ZAMBEEF!

Zambian noticings:

1. Piercing blue sky and air so dry the entire country seems likely to burst into flames at any moment.

2. Lots of Zambians know lots of English. Although it’s one of the national languages, I was still surprised to hear very young children speaking it (I hadn’t expected it to be a first language) and to hear Zambians speaking to each other in English rather than a local language. This assisted my eavesdropping, my preferred method of information gathering.

3. A disproportionate number of individuals with disfiguring growths.

4. ELEPHANTS! ON! THE! ROAD!

5. Horrible roads (elephants aside). I felt this with my stomach more than I saw this with my eyes. Poor Carissa. She’s probably seen more of my vomit in a month than my mother saw in my whole life. In fairness, the potholes are not entirely to blame because I also got sick on a canoe, much to my amazement.

5. Zambeef! This is the national beef company. Zambia is full of cows. You could drive dozens of miles without seeing a soul, unlike Malawi, Jersey and other densely populated places dear to my heart. But you can’t even go to the bathroom without crossing paths with a cow. Zambeef also works as an expletive (Zambeef! I stubbed my toe!), and a catchall phrase (“I can’t find my Zambeef-amajig”). Note: Zambians and normal people do not do this, just me.

The preplanned highlight of my trip was a few days at Victoria Falls, of Seven Natural Wonders of the World fame. It is so massive and stunning it is difficult and seems pointless to describe. But imagine a really, really long row of really, really tall staircases. But instead of stairs, water. It was really loud too, but didn’t quite drown out the sound of unauthorized tour guides getting shot at (but not shot) by park rangers.

Victoria Falls is populated by lots of baboon families. Have you ever seen a baboon up close? They are like small, ugly humans. Mama baboons cradle their babies as they nurse them, and while sweet in a creepy sort of way, it made me a tad nervous to be so close to mothers and their young. But what I really should have worried about was taking that orange Carissa offered me. Before I could finish peeling it, I had the baboon town hall meeting at my feet and they all came looking for oranges. Using my NYC brain (if someone is trying to mug you, throw your wallet away from you and run the other way), I chucked my orange at the biggest baboon’s hairy, old man head and speed walked the opposite direction (passing a sign that said, “Don’t feed the animals.”)

Victoria Falls straddles the Zambian/Zimbabwean border. There is a bridge along the falls connecting the two countries that people bungee jump off of: $130 per plummet. Despite all of the unfamiliar languages and countries and cultures I have come in contact with over the past several weeks, the one thing I have ultimately had the most difficulty understanding is the appeal of flinging yourself upside off a bridge between two countries which at the present time are not particularly noted for high quality construction nor stellar medical services. Watching person after person fall made my stomach drop and my heart pound in my throat, but I couldn’t stop looking- it was like rubbernecking at a car wreck. Bungee jumping is actually just one of many “attractions” at the falls. You can microlight and helicopter over them, raft and kayak and river board in them, and several other activities. But just watching them was more than thrilling for me, and when two rainbows appeared in the spray as if on cue, I couldn’t have been happier.

When my eyes got their fill of falling water (and humans), I headed to Bovu Island via pickup truck and dugout canoe. This tiny island in the Zambezi River is unpopulated except for the cook and night guard. There were no other guests while we were there and the owner was away so Carissa and I had the entire island etched with mazelike paths, library with termite eaten books, nightly batch of salt and vinegar popcorn, and David, the guide, all to ourselves. David told us to be mindful of the crocodiles and hippos on the shore. When I asked if there are any snakes on the island, David said, “only pythons, puff adders and spitting cobras.” Then he quickly assured me that these highly poisonous species are in hibernation. At night I could hear the hippos grazing a few feet from the tent, and in the early mornings I watched monkeys sneak into the kitchen, squat between the half-melted candles stuck in wine bottles and slurp strands of spaghetti from last night’s dinner.

Bovu Island was my last stop in my travels for heading back to the capital of Zambia and then to my new home. I drugged myself in preparation for the long, bumpy bus ride to Lusaka which was made memorable by running over someone’s hand and the endless stream of low budget Christian music videos. In Lusaka, I met a Peace Corps volunteer on vacation from his assignment in Malawi. While explaining to him my presence on the continent, he said, “Lesoo-what?!” I tried pronouncing the name of my soon-to-be country of residence the way it is spelled: “Le-SO-THOW,” but he still stared blankly. I am used to people from home not knowing where or what Lesotho is, but when people residing a few countries away not having a clue makes me a little uneasy. . .

Here I come, oh country of mystery and funky spelling.

So We Kept Going

My insides were rebelling in Malawi, and I wasn’t in the best state to keep moving. But I was also feeling cranky and lethargic and nothing makes me giddier than careening toward the nearest border in a crumbling excuse for public transportation. SO, we kept going.

