I loved reading the names painted on shops and restaurants we passed on the road. I also loved how most businesses had painted on their wall, underneath their name, ‘We offer the following services…’, often followed by a long list of what seemed like quite randomly chosen goods and services, and ending in ‘etc’.
In Tanzania, and Zanzibar particularly (outside Stone Town), the names were quirkily aspirational:
Nice Hair Dressing Salon
Aalya Beautiful Salon
Bob & Bad Boy Ritzy Barber Salon
Tulifo Modern Butchery
In Zambia, things tended to take a more philosophical tone:
Reasonable Shop & Take Away
Reasonable Restaurant
No Money No Power Grocery
New Deal Tarven (sic)
Be Strong Enterprises
Be Strong Barber Salon
Tropics Depot – for all your stationary, food, signwriting etc etc
Just Imagine Investments
Hope Dot Com (internet cafe)
Sex Thrills, AIDS Kills (billboard)
Namibian businesses seemed to have less personality overall, apart from a couple of interesting ones:
The Dog Is Hot Bar
OK Food (actually a big supermarket chain, where we bought food to cook for dinner, and yes, it was acceptable)
But one of the best signs we saw was in Malawi:
Road Signs Save Lives (painted on a road sign)
Days 158 – 159, Friday 23rd & Saturday 24th January 2009 (Cath)
There are no photos from this section, so I’ll make it brief. Brief-ish.
At breakfast on our last day at Kande, Anne was not allowed to throw away some mouldy bread – Mel stopped her, saying ‘mould doesn’t hurt you’. Especially since Anne is actually a biologist whose work focuses on infectious diseases (albeit of fish), that seemed a big call! Not that it was out of character – Mel has also been heard telling geologists about how mountains are formed, teachers about how to maintain professional relationships with children, and of course pharmacists about which antibiotics are the ‘best’.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually been eating really healthily on the truck. The problem is that most of our food is bought at supermarkets, rather than local fresh food markets, and most (well, all) of our meals are things that people on the truck eat at home (there has been great variety, considering it’s all cooked over a fire – stir-fries, Thai curry, pasta, bangers & mash, lots of salads and fruit, even some eggs and pancakes for breakfast). It is only when we have free time in towns that we have the chance to try African food. So when we arrived in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, we had the best intentions – but ended up eating Nando’s for lunch, trying to salve our consciences with the fact that peri-peri is African! It had been a long, rough morning (we ended up without water to drink on the truck) and we just felt like some comfort food. I also bought some strawberry drinking yoghurt, because dairy is an extremely rare luxury, and it was yum.
Lilongwe was a strange capital city. It was very small as national capitals go, and its supermarkets were so big and Western and shiny, mainly frequented by the privileged few and the expat community, that as we walked through the carpark of Shoprite I felt we could be in an Australian country town, just with a lot of street touts thrown in. The further we ventured from the shopping centre, the more real and African it all felt again, but it was very hard to get our heads around. This is Malawi – just down the road, everybody is living in mud huts and subsisting mainly on cassava, struggling to buy paraffin for their lamps!
Camp was a twenty minute walk up the hill, past houses surrounded by big fences topped with broken glass for security. Al’s group cooked us some delicious burritos, we had an early night, I did bush gym in the morning, and we headed back into town – it was so nice to be able to walk somewhere from camp for a change.
Our time in Lilongwe was rounded out by some time on the internet (two cafes were closed due to power outages, but one was open, and I was happy to find a lovely email from Mere), meeting two new passengers joining us on the trip (Loren & Tanaz), purchasing some wooden carvings from a market (and getting a man there to polish bits of our elephant that Mr Smooth had missed), and buying some pretty patterned cotton from a street vendor with our last Malawian Kwacha.
Into Zambia we headed, stopped quickly in Chipata to withdraw a few million Zambian Kwacha from the ATM, and soon found ourselves at an established campsite again, in the middle of nowhere. Mike (originally from Vic, but lately of London) set up his media player so we could all sit around and watch a movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in the bar. Most people seemed to have a touch of grumpiness about them, since we’d just found out that due to heavy rains, we wouldn’t be able to go to South Luangwa National Park or the Flat Dogs campsite Mel had raved about at the start of the trip – apparently a previous group woke up to find an elephant amongst their tents. Visiting both of those places had been billed as Zambia’s highlights, and as compensation for us not being able to go through Zimbabwe (which was off-limits to us because Oasis had to stick to a declaration it had made on its website, saying it would not travel there for six months, ending just two days after we were there). So, while we all understood the wet season would make our itinerary unpredictable, and we really wouldn’t choose to get stuck with a bogged truck for days on end, it was hard not to be disappointed. ‘Can’t we try?! It’ll be an adventure’!
