Two and a half days off

Back on the truck. Maybe it’s me, but it seems particularly bouncy today. I find myself sighing, and clutching the computer to keep it from flying off my lap, and cursing quietly. Maybe I’ve lost a bit of my truck-savvy since we’ve just had two and a half glorious days off – no pre-dawn starts, no striking tents in the rain, and no endless hours bouncing down the road in the steamy truck. We were only scheduled to have one and a half days at Kande Beach (pronounced like “candy”), but we had a small mutiny and unanimously decided to skip a visit to the Luwawo Forest Lodge and have an extra day on the beach instead. Our leaders Sarah and Dave were just as happy as the rest of us to be able to land for a while. Luwawo Forest would have been a nice stop, but the road in and out can become impassable after heavy rains, and we were all exhausted after two long long driving days in the truck, so we stayed.

We’re down to just nine travelers on the truck now, plus Sarah and Dave and Charles. It’s a small group, and all good people. We've been traveling together long enough now that we know each other – not necessarily in a one-big-happy-family touchy-feely way, but in a way that means we’re aware of each other’s quirks and can work around them when necessary, and are comfortable in conversation and in silence. Also, the small numbers make it easier to come to decisions like the one to skip the rain forest, and it means there’s a lot more room to spread out on the truck. The big group had its advantages too, but I prefer this.

Terrence, demonstrating his “truck-surfing” technique.

Kande was a nice spot, on the shores of Lake Malawi. It’s very popular with overland trucks – there ended up being at least six there at times, so our stop wasn’t a very African experience, it was more like a bit of time off from Africa. Seeing the trucks from other companies (Acacia, Nomad, Toucan) made us realize that the Dragoman trucks are certainly not the most comfortable on the road. The other trucks were shiny and new, with more comfortable seats, individual gear lockers, and other amenities. Our truck is old and dirty and worn. All our gear gets piled into one big locker at the back of the truck, and we have no access to it during the day. We get where we’re going, but not in much comfort.

Our truck does have advantages, but those are entirely under the hood. It’s got a workhorse diesel engine that’s old enough that there are no computers or sensors or widgets involved. Dave and Sarah are both fully trained in maintaining it and can fix about 80% of the problems that could arise on their own. The newer, fancier trucks have a lot of sensors that can shut them down without notice. Dave told us about one truck where the windshield wiper sensor malfunctioned leaving it dead in the water. Without a computer to diagnose the problem, the drivers were left waiting for help to arrive. So I admire Dragoman for maintaining a fleet of vehicles that can be made to go under almost any circumstances. I just don’t understand why they can’t spruce up the interior so that the passengers can enjoy the same loving attention that the engine does. The prices among all the different companies are similar, so I’m surprised there's such a variation in the equipment.

The campsite at Kande was inside a walled compound with guards, as with all the other sites we’ve stopped at. We were advised to travel in groups if we decided to leave and walk up to Kande village, about a 25 minute walk. Mostly we hung around at the campsite. They had a cheap bar, some watersports options, a small café with excellent chocolate cake, and on-again off-again internet access.

I say there were watersports, but some of our group did not partake because of the risk of contracting schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia), which is present in parts of Lake Malawi. The disease is spread by flukes (minute worms) that are carried by a species of freshwater snail. It’s not a nice – in its most severe, untreated form it can cause kidney failure and bowel damage, but the symptoms take a long time to develop and a longer time to become severe, and the treatment is cheap and readily available over the counter . Uganda Rob used to live in Malawi and he said it wasn’t anything to worry about. Also we’ve got a new member of the group who joined us in Dar, and she’s a GP. (Nicola shares her name with Nikki, who was already with us, so I suggested we start calling the new Nic “Sparky”, which we now often extend to “Doctor Sparky”.) Anyways, Dr. Sparky went in the water, and so did one or two others, and I did too. I think the risk was minimal – the snails that carry the flukes that cause the problem tend to live in reedy areas of still water. Our area was clear of plants and had reasonable waves. Really, though, it was mostly just that I couldn’t imagine spending three days on a beach in the scorching African sun without going in the water. And the water was lovely – clear and fresh and just the right temperature. Flukes be damned, I was happy in that lake. And it turns out that the treatment is so cheap and easy that we had no trouble finding it during a brief stop in Lilongwe – a single dose is all that’s needed. It cost about $3.50.