Although my visa was free when I was in Zambia last year, this time, I had to pay an insane amount for a three-year visa, the only option now for American citizens. Then it was on to Chipata, on the Zambian side of the border with Malawi to catch a bus to the capital. We bought our tickets from Zoom (HA!) Bus, whose slogan is “You Snooze You Loose,” and then spent the next many hours sitting on what we came to refer to as the stairs of defeat.

Since I was in Ghana in 2005, I have marveled at the comparative lack of the time I’ve spent waiting on the side of the road in other sub-Saharan African countries. My luck ended in Zambia, although rather than the side of the road, I was confined to the small, dusty bus depot, trying to figure out why every other bus was entering, filling up and leaving the station except the inaccurately titled Zoom bus.

The bus depot was like its own tiny, weird, fantastic city. In truth, it wasn’t a bad place to be stuck waiting. The setting was ideal for people watching and an entertaining introduction into local Zambian life. Alongside ticket booths were multiple liquor stores (and subsequently drunk passengers, and quite probably, drivers). The longer I waited, the more I understood the market for alcohol in a bus station. There was also a jail cell to lock up the rowdy drinkers, essentially a lone train car reinforced with iron bars. A man with blue coveralls was mopping the outside of the jail, but didn’t bother cleaning the inside.

I didn’t patronize the liquor stores but I was a loyal customer at the fee paying toilet and shopped at the open air stall equivalent of a bodega. I bought a package of cookies, and the woman behind the counter shone the plastic wrapper with a rag. Another stall was a cell phone kiosk whose only entrance was a miniature door, Through the Looking Glass style. I was beyond shocked when the tiny door opened and a tiny man emerged- an actual Little Person. I don’t know if the door was made small to fit the user, or if he got the job because he could fit through the door, or this was just a serendipitous set of circumstances. In any case, I was thankful I had a companion to witness this small, incredible moment with me and to confirm that I wasn’t having a malarial or (malaria prophylaxis) hallucination.

Zoom somehow crashed or broke down or the driver quit or gave up or drove the wrong way, because at some point (more accurately, at a point six hours later than when I arrived), all of the passengers were instructed to pile onto another company’s bus. Waiting for the bus to come was a blink of an eye compared to the ride to Lusaka, the capital. The roads are crappier than the distances between cities are long, and Zambia is a huge country. We played word games to pass the time and to distract ourselves from full bladders. I was so desperate that Carissa offered me her water bottle as a temporary makeshift toilet. I very seriously was considering using it (hallelujah for skirts) when the bus pulled off the road. A single naked bulb in the lone village shop and the stars were the only light in the pitch black night. A Zambian woman from our bus directed us to a patch of dirt that was to be our toilet and side by side we exhaled sighs of relief and peed on our feet.

We arrived in Lusaka so late, we didn’t bother trying to find the hotel we had booked, and slept on the bus until 5 am. When I stepped off the bus, I saw that the Lusaka station had no hint of the weird charm of Chipata and seemed more like Port Authority in New York City. I loved it. Beneath a sign that said, “No Call Boys, No Standing, No Loitering, No Sleeping, No Illegal,” people dozed on quilts and leaned against garbage cans, and I’m sure there were call boys and any number of illegal activities going on in the near vicinity. Even though no buses were coming or going at this hour, the place was bustling and full of noise. People bought and sold wigs and hair extensions, crocheted hats, plastic dolls and roasted maize. Everywhere I tried to walk, there was pushing and spitting and an impressive feistiness for 5 am.

After about ten minutes of fresh air, I found my next bus, and while we waited for it to fill up, the early passengers (lucky us) got a visit from the bus station preacher. I’m pretty sure the buses are this guy’s church, the passengers, his congregants. Because I was sitting at the front, and the aisles were crowded to walk up and down, I got the brunt of the preaching. Within a few minutes, my ears were ringing and I was flecked with the preacher’s holy spit. He ended by praying we wouldn’t crash, and who wouldn’t say amen to that?

From the Bottom

After gazing at Lake Malawi from hundreds of feet above it, Carissa convinced me that the next logical step would be to experience it from the bottom. It took quite a lot of prodding to get me signed up for a scuba diving course, but not only does Malawi have the nearly superlative distinction of being the second cheapest place to dive in the world, the upcoming course ended on the same day that the best health insurance I’ve ever had was due to expire. I mean, who knows when the next time I’ll be covered for lung overexpansion injury is? The fact that one of the instructors also happens to be the best baker in the world sealed the deal (this country just turns me into a cake monster like no other place on earth).

