Sometimes, nothing goes wrong for a little while and you simply have amazing times with awesome people. This is that post. I promise it will be back to regularly scheduled misadventure soon, but first:
Weary from 13 hours of travel in 5 different vehicles and nothing to eat, we arrived in Nkhata Bay to pizza and a puppy.
It was pizza night and they let us put in orders even though we were a bit late. We gratefully settled into our room, a charming little stone 2-level cottage with a cold shower and composting toilet (they’re really big on sustainability here).
It was also quiz night, so we teamed up with an American lady and a Quebecois gent. We like to think our loss was respectably narrow.
The next day we set out exploring little Nkhata Bay. Literally every time we walked up or down the hill we had to step over a gecko or whatever this is with either a bright blue or bright green tail. One specimen was half-blue towards the end, half-green new growth at the body. Maybe this is one of those natural transitions which indicates maturity?
The backpackers we stayed at, Butterfly Space, is at the top of a hill near town. The road up to it has about 6 stalls selling tack of various quality. Dave and I set out to purchase something in every country, so we took a look. The most interesting was Kelvin’s at the top, with lots of carvings that we hadn’t seen elsewhere. Some were even made of ebony, with chunks of the raw stuff laying around waiting to be turned into art.
Two carvings caught our eye straight off.
We were told they were “boogeymen” of some sort. Of course we each bought one.
We later learned that the tokoloshe, in Zulu mythology, was a mischievous little water sprite that could turn invisible by drinking water and killed people in their sleep up in the mountains. The myth was that the tokoloshe, perhaps summoned by a witch doctor, would sneak into your rondavel (little round hut) at night and suffocate you while you slept. You could protect yourself by putting a brick under each leg of your bed, as they were too short to climb up. In actuality, the fire keeping the rondavel warm was using up all the oxygen in the thin air. The heavier carbon monoxide concentrated at the ground and people who slept down low died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Tokoloshes have also been blamed for murders and even pregnancies.
How were we going to get these little personifications of evil to our respective statue stashes in the UK and US? We were told it would be no problem to post them, and not very expensive either.
Not having proper packing materials handy, they wrapped our carvings in cardboard with bits of steel-lined tire cut into ribbons. I did not have high hopes for ever seeing this package again.
But before it even could start the journey, there was a snag: when you ship wood from Malawi, you have to get two pieces of paperwork, one from “Forestry” and the other from “Fumigation” or some such. We were told this helps to reduce the theft of rare Malawian wood. The Postmaster was out so we had to wait until Monday, which gave us a fantastic excuse to extend our stay at what had become our favorite stop in Africa so far.
It wasn’t possible to extend our overall schedule, though. Instead, we dropped another planned stop further down the coast at Senga Bay. We’d both like to make it there some time, it’s supposed to be amazing.
We headed back in time for another delicious dinner and more Carlsberg-branded beer. Carlsberg has an effective monopoly on beer in Malawi: all beers brewed here, including the one actual Malawian beer called Kuche Kuche (“drink ’til dawn”), are produced at the Carlsberg brewery in Blantyre. On the plus side, the Carlsberg “Classic” here is a tasty 4.7% closer to the Danish original than the 4.2% piss they sell in England by the same name. I preferred the 5.7% “Special Brew” version, for some mysterious reason.
Well fed, we caught the sunset on the little beach at the backpackers from where people have been known to set off on kayaks.
The next morning we had a bit of a lie-in and a relaxed day. I worked on a blog post, Dave swam. For dinner, most of the guests went to the backpackers next door for some sort of special dinner event. We missed the memo, but so did a really interesting couple from Kenya.
Dos and Wamuyu (under the moniker Throttle Adventures) are riding their BMW motorbikes around the world, on every continent, for the next 3.5 years. When they finish, Wamuyu will be the first black woman ever to have done so. We’d actually seen them earlier, on the way into Malawi, when they were stopped at a police checkpoint handing over paperwork.
We got along famously and drank a bunch and planned to meet up further along in Africa, as one always does, except that we meant it this time.
Guess what we decided to do with our next extra day? A Norwegian couple named Hanne and Erik joined us for some kayaking to a rock-jumping spot about an hour down the beach. They took a double kayak, Dave took a single, and I didn’t fit in the remaining single so I joined our guide in a double.
We stopped for lunch and took turns jumping off a rocky cliff into the water — maybe 6 or 7m (20-23ft) tall. I don’t particularly enjoy falling, so I just did a pretty straightforward jump like Hanne and Erik. Dave managed to land a flip on his back but survived.
It was super relaxing just being out on the water, exactly what we needed after the hectic pace we’d been keeping the last week or so.
Dos, Wamuyu, Hanne, Erik, Dave, a lovely Kenyan named Gloria, and I all spent the evening in fine fashion: drinking and dancing. The hangover the next day was as severe as it was well-deserved.
But things that needed doing! It was down the hill to explore the market and run some errands.
Dave and I went back to the post office to ship our packages, but were told the papers would take days and cost more than the pieces did in the first place. We accepted the cost but couldn’t delay in Malawi any longer… The Postmaster came to our rescue and called a local art dealer who was well-versed in the process and offered to handle it all for us after we’d left Malawi. He saved our bacon for sure, and we owe him a debt: both our packages finally arrived (though mine took about a month).
The next morning was Dos and Wamuyu’s last day in Nkhata Bay, and they asked us to sign their bikes. This was a tremendous honor and Dave and I were both touched.
We watched them ride off quite sure we would be drinking with them again (foreshadowing?).
Next time: finally, a god damn safari