Instead, we had to wait until tomorrow to hear what Mel and Franco had come up with instead – I found it quite hard going to bed with no knowledge of, and more importantly, no chance of having control over where I’d be for the next week.
Filed under: Malawi
Days 155 – 157, Tuesday 20th – Thursday 22nd January 2009 (Cath)
Sidetracks aside, we arrived at Kande Beach with plenty of time to enjoy a double celebration – Anne’s birthday and Obama Day!
Proud Team America watching the inauguration ceremony
Birthday cake overland style – pancakes, marshmallows, bananas, and lots of sticky sweet chocolatey goo
The next day was not called Wednesday. It was called Pig Day. Someone other than us was up early, digging a pit for charcoal, sticking steel poles in the ground on either side of it, and accepting delivery of a (humanely slaughtered) pig to be rotated slowly above it all day.
We, for once, weren’t awake as soon as the sun rose, because we had taken the upgrade option and were sleeping under a solid roof, in a little bungalow on the beach. I dragged myself out in time to join a mid-morning Bush Gym session.
Lots of good people working out (spurred on by Jez and Carly, both physios), plus lots of lazy people sitting in the middle watching them, not to mention the sneaky ones taking photos…
At least some of us were in top form, looking toned and ready to model our gorgeous Pig Day outfits.
The challenge wasn’t just to wear these things all day – we also had to compete against each other in some wacky team sports on the beach, in what Mel dubbed the ‘Truck Olympics’. Al and I were on different teams, which respectably (well, apart from the all-animal-print-attire and men in dresses) finished in the rear of the field of four. Let’s not restart the debate about who was third and who was fourth, after a controversial tie-breaking wheelbarrow race. The field we did excel in was sadly not scheduled in the day’s ‘organised fun’, so we arranged with our fellow, more spontaneous athletes to add it on to the end of proceedings – the human pyramid. I’ve chased down a photo of it – click on ‘April’ on the calendar to find it posted under ‘home, catching up’.
The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, punctuated by a huge dinner of gristly pork, delicious stuffed capsicums, baked potatoes, and way too much food in general. There was definitely some punch, some dance aerobics, and some hammocks.
The Thursday at Kande didn’t have an official name of its own, but let’s call it Bilharzia Day. Al and I ventured out in the morning, into the real world outside camp, where we walked through the village, browsed through wood carving shops, saw market day in action on the main road, and ended up shopping at David Jones. David was lovely, and had heard from previous visitors that he had a namesake store in Melbourne. He had a stall (with a black and white painted sign) under a stand of gum trees (they’re everywhere!) on the verge of the road, and in the time we were there, not a single vehicle went past. We could see why our big yellow truck usually drew so many people out to wave. The only people we saw were other locals, mainly schoolkids on their way home. So we spent a bit more money than we’d planned to.
On the walk back to camp, we passed extremely friendly people (mainly women carrying baskets on their heads, but also a man in a suit with a briefcase) who smiled and said hello, kids who asked for bottles (they get money for recycling them), one little girl who said ‘good morning, madam – give me money’ then collapsed into fits of giggles with her friends, fields and fields of cassava, and two little girls fetching water from a well and carrying it in buckets on their heads, who posed for a beautiful photograph that I have sadly lost.
Closer to camp, we went back to a shop (made of wooden posts and a bark roof) where we’d seen a carved wooden elephant we wanted to buy. There was nobody there, but we hoped by walking in we’d attract the shopkeeper if they were nearby. Instead, a young guy riding a bike along the path pulled over and said ‘this is my cousin’s shop, I can help you’. We said ‘ok, how much is this elephant?’, and since his starting price was lower than what we’d decided we’d pay, we only bargained enough to be polite and bought it. There were a few patches of untreated wood on its feet, so we asked if they could be polished for us. He agreed to that, so we gave him a small deposit, and he said he’d bring the elephant to the house in the village where we’d be eating dinner that night and collect the rest of the money.
As he rode off on his bike, one hand on the handlebar, one holding the elephant, we realised: he has our money, he has the elephant, we don’t know his name (well, he told us he was ‘Julius Caesar – or you can call me Mr Smooth’) or where he lives, and we are trusting that he will bring our purchase to dinner, when we don’t know ourselves where we will be eating.
There were not many places in the world where we would have felt comfortable with that situation, we reflected, as we watched him disappear into the cassava. Then we thought: what if the real shopkeeper turns up and finds us standing here, his elephant missing?! So we walked back to camp.
And now for the Bilharzia part of the day: we went for a swim in Lake Malawi. The lake looks innocent enough, but it is the home of lots of little snails which excrete lots of Schistosoma parasite larvae into the water, where they can penetrate any human skin they come across, causing a nasty disease called bilharzia (or schistosomiasis) while they reproduce. So, we had planned not to swim.