There were also cheap upgrades available, and I ended up sharing a 4-bed room that had a bathroom a small kitchen area, and a fridge, for just 1550 Malawian Kwacha per person per night (about $11.00). Then again it was still Africa, which means that the power went out for hours at a time, and the internet was crawlingly slow, and we shared our room with some small bits of wildlife. Also there was one day when, despite the fact that the power was off, you could get a nice little shock from touching any plumbing fixture in the room – kitchen sink, tap, shower pipe… no power in the sockets, but plenty in the pipes. I was tempted to plug my computer in to the sink. Vancouver Rob – you would have been pleased. After one night when the power failed I was left with a completely drained battery on the computer and no way to charge it until the power came back, no internet access at the campsite, and no credit left on my cell phone. Completely cut off, I did what I had to do:

Book: “The Poisonwood Bible”, by Barbara Kingsolver. Highly recommended.

Other than lounging, which we did a lot, we also walked into the village. The first time we did this we had an escort of two locals who picked us up right outside the gates and walked with us all the way, trying to pull us into conversation. This happens a lot, and it’s always awkward. Part of me naturally wants to be friendly and sociable, but a lot of me remembers Hubert Scammy Scammerson in Nairobi, and the kids who put their hands out for money or gifts, and the other guys who “guide” you somewhere you knew how to get to in the first place in the hopes of a tip. Our escorts at Kande dogged us until they had “delivered” us to the local carving market, after which they miraculously disappeared, leaving us to walk back in peace.

Kande village was small, and didn’t seem to have a lot to offer other than lots of small children who swarmed around us wanting to hold hands and walk with us and ask us for treats and money and our bottles of water. At one point when we we gathered at the Post Office for a few people to mail postcards I counted twenty little black heads in our entourage. Heather seemed particularly magnetic to them.

We started calling her “Madonna” for her obvious bond with these small African children

We did buy a few things in the village, all of which were edible. And I think I shall declare one of the purchases Steve’s Weird Food for Malawi, because though it was actually strangely familiar, encountering them piled on a plate on a red dirt road in a village in Africa was, well, weird.

Donuts!

Yup, Tim Hortons has nothing on the women of Kande. There was a whole row of them selling small plain donuts – they had no holes but they were clearly deep-fried dough and just needed a swipe of jam or a dip into sugar to make them taste like home. And at 10 Kwacha each (about 7 cents), they were a steal compared to Tim’s.

Other than walking to the village, I did get a bit of exercise when Dr. Sparky and I rented a plastic canoe and paddled out to nearby Kande Island. It was only a short way but nice to be out on the water. We had snorkeling masks with us but they were crap and filled up with water so quickly that you only have about 30 seconds of looking before you’d have to surface and snort out a nose full of water. We quickly gave up on the masks and lounged in the water chatting.

A group of small local boys was there too – each arrived in his own handmade wooden canoe that looked not far removed from the tree. Though they were probably only about 10 years old they maneuvered skillfully with a single paddle using an interesting and fluid one-stroke-on-the-left, one-stroke-on-the-right technique. And despite the fact that their boats outweighed them by a significant margin, they managed to haul them up on to the rocks to secure them. They were playing and fishing, and they borrowed our crappy snorkeling masks even though the fit was even worse on their small faces. I wish I had some pictures, but I didn’t take a camera since didn’t want to risk sending to a watery death.

And that’s about all there is to tell about our days off at Kande Beach. Oh, except for this: I got up one night and managed to smash my right little toe quite smartly against the bed leg. I uttered some choice words as I stumbled into a nearby bed to steady myself and then hobbled off to the bathroom. The next morning the toe was swollen and sore and it’s now turned a lovely shade of purple. No matter though, I can still move it so it’s not broken or anything, and I’m only limping slightly. And if it ends up needing to be amputated, there’s always Dr. Sparky.

Thoughts on Africa so far

Africa is beautiful, frustrating, overwhelming, fantastic and maddening. Here follow a few thoughts I’ve had about the place, some more fully-formed than others. I worry that most of them sound bitchy or condescending, and I suppose in some cases they are. Remember that I’ve spent most of the last few week sin Tanzania, though most of what’s below applies toa Africa in general. All I can say is that I’m trying to keep an open mind, but Africa is a real challenge. I’m in Malawi now, and am happy to report that it seems generally more prosperous, orderly and clean than what I encountered in Kenya and Tanzania.

A sadly prescient quote on the bulletin board in the truck.