From the first morning of class, I was definitely the special kid in scuba class. I was uncoordinated at snorkeling, but adding a wet suit, oxygen tank and weights to my tendency to flail in water did not help the situation. The first time we dove from shore, I was so heavily weighted that I was basically crawling along the bottom of the lake. Despite the fact that I was hands and knees in fish crap, breathing underwater is perhaps the coolest sensation I’ve ever experienced. Lake Malawi has some really beautiful fish, including one type in which the mothers scoop their babies in their mouths when you swim near, and another species that feeds on the plant life growing on the underside of rocks, and thus spend their entire lives upside down. My instructor thinks it’s really fun to go through rock tunnels. I was not nearly stealthy enough to navigate them without crashing, but although we communicate under water with hand signals, there is no sign for, “if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just go around.”

The second half of the course involved diving from the boat. Unfortunately, as it turns out, I get sea sickness, including but not limited to sitting in moving boats, sitting in anchored boats, looking at a bobbing boat from shore, and especially smelling engine exhaust. This last one is particularly unfortunate because the smallest people have to sit closest to the engine to balance the weight. The first boat dive, I willed my digestive tract to work with gravity until I got to the surface where I emptied my breakfast into the lake. One of my classmates got to practice our recently learned “rescue skills” by inflating my life jacket and dragging me to the boat.

The instructor insisted that the route we took was particularly rough, and convinced me to give it another go in the afternoon. She prescribed ginger biscuits and watered down coke as a stomach cure-all. She insisted that if I need to, I should just vomit underwater into my breathing regulator, the thought of which struck me as unnecessarily unpleasant. When the opportunity to see presented itself, I ditched the group, headed for the surface and swam to shore. In the company of a family of tumor encrusted ducks I proceeded to spew the ginger and coke cocktail. A Rastafarian woodcarver wandered to the shore to keep me company. We had the following conversation:
Rastafarian: Are you diving?
Me: No, I’m vomiting.
Rastafarian: Diving is cool.
Me: [vomit]
Rastafarian: Diving is sooo nice.
Me: [vomit]
Rastafarian: Good luck on your exam.

Carissa tried to convince me that I have some sort of parasite, rather than really comprehensive seasickness. One of our classmates, an enormous, androgynous looking, Finnish music therapist who plays heavy metal gigs with his schizophrenic clients, was down with some sort of bug. And we did share breathing mouthpieces during safety drills before he dropped out of the class to puke in private. I rejected this piece of logic though and informed Carissa of my B-list superpower of vomiting in response to dislike. Therefore, vomiting is caused by my hatred for self contained underwater breathing apparatus, and not the funky lake water I may have been drinking or eating in the restaurant where the cooks don’t wash their hands.

I didn’t attempt the last couple dives, because all I wanted to do was lie in the fetal position clutching a vile of Dramamine, not contort myself into a wetsuit, let alone get in a moving vehicle. So I didn’t end up getting certified. But I did pass the exam, perhaps courtesy of my Rasta friend’s well wishes. And maybe, I’ll finish my certification some other time, in some other country.

From the Top

By the time my ama and I arrived in Malawi, we were sharing a serious case of bus lag. The happy exhaustion of village reunions made us even loopier, but it was the two solid days of pouring rain that really unraveled us. On top of that, we had to adjust to the lack of electricity, and the other particulars of rural life. It wasn’t that I missed light bulbs and wall outlets, but the two of us fumbled around for the non-existent light switch in our chalet every night, and I consistently try to charge my head torch batteries using solar power, when the sun hadn’t shone for days. One of my favorite moments in Malawi was sitting around the blazing fire at night with the watchmen. One night, ama passed around her pack of cigarettes and when she offered her lighter, Tidrey, one of the watchmen, shook his head at us, pulled a flaming log out of the fire, and said, “Africa match.”

The first day of the downpours, we shut ourselves indoors building a fort that I was ridiculously proud of. We used chairs, tent poles, chitenges (cloth Malawian women use as a wrap skirt or baby sling), yoga mats, sleeping bags, and the architectural genius of Carissa, a grad school friend. We lit some paraffin inside, told stories, ate Smarties (inferior, British M&Ms) through the mouth hole of a wooden mask and generally made ourselves stir crazy. I’m pretty sure I could have stayed in there all day, but I emerged to bake a chocolate cake in the wood burning stove in the kitchen. The sound of water on the tin roof made the rain all the more spectacular and I was quite jealous of the family of cats sleeping underneath the warm stove. When I grow up I’m going to have a little rain shack with a tin roof and a stove inside big enough for me to curl up under.

