Lilongwe to Nhkata Bay

July 30th, Day 50:

Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay:

  Lilongwe had been a less efficient visit than we had hoped for, and being several days behind schedule, we decided that we would try to push for Nkhata Bay. Nkhata had been the place I had been looking forward to all trip; known as the quintessential Lake Malawi beach town. I was very excited to finally see the lake, so it was not particularly difficult to get up early and head off down the road.

  We had had a nice night staying in the home of the US Embassy RSO, (Regional Security Officer), and even got a great breakfast prepared by his wife before starting the bike ride. We managed to make good time on the first leg of the journey. Nkhata Bay was too far to ride to in one day, but we figured if we could ride about 50 miles towards the turn off from the main highway towards the lake that we should be able to hitch a ride the rest of the way with a truck. This meant that we had to get to the correct road early in order to look into catching a ride before it got dark. The conditions were permitting, and we breezed through.

 Once again, the children all yelled to us as we passed, but we started to notice a new development. We are always curious to try to find any differences between countries, and the first thing we noticed about Malawians rather than Zambians was their use of the line “give me money!” It seemed like the parents must have trained every child, or that it was some important national class, to say, “give me money” whenever a white person is seen. It was always said with exactly the same intonation and seemed to be the only English words that any child would speak. It also was used in lieu of greetings, though often a quick “hello” was tacked on to the front of the phrase. At first we found it quite funny to have children constantly chanting it to us, but the humor quickly turned to confusion, and then to frustration. Not only did the line start to annoy us, but it was also extremely ineffective. I don’t think that anyone would be interested in giving money to people who say that as their first comment to you, and the rural Malawian community could do to have a conference on begging strategies, because they are some of the worst beggars I have ever encountered.

  However, often once we stopped and got past the first lines and said “no” to every child once, they would generally start laughing and we would start to have nice interactions with the local people. One of the more interesting interactions occurred when we finally made it to the turn-off that we had been heading towards. There was a small gas station, and Eric and I were starving and very thirsty so we stopped to get some refreshments. As we sat outside the store eating some ice cream and drinking some coca-cola, we began to get approached by local children interested in scoring some free food. We shared some of our things with the kids, but when the store saw the children outside they got upset and drove the children away. However, after a few minutes the children would manage to make their way back to the shop, and then after a few minutes with us, they would get driven away again by the storekeepers. This seemed a bit strange to us, because we did not mind the children, and the local people seemed to be excessively harsh with the children, but nobody else seemed to think so. One image that keeps returning to me is that of a child getting hit by an older man in front of a parked UNICEF vehicle, the people inside the UNICEF car not even flinching at the scene. I hope those are not the people getting my UNICEF spare-change donations…

   After filing our bellies, we set out to get a lift to Nkhata Bay. We spent a while trying to hitch rides with people before we managed to find the local “bus stop”, where all of the Malawians wait to hitch rides from trucks once they finish their shipments for the day. We managed to find a large truck that everyone was cramming into but were unsure of where it was headed. After frantically trying to find out, we decided that it was hopeless and figured our best option was to hop in and hope it goes far enough. There was only one road, so we knew we would at least be headed in the right direction.

   The truck ride ended up being quite interesting. We loaded our bikes into the back and sat in the huge metal enclosed storage compartment in the back with probably 20 or so other people, all headed home after their day of work.  After several minutes of exchanging confused stares, we finally broke the ice by getting out our Obama books. These always seem to be huge hits with the locals, and are a great way to immediately build a connection between the locals and us. Every African seems to love Obama, and when we explain that he is our president and that we are American, they seem to grow fond of us.  So we passed our time by passing the book around the truck compartment and trying in vain to have conversations with the other passengers in a mixture of broken languages.

   Night fell while we road, and eventually the truck stopped for good. Unsure of where we were, we asked the driver to point our location out on our map. After getting his bearings the driver managed to point to a spot on the map much further from Nkhata bay than we would have liked.  We asked what truck we could take, and he explained that it was too late to get another ride. We would have to wait until morning. However, Eric and I did not have time to wait until morning, because I had been dreaming of Nkhata Bay the whole trip and desperately wanted to take one day off there to enjoy Lake Malawi, and if we didn’t make it that night the day-off would vanish!

   We were in a difficult situation. We were at some small rural market, and few people could speak any English. It was already getting late, and people were all busy finishing up their dinners and preparing to go to bed. Small fish were cooking over fires, and a row of old trucks was lined up beside the market. We decided to approach the truck drivers and see if we could talk anyone into driving us the rest of the way.  This turned out to be more difficult that I had expected. Despite how poor of a country Malawi was (one of the 10 poorest in the world), nobody seemed interested in making some extra money by driving us for a couple hours. After a great deal of negotiating we managed to find a group of other people who wanted to get further down the road, and together with them we managed to convince a truck to drive us. We loaded our bikes on the back and got in.

  Eric and I both were very tired and fell asleep in the truck. When we awoke, we were in Nkhata bay. It was about midnight, and we pulled up to a small guesthouse, unloaded our bicycles, woke up the guesthouse owner, and got ourselves a nice little room on the lake. We then fell asleep again.