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It fesls like there is garbage everywhere – sometimes it’s like to whole continent is one giant garbage dump. It’s scattered along the roadside, or blowing down city streets, or piled in heaps that slide down riverbanks towards the water. The charitable part of me wants to think that people are living in such poverty that they’re far more worried about simply getting food in their mouths and shelter over their heads than in keeping things tidy. The uncharitable part can’t help but feel that even a hand-to-mouth existence could be made more tolerable by pleasant surroundings, and it wouldn’t take much to clean things up, or at least to stop making it worse by continuing to throw things out whenever and wherever the mood strikes. Perhaps they simply don’t care, or that those who do care are vastly outnumbered and overmatched. Tanzania was awful for this, but as soon as we crossed into Malawi there was a marked difference, despite the fact that Malawi is generally poorer than Tanzania.

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Similarly, we pass a lot of unfinished buildings by the side of the road. In some cases it’s easy to see that they’re under construction. But most of the time it’s impossible to tell if the structure was halfway through being built, or halfway through being demolished. In some there are trees growing up through unroofed rooms and doorways with lintels that have sagged so badly they look like half-lidded eyes. I think a lot of the time people start building with a small amount of money and simply plan to continue whenever they have the funds to do so. It seems that most of the time, the funds just aren’t there. I asked about this in Uganda and was told that in some cases people will construct the bottom level of a building and rent it out, thus earning the money to continue building the next level. But this was in urban commercial areas, where there was obviously a lot more wealth than the places we were driving through.

Hand-made red mud bricks, the most common building material for small houses.

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The service industry in Africa is… well, let’s just say it’s not exactly up to a Wal-Mart level of speed and enthusiasm. As I suspected, my experience with Fed Ex in Uganda was not a one-off but a sign of things to come. This is most obvious in restaurants, where the service can be unbearably slow. I’ve started to think that I should order what I suspect my grandchildren will want to eat, since sometimes it feels like generations could rise and fall in the time it takes to get a plate of food. Laurie ordered a cheese and tomato sandwich from a Zanzibar restaurant and after waiting for about 45 minutes finally asked about the hold-up. She was told that it would take much much longer still, because they were going to have to bake the bread. However, she could have a hamburger, because they had hamburger buns. Clever Laurie elected to have her cheese and tomato ON a hamburger bun, which was a revolutionary solution that seemed not to have occurred to anyone in the kitchen. Nor did it occur to them to simply explain that they were out of bread when Laurie placed the order. It’s just weird.

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In general it feels like most things in Africa are broken but still in use. Buildings appear to be abandoned - leaning, tumbledown, and in danger of imminent failure - but in many cases they’re inhabited. On the way up to the north of Zanzibar we passed a long bus shelter with a corrugated metal roof. One end of the shelter was completely collapsed with its front corner resting on the ground, but people were sitting under the uncollapsed end, calmly waiting for their bus. It seems that the decay is so pervasive and overwhelming that they simply have no choice but to accept it, make the best of it, and carry on. The infrastructure in Africa is just a disaster. The main reason it takes us so long to get anywhere is that the roads are often in a bad state. We have a couple of big brains on the truck, and the consensus among them seems to be that the road beds may not have been properly prepared and compacted so that the heat of the sun, coupled with the weight of the heavy transport trucks, causes them to degrade quickly and develop big ruts. We’ve passed over some very nice sections of newly-laid asphalt, and we’ve passed areas where they’re fixing old roads or constructing new ones. But we also bounce over a lot of roads so dismal that I fear they will jar loose the fillings in my teeth.

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Maybe because of the bad roads, or maybe because of less-than-cautious driving techniques, but most likely because of a nasty combination of the two, we’ve passed an alarming number of overturned, smashed or otherwise incapacitated transport trucks. Sometimes they’re off to the side of the road, but as I mentioned before, in one case there was an overturned truck completely blocking traffic in both directions. I estimate we’ve seen about six catastrophic accidents in the time since we left Nairobi, and I that’s more than I’ve seen in a lifetime of highway driving in North America.

The first of many, this one was on the way to the Serengeti

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The luggage system on the Zanzibar ferry is a bit primitive. It works like this: anything too large to carry with you in the cabin is left dockside where a team of loaders passes it in a human chain up to the front deck of the boat. Once everything is loaded they tie a tarp over the pile and set off. At the other end the tarp is removed and another human chain passes each bag down off the boat to the dock where your only choice is to push your way through the crush of people to grab your things as they’re passed down.

Or at least that’s how things are supposed to work. In my case, on the way back from Zanzibar, it works like this:

The bag – in this case my trusty Aeronaut – is passed to a less-that-capable link in the chain who fails to grasp it properly and drops it into the Indian Ocean. Then the crowd gasps