My friend George, another former volunteer in the neighborhood for a visit, arrived in time for cake consumption and added Amarula to the festivities. She is a sarcastic, intelligent and well-spoken med student traveling with her cousin, who seems to thrive on feigning misery and got engaged a few weeks ago as a joke. They were not particularly amused by the fort, although that didn’t stop us from spending most of the next day in it. When the paraffin fumes started to make me lightheaded, I tried to organize the largest game of cat’s cradle ever (this too, I was ridiculously proud of). I’m not really traveling with enough clothes (or a towel) to get wet, and I was perfectly happy to wait out the rain. I left the chalet so little, that the village “Heloises” (peanut butter pounders, laundry virtuosos and all around domestic goddesses) laughed and babbled every time they saw me. The only words I understood were “vuwa” and “nyomba” which mean “rain” and “house,” so I gather they were laughing at how I was staying inside because of the rain. Then I dragged them over to see the fort. They kept saying over and over again, “What is it?” “Nyomba,” I told them. They seemed both appalled and amazed, and laughed so hard they clutched each other gasping for breath.

When the rain finally trickled to a stop, I headed to the library, my favorite place in the whole village, and one of my favorite places on earth. Mr. Longwe, the librarian and his two assistants use and love the Dewey Decimal system. Drunk people are not allowed to check out books and there is a sign demanding that all shirts be tucked in. Although the whole thing is the size of a tool shed, I get the grand tour every time I go, and it’s a seriously long tour. I took an absurd short cut to get to the library, and not only did it take longer than the usual way, I got soaked in waist high grass and ended up having to climb over a slippery fence. When I thudded to the ground on the other side I noticed a nice fat snake speared on one of the fence posts. Perhaps it was a warning to other snakes, or perhaps a warning to fools like me, as I’m sure I was trodding on its poisonous cousins.

When the rain finally stopped, we headed to Mzuzu on a marshmallow quest. After scouring the city we found a single dirty bag in an Indian shop. Armed with our precious grimy bag of white and pink processed quasi food, we headed north to one of my favorite spots in the whole country. On the vertical road from Chitimba to Livingstonia is Mushroom Farm, a beautiful little lodge on the edge of a dramatic cliff. When I tried staying here a year ago, Ewan McGregor left me stranded and wet on the rainy mountainside. Really. Check out the documentary The Long Way Down. Except don’t, because he booked the whole place and didn’t even end up staying there. Jerk.

The lodge is walking distance to Livingstonia. This old mission town is a namesake of David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame. One of the best hospitals in the country is here, but its location at the top of a mountain is not ideal for anyone who actually needs a hospital. There is also a pro-colonialism museum with a staunch, “thank god (literally) for missionaries” message. It houses the most disorganized bunch of crap ever to grace the insides of glass cases. There are ancient ether masks next to a photo of Patrice Lumumba next to a painting of Booker T. Washington. I wouldn’t recommend this museum to someone interested in learning about Malawi in an organized, logical and relatively unbiased manner, but for someone who wants to see what a Malawian museum is like, this is probably a good prototype.

At the lodge, the five of us crowded in a pretty, little, mud and straw hut decorated with colored glass. Also sharing this accommodation was an attractive bunch of skittish lizards. Carissa mistook one for a hook and tried to hang her jacket on it. There was plenty of hiking to do, but this place is also perfect for just sitting. And eating. This lodge has one of the best vegetarian restaurants I’ve ever come across. Oddly, the bar sells squirrel biltong (aka squirrel jerky).

I think that people generally fail miserably when trying to describe mountain scenery. But as I spent most of my time on the mountain looking out over the cliffs, I’ll try to describe what it looked like below. For one thing, the sky and lake blend together obscuring the horizon like a curtain. When you stare ahead trying to see where one ends and the other begins, like a Magic Eye optical illusion, the blue edge of Tanaznia emerges. At sunrise, light glints off hundreds of tin roofs of the miniature villages below. At night, as many tiny fires blaze like tiny orange glowing dots, and they are as spectacular as the stars. I love Malawi and stars and the edges of cliffs, and you too.

Get Up and Dance, Ugly!

One of the parts of my trip that I was most looking forward to was going back to the school where I used to teach. I planned my travels meticulously so that I would arrive before the end of term. When I left the school last year I thought there was no way I could be back so soon. That I happened to be passing through Malawi at the same time as two other volunteers I met last year who also thought the same thing made the circumstances that much more thrilling. The first day I was set to go to the school, I woke up absolutely giddy and set out when it was still dark. In a two-hour walk there are ample opportunities to make wrong turns, but I found that when I stopped trying to remember the way, I drifted in the right direction. Unfortunately when I got there, I found that school had closed four days earlier, a week before I had been told it would. I was crushed, especially after the mad dash from Mozambique. One of the teachers, Rabecca, lives near the school so I headed to her house to see her, and her son, granddaughter and nieces that had all been in my class, as well as the baby she was pregnant with last time I saw her.