But the sun was stinking hot, so were we, there were canoes for hire, and a few other people wanted to try and get out to the island. We’d also been showering in lake water since we arrived in Malawi, so our risk was already above zero – we might as well get some enjoyment out of it.
How could we resist?
Al took control of one of the canoes, while I alternated between swimming and hitching a ride by hanging onto the back of the canoe. It took us nearly an hour, we think, to cover about 800 metres! There was a lot of wind, and therefore a lot of waves (the photo above was taken later once things had calmed down) and sideways drift, and the canoes were really unstable – only one of the three made it across without capsizing (and that wasn’t Al’s). The island was worth the trip. As we sat and caught our breath there on the tall rocks jutting out of the water, a canoe went past with two local men paddling and a foreign-looking woman sitting calmly in between them. She might have been completely dry but at least we felt we’d accomplished something! Al joined the other people who felt up for it and jumped off a four metre cliff, while I took the more technically difficult route and climbed back down the rocks into the water. I decided to save my energy and go in a canoe this time, but was defeated by my lack of balance – we couldn’t stop the canoe tipping dangerously while I was in it, so I found myself relegated to swimming again! The wind had died down so the return journey only took about twenty minutes, and when we were nearly home Al picked me up in his canoe, so I rode in luxury back to shore.
Dinner in the village was interrupted by a rain storm, but not before we’d sat on the floor and eaten our fill of spinach, pumpkin, rice, nshima (a paste made from cassava), and beans. The rain also meant most locals went home, and it turned into another night spent hanging out with the truck people, who are great but not the main reason we were in the village.
But Mr Smooth and our elephant did turn up! We protected it from the rain under t-shirts as we returned to camp, carrying our plates back, with kids flocking out of the darkness to eat our leftovers.
Filed under: Malawi
Day Something, Tuesdayish 20th January 2008 (Cath – written on the spot)
I’m sitting on the shore of Lake Malawi, about to head to the bar to watch Obama’s inauguration!
On Zanzibar, among the usual East African souvenirs, towels showing Obama’s smiling face surrounded by the Stars and Stripes were for sale everywhere. I can’t imagine what the mood must be like in Kenya.
I don’t want to have very high expectations of the night, in the same way I don’t want to expect too much too soon from the new administration, but I think it is going to be a good one.
Filed under: Malawi
Day 155, Tuesday 20th January 2009 (Cath)
Chitimba gave us one last farewell surprise on Tuesday morning – a chameleon! We watched it creep up a tree trunk and catch, with a flick of the tongue, a little lizard for breakfast. For a sheltered campsite, there was a lot of wildlife around – Andy and Lis had earlier seen a green mamba drop from a tree.
Speaking of killers…
To keep us entertained, last night Mel introduced us to a game called ‘Killer’, which saw everyone instantly transformed into an assassin focused on hitting their allocated target with a rolled-up pair of socks – no witnesses allowed, or the kill didn’t count. Of course, some people were obviously born to be deadlier assassins than others. I hit my victim (Alex, on his gap year from England) in the first couple of hours after dinner, while we sat in the dark watching the lightning (a true assassin has to take advantage of things like electrical blackouts), and was disappointed to find that Mel had already gone to bed so I couldn’t find out my next target until the morning. Al decided to wait for his killer to get him so that he didn’t have to worry about it any more.
On Tuesday morning, I hit my second target (the ultra competitive Nita – man, it felt good!) on the truck while we were surrounded by eight other people – they all just happened to have their head out the roof, their eyes shut, or all their attention on their books at the exact moment Nita turned to adjust the volume on the speakers. BANG! Socks to her leg.
The tables turned when we arrived in the town of Mzuzu, halfway to our next campsite, Kande Beach. We were each given the equivalent of about $2 to spend at a clothes market, buying the worst outfits we could find for each other to wear the next day. It didn’t take long to put a stunning look together – either a circus troup or an amateur theatre company must regularly donate to this area (or at least, overland trucks drop the same clothes back to the same stall holders each time they pass, for the next group to buy all over again). On the way from the market into town, we found ourselves walking in a small group which included Al’s target, Giselle. And didn’t his competitive side come out all of a sudden!? Some deft manouevring (and borrowing of my socks – he hadn’t even taken his out of his backpack!) saw Al walking alone behind her as she crossed the road – BANG!
Since my assassin (who went on to win the game) got me on the back of the neck within minutes of us getting back on the truck, Al was suddenly the one going for gold. Unfortunately, his assassin (the eventual runner-up) was also on a mission, and not unwilling to play dirty – he pretended he was out of the game then struck while Al, along with everyone else, was waving to some kids out of the window. The whole game was up before we arrived at Kande Beach – Mel had expected it to entertain us for about a week.
