretty decent time. Lilongwe is a much more manageable city—it was quiet and small, and seemed pretty cosmopolitan since we could find Indian and chinese food :-). We stayed at a nice backpackers where we met a volunteer from Mozambique who just finished her service, Kara. She was going to the same place and ended up joining us for a part of our trip! It was a relaxing night before we set of for our first exotic desitation, Nkhata Bay on Lake Malawi. We were initially informed that we were taking an express bus that would be much nicer than the other options, despite being the same price. The bus itself was definitely nicer, and since we got there on time, we got our own seats. However, by nine o'clock (our starting time being 8 o'clock), we realized that this bus, despite its appearance, was definitely local transport. We had people standing in the aisles (for the entire trip), music blasting, and off course, a couple of chickens. Every time we stopped people sold their wares, including corn, bread, and peanuts—by the end we were starving but when we tried to buy food, our newfound malawian friends yelled at the local sellers trying to overcharge us. By the end, we got slightly delirious and megan started talking about wood nymphs and sprites. Fortunately, our bus driver was speeding through the mountainous road along Lake Malawi, so along with getting to our destination quickly, I was constantly entertained by Megan falling on me seductively (accidentally).

We did eventually get to Nkhata bay, where random men found us and took us to one of the local backpackers/lodges. Nkhata bay pretty much can be described as paradise. Lake Malawi is completely clear blue and the beaches are sandy, but the sand is not so fine that it stuck to you all the time. To top it off, there were mango trees on the beach and you could see fisherman in the tiny boats riding out at sunset.

We spent a couple days just vegging out after hard travel—the lodge that we were staying at also had the most hilarious staff. First was simon, the four foot tall little old man who spoke with a really high voice. He didn't really do anything funny until he noticed that megan could not stop laughing every time he walked by. Then, once he started dancing in front of her (leaving her, i think, at the brink of hysterics) and when we left, he gave her a bunch of air kisses. It was pretty fantastic—but my favorite was Dixon, the main waiter. Every time you asked him for food, he said “whyyyy not, ahahahahahah.” Once he convinced us to buy a meal just because he said it would be “yaaummyy yaummmy yaummyyy.” When we said we enjoyed it, he just said “ahahaha, loaavelly jabelly.” Clearly, he was amazing.

Anyways, we decided to leave this paradise for the ferry that travels across lake Malawi (we were misguided by the deceitful and unreliable lonely planet, which told us that not only was their tons of food available on the ferry, but that we could possibly meet our soulmates on this ferry. After going on the ferry for two days, i can assure you that this is pretty much impossible.) We got on the ferry, deciding to take 1st class, which was the cheapest option above deck. 1st class meant we camped on the deck of the ferry—possibly scenic, when its not the rainy season. The sights were beautiful at times, but frustrating because it was raining mostly and because the boat stopped for hours because someone wanted to transport a car on to the ferry. IF the ferry was normal, as in it docked at all of its stops, this wouldn't have taken long. But no, the car was transported via smaller boat onto the ferry. Needless to say it took forever. We spent Christmas on the ferry and made each other some rather exciting gifts—including a massage, a bottle cap necklace, beer goggles made from cardboard and bottle caps, and a paper rose. It was a little sad, but nothing compared to our initial shock at discovering that we were definitely NOT meeting our soulmates on the ferry.

Anyways, we chose to get off at a smaller stop, Chipoka. We unloaded onto a small, suspicious looking wooden motorboat, but our elation at getting of the ferry was too strong to be overshadowed by this. Until we found out how we were getting off the small boat. One of the older (Malawian) ladies on the boat almost fainted when she saw it—we were to climb up a 5 foot high cement wall using the rusty metal (often broken) beams attached to that wall. We climbed up with our backpacks and watched incredulously as babies were lifted over the wall by one arm. They didn't seem shocked though.

Anyways. We made it!! And got to the road where we parted ways with two members of our group, kara (stayed on the ferry) and simon (went back to namibia), and set to wait for a hike to the next town, or possibly mozambique. Originally we had planned to get all the way there, but our ferry was eight hours late and no one was stopping to take us anywhere. Combis rejected us because we were too many people—this would never happen in Namibia and cause me to missed overloading here desperately. Anyways, finally, a flat-bed truck pulled up and a white guy speaking Chichewa (the local language), started helping us out because, i'm pretty sure, we appeared just as desperate as we were. Anyways, he turned out to be Peacecorps and offered to host us for the night (and has been to Richmond). We ended up riding on bike taxis the 2-3 km to his site—since we all had our huge backpacks on, i'm pretty sure the drivers were exhausted by the end. At one point, we saw a herd of cows in our way and I was sure we were going to fall until the driver started yelling at the person herding the cows and the cows to move. I tried to communicate this to the driver, but his english was limited to "yes, madam", "thank you madam", pointing and a thumbs up. The cows listened to the driver, but since the person herding them was about four years old, i'm pretty sure he had no control. Well, i guess he didn't look like he cared much either. Anyways, we got to the site—it was beautiful and set in a valley with small farms all around it. It was fun to play volunteer there—we played with the kids that congregated to stare at us and Danny, the volunteer cooked us delicious food on woodfire/stove. He had only been at his site a week and was soo happy and excited to be there so that was also nice and we tried not to infect him with our occasionally pessimistic perspective on volunteer life.

Anyways, the next day, after another wonderful meal (we really hadn't had much to eat on the ferry), we set off for mozambique. We got to the border town pretty quickly (By noon) and had some more good local food while we waited around for the rain to stop. We wanted to change money, since there was a bank and an exchange place, but we were deceived by the signs. The atm was not working, the exchange place was closed, the bank wouldn't exchange anything or provide any services of the atm, and we were simply told that nothing could be done. Ack. I'm not really sure why the bank was even there or why those people were being needlessly employed. Anyways, it all worked out b/c one person's card work and everyone accepts dollars and rand everywhere. We learned our lesson from the previous border and exchanged the rest of our malawian money with the sketchy men at the border—this time they had calculators which were mysteriously programmed and didn't work properly. Fortunately we also learned to work out the rate in our head ahead of time, so i think we got a decent deal. Anyways, it was the end of the kwacha (sadly) and the beggining of the mozambiquan currency, meticais. Much less fun, obviously, but much more managable as it was 25 meticais to 1 us dollar. After haggling for the last time in english (not understanding how wonderful this is, compared to haggling in, say, Portuguese), we once again walked across the border, blissfully unaware of the exhausting journey that lay ahead of us in Mozambique.

next edition—mozambique.