Sadly, Rabecca’s five-year-old son, Lightman had passed away a few weeks after I left last year. Such is long distance communication from rural Malawi to, well, anywhere, that I hadn’t heard about it until I asked her that day where he was. Lightman was a wild little boy. He would spend all morning driving me crazy running around the room and knocking down the two-year-olds. Then he would climb into my lap, give me these strangling hugs and coo “sabizi, sabizi,” which means teacher. Although young children die all the time here, it was still shocking to hear. The fact that he had been dead for so long made the news even more strange and awful because it somehow made my grief seem inappropriate and out of place. I anxiously named all of the other children I remembered, and asked if they were ok. Rabecca would giggle and say, “ah, he is alright” or “she is alright.”

After visiting Rabecca, I went to other teacher, Mary’s house. She knew through the bush telegraph that I was on my way, so she was waiting for me with her daughter Esther. Last time I saw Esther, she was a floppy newborn, and now she is this big, gorgeous, banana- eating one year old. Mary’s husband had passed away since I was last here, and it has been a huge loss to the community, and of course to Mary and her six children. Frank passed away in May, and I did hear about it before I got to Malawi, so Mary and I were both spared the awkwardness of me asking where he was. I fed Esther bananas and Mary told me about all of the others in the community who had passed away that year, and others who are sick. Even for a rural village in a poor country with little access to nutrition and health care the number of deaths seemed unusually high, and the whole village seems to be collectively grieving. At the same time there is little talk about HIV/AIDS, which is likely a huge factor in all of this. People talk about the disease in abstract terms, but no one openly says they are infected, which can only exacerbate the spread and limit the quality of life for those living with the disease.

One good piece of news did come out of my visit with Mary; she promised to reopen the school for a day later that week so I could see the children. Actually, she gave me two good pieces of news. When I was at the school earlier that day I was keeping an eye out for Sam, my very dedicated, stoned and silent stalker who used to follow me everywhere last year. I asked Mary what he was up to these days, and she told me I wouldn’t even recognize him if I saw him now. When I asked why, she said, “Now he bathes.” When I asked if he would try to find and/or follow me, she assured me not.

Two days later I went to the school and saw some of my old students. Many were visiting family out of town and others live in further villages and didn’t get the message, but Rabecca and Mary organized quite a crowd. About half the children I didn’t recognize, and they were the scabbiest, snottiest group of kids I’ve ever seen. I imagined Rabecca running all over the village collecting abandoned children and dragging them to school to make me happy. (It worked).

I was happy to hear that some of the oldest children whose parents kept sending them to nursery school for the free meals are finally in primary school. It was also good to see that some of the children have grown considerably since last year and seem to be happy and healthy and learning. One girl, who was named Diana last year is now called Joyce and she is still beating up all the other children. Laban who used to be this sticky, little, spherical child sucking on bits of cellophane stretched out a little and came to school chewing on a nail. Another boy, Charles, (who for ages I thought was named “Chalo”) now brings his 18-month-old brother to school with him. The last time I saw this baby, Rabecca was wrestling him out of the sling on his mother’s back while his mother was wrestling her husband’s girlfriend (who says small town life is dull?). Charles drags his brother around the school and takes swigs out of his bottle when he thinks no one is looking. When I asked Charles his brother’s name he said, “Ugly.”

The teachers ran a little lesson complete with the calendar chant, days of the week chant, counting numbers chant, alphabet chant and the let us pray chant. These kids are chanting machines. Then they did some colors and shape activities that look a little something like this:
Teacher: Rhoda, come point to the color red.
(Rhoda points to green)
Teacher: Is that right?
Entire Class: NOOOOOOOOO!
Teacher: Sit down! [you incorrect, delinquent child!]
Teacher: Maria, come point to the color red
(Maria points to red)
Teacher: Clap hands for Maria
Entire Class: Wello done! wello done! Shoowa! Bleep blip blop! Tala!
(Well done! Well done! Sure! Keep it up! Tala! There isn’t really a direct translation for “tala,” but it means something like, take the good thing you just did and put it in your pocket.)

Then the teachers looked at me and said, “teach us something,” which was definitely not something I had prepared to do. Perhaps sensing my panic, the children and teachers started shouting out requests of (English) games and songs I used to do with them. The unanimous class favorite is the get up and dance song, which involves me singing for each child to dance one at a time. But when there are thirty-something kids in the class, I am panting and hoarse by 17th verse, and the end of the song is nowhere in sight. They all do the same dance move where they put their hands on their waist and wiggle their hips in the fiercest possible manner. When I got to Charles’ brother, I asked Rabecca his name just to be sure. She said, “Ugly.” I asked her to repeat it, and she said, “UG-LEE.” But I couldn’t bring myself to sing “Get up and dance, Ugly” so I sang, “get up and dance, hmmhmm.”

After get up and dance and a few more songs, Mary and Rabecca and the children took me to their new garden which involved a perilous walk during which all but the most coordinated children slid or rolled down a hill into a ditch. The children found a pretty sizable turtle in a mud pit and busied themselves whacking its shell with sticks. The teachers looked on approvingly from underneath a tree and Rabecca’s baby, tied snugly to her back, gagged on some leaves that were hanging tantalizingly close to his mouth.

Rabecca asked me if I remembered the “boy that used to chase you.” I said yes and that I heard he was a different person now. Rabecca confirmed so I asked what brought about the change. She said that he no longer smokes “the chomba.” I told her I was sort of hoping to run into him, but she assured me that I would not see him. I don’t know why I would want to, given all of the aggravation he caused me, but I am curious to see him with normal sized pupils and a purpose in life besides irritating me. Despite assurances from Mary and Rabecca, I kept expecting him to materialize in between the garden rows or levitate from a mud puddle.

By the time we got all the children back the way we came, and climbing up took a lot more time than rolling down, both the children and the teachers were ready to call it a day. I said goodbye and thank you and bleep blip blop to the children. Before I left, I pointed to Ugly and asked Mary to spell his name. A-R-G-L-E-Y. Wello done on my comprehension skills. Tala!

Malawidays!

I aimed to do as little as possible in Senga Bay, Malawi, and this was not difficult. It’s pretty easy to do very little anywhere in Malawi. I stayed in an old marina with a restaurant on stilts over the lake. The place is owned by an enormous (in girth not number) Zimbabwean family, who sit behind their desks, constantly shouting to their staff, all of whom never walk, but run all over the property even for the most inconsequential tasks. The owners had some pretty interesting ideas about certain things, like despite the political instability and massive inflation in Zimbabwe, that things are fine, that fuel and food are plentiful, that nothing has changed. When I inquired about reports I’ve heard to the contrary, one looked at me as though I am incredibly stupid and said, “well not for the locals” (read: black people).

Senga Bay is quite spread out, and it is several kilometers from the lakeshore to the town center. It took me a few hours to walk there, and I went the short way, which took me through a lot of private property, as well as past a herd of cows on the beach (there is something that feels wrong about seeing cows on a beach). From the road, I took a bike taxi (which is just a regular bike that you cling to the back of) to the best banana pancakes in Malawi. Given my experiences with the variety of Malawian cuisine, I can’t imagine that there are many other contenders for the title. I also think that after people peel bananas they should just eat them and not hide them in other foods.

After getting a little shaken up by snarling Mozambican dogs, I was happy to start running again in Senga Bay. I found that as long as I wore a skirt, I attracted no more attention that if I’d been walking, and probably less than if I’d been walking in pants. Two young women saw me running through the village and trailed behind me, giggling. Although I know little Chitonga, and even less Chichewa, the language of this region, I know the word for “Let’s go.” I started shouting “Tien! Tien!” at the women, and I don’t know if they were more surprised to hear me speak their language or that I wanted their company. One of them only ran a few meters, but the other ran quite a ways with me. She ran with me the next day as well, and although she stopped first, I’m pretty sure I was breathing harder. Tien!

Cassava Leaves and the Indian Ocean

I got my first ever glimpse of the Indian Ocean on the bus ride to Mozambique. I used this sparkling view to distract myself from the fact that the driver was steering with his elbows whilst eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. I sat next to a mother hen-like Portugese woman who lives in Mozambique. She diagnosed me with the condition of White Female, the side effects of which include getting robbed, carjacked, hassled by bribe seeking police and ripped off by money changers and taxi drivers (such talks have been a running theme that aside from the getting ripped off part, I don’t recall from my previous experiences traveling, nor do any of these things seem all that likely to occur when exercising the slightest amount of common sense). She insisted on driving me to my hostel and gave me her number in case anything “happens.”

Maputo, the capital of Mozambique is a funky city with good music and good food and crazy drivers. I stayed at a hostel with a receptionist who was like a docent on amphetamines. This fountain pen wielding maniac covered my map with dots, blotting out the street names as he rambled about everything from shopping malls to cassava leaves to the currency museum. I couldn’t follow 80% of what he was saying and he ruined my map. He may have been one of my favorite things about the city, and I liked Maputo a great deal. Since my map was now illegible and I couldn’t comprehend most of his verbal instructions although he spoke excellent English, I wandered around eating cashews, gaping at police officers and their giant guns and counting the number of streets named after Communists (a lot).

I was traveling with a Dutch guy in Mozambique and the experience prompted me to set up a few ground rules about future travelmate selection, specifically no Europeans during Eurocup. I am also now wary of people that travel with an excessive amount of shirts. He seemed to have packed for the sole purpose of never having to do laundry. He had 15 t-shirts, but no map or guidebook, no water bottle or flashlight, no mosquito net or spray or malaria prophylaxis. He did have a camera though, and the majority of time I spent with him, he was staring at the country through the lens calling Mozambicans who don’t speak English stupid, and everything else about the country, “so shit.” (I didn’t bother telling him that even if it was, it would be “so shitty.”) I very briefly considered smashing his camera with my Lonely Planet, but instead I ditched him mid bus ride hoping that my impromptu stop had accommodations nearby, and guiltlessly left him a lost malaria magnet.

Shortly before I jumped bus, we went to Xai Xai Beach where we met Gavin, an Afrikaaner-Portugese man who was in Mozambique to sprinkle his father’s (five years deceased) ashes. He followed me around all afternoon, stumbling, pleading that I talk to him (his exact words were “Tara, let me tell you my family history”), professing his respect for me, and demanding that I eat prawns to show my respect for him. “Kara, I respect you. So you respect me by eating prawns.” He told the Dutch guy, “I’m paying for her, but you’re on your own.” The alcohol on his breath made my contacts water, and I politely declined. However, when I arrived at the town restaurant, Gavin was nowhere in sight, but there was an enormous plate of food with my name on it. (Actually, with the name Tina on it, but the server assured me it was for me.) While we were eating, Gavin pulled up in his car, and a Mozambican kid ran out, handed the Dutch guy a folded up napkin and ran away. We opened the napkin and found that it was full of marijuana. The girl gets prawns, the boy gets weed. Later that night while the Dutch guy was searching for a TV to watch to Holland lose a Eurocup match, and I went to bed early, I could hear Gavin outside assaulting some other travelers with a pot of crayfish curry. When he got tired of that he started banging on my door, shouting at me to come respect him and meet his crayfish curry eating friends. Despite his stupor, he managed to punch one of my windows open, then forgot what he was doing and wandered away.

I spent the next few much quieter days alone in Inhambane, a Muslim town and former slave trading post. It’s small and quiet, and the streets are lined with jacarandas and pastel painted buildings. I spent my time wandering the markets and mosques trailed by a schizophrenic puppy. I later moved to a nearby beach where I continued my knack for attracting canines of questionable temper and health. When one red-eyed dog ran at me baring its teeth, I walked up to my waist in the ocean in my shoes and ankle length skirt. I gazed nonchalantly at the horizon as if it is my normal habit to go into the water fully clothed with a shoulder bag, holding my camera on my head, until someone dragged the dog away and someone else dragged me out of the water. Although the dog didn’t bite me, the mosquitoes took over on that front and feasted on my face until I looked like a leper and my eyelids swelled shut. This was unfortunate because Mozambique is just too beautiful to not, well, see. But after a Benadryl induced slumber, my cheeks and eyelids deflated to more standard proportions.

On the subject of sleeping, my Larium dreams have started to kick in. For those of you not familiar with the side effects of this anti-malarial drug, one of them is having vivid and bizarre dreams, like that my sink drain was clogged with lizards, or that I was a model in a fashion show for invalids on Good Morning America, or that I had a travel agent who gave trip report cards and I got a “needs improvement” under “leaving” (What do you have to say about that my psych major friends?)

The farther I got from the capital, two things became apparent. One was that there is a countrywide change crisis, by which I mean that paying anything other than the exact price results either in seemingly unwarranted anger or panic-stricken faces. I don’t know why change is so scarce, but it does make drawing money out of an ATM and then trying to buy an orange a stressful chain of events. The bar/restaurant at my lodge routinely passed out IOU’s, while the local baker gave change in the form of doughnuts and the internet café owner turned away customers who couldn’t pay in small bills.

The other thing that became apparent as I drifted farther from urban areas was the more obvious fact that English would only get me so far. Whenever language barriers arise, I have a strong urge to start shouting in broken French. While Spanish-speaking travelers seemed to get by with a few shifts in vocabulary and adding more phlegm, my Franglais was useless in Mozambique. This was really only a problem when I wandered off the beaten path in rural areas and needed directions back to where I came from. But in most circumstances, attempts to understand locals were rewarding and hilarious experiences, like when inquired about an item on a restaurant menu and the cook mooed, or when a fisherman with a passion for marine biology used pantomime to explain the workings of the crustacean excretory system.

Travel became much easier when I met up with a friend who speaks decent Portugese. I lived with her in Malawi last year and locals often mistook her for my mother. I don’t know how, because although she is technically old enough to be, she doesn’t look like she is (nor, I don’t think she’ll be offended if I say, does she act like she is), plus is blue-eyed, ginger haired and freckled. My Malawian ama is quite the globe trotting wild Irish woman. She’s lived and worked all over the world, but work “depresses” her so she just went back to school for a second bachelors and is in the process of moving to Malawi. One of her classic moves is to sample questionable street meat and then swig local rum to avoid “dodgy guts.”

Unfortunately, ama was not with me on the longest bus ride of my life, and as the supposedly 12 hour drive stretched into the teens, not a single person on the bus could tell me if I was headed in the right direction. The bus was scheduled to leave at 4:30 in the morning, which meant I had to wake up at 3:45 in the morning, which meant that I didn’t sleep at all because I was afraid I would sleep through my alarm. If I believed more strongly in signs, I would have taken my unfortunate taxi ride to the bus station to mean I was not meant to travel that day. When the driver got out of the car to locate my bus, it started rolling away with me inside. I couldn’t tell if the car was going fast enough to hurt a pedestrian or if it would stop on it’s own so I reached for the wheel and steered the taxi into the nearest bus, which definitely stopped the momentum. In hindsight, it probably would have been more prudent to use the brake but please don’t expect logic at 4 am in a car with the driver’s seat on the right hand side. This collision caused a lot of shouting, although I gathered that by the end of it, both the taxi driver and the bus driver agreed that no damage had been done. I mean, these are vehicles held together with masking tape and twine, and if anything, I probably knocked a loose part back into place. Luckily, no one seemed aware that I had actually caused the collision, so I shook my finger at taxi driver and said, “you let me roll away!”

Finally locating the bus began a nearly twenty-hour ordeal of crawling up the coast that included a grand total of ONE bathroom stop. The worst sections were the first four hours, in which we essentially only moved from one parking space to another in the bus station, and the last four in which it got dark before signs for my destination appeared, and I feared that I wasn’t on the right bus. The middle 14 hours is a blur of sitting between two women and their children, Sticky and Fever. I ate cornflakes and gazed at the morphing landscape out of shattered windows held together with tape. Each time a person got off the bus, she was replaced with her volume in goods so that by the end of my trip I surrounded by about 800 pairs of flip flops.

When I finally got to experience Vilanculos my destination, in the daylight, it was more or less worth the hideous trip. This beach town is located across from an archipelago where ama and I went snorkeling with a semi-silent Australian miner on a five YEAR holiday. I was an absolute mess at snorkeling. I kept trying to breathe through my nose instead of my mouth and would become convinced that I was suffocating. That is, of course, when I could manage to orient myself face down. Most of the time I couldn’t get my flippers to stay behind me and kept winding up on my back with my feet in the air. In this position, I kept drifting away and Ama would have to come collect me. When I got tired of having to get dragged back to the reef, I stood on the edge, put my face in the water and looked at the fish that way. That night ama and I exchanged a local jewelry maker a cooking lesson for a bottle of Tipo Tinto, the local rum that is sold in plastic bottles and smells like hospital and cake. We learned how to make matapa, a staple of cassava leaves, coconut and peanuts. His instructions included to “smash everything like a flower” (“like a flour?”) and that “it will tell you when it’s ready.”

Ama and I were anxious to get to Malawi; she needed to start work and I wanted to arrive before the school where I used to teach goes on holiday. We essentially waited until I could stomach the thought of getting on a bus again, and began our marathon to the border, which involved a steady stream of 3 am wakeups for 4 am all-day bus rides. The further north we traveled, the worse the roads became in nauseating combinations of tarmac, dirt and gaping holes. Although you drive on the left side of the road in Mozambique, whatever patch of road is smoothest is de facto fair game, so vehicles tend to speed toward each other until one swerves out of the way. If the chapas (minibuses) weren’t overheating and breaking down, we were getting pulled over for speeding by police looking for bribes. On one such occasion, the driver tried to convince the police that it was the bus we just overtook that was speeding. The officer didn’t buy it and he entered into some sort of negotiation with the driver that ended with him leaving the conductor behind as collateral.

Tete, the closest Mozambican city to the border has the distinction of being both incredibly humid and incredibly dusty, and markedly hotter than the surrounding areas. When the air turned steamy and tan and 20 degrees warmer we knew we were close to Malawi. There are six kilometers between the exit post for Mozambique and entrance post for Malawi. There were several houses in this stretch of non-country, which just baffled me. Part of me wanted to get out of the taxi and inquire about the particulars of living in a border, but I was too excited to stop. Into the warm heart of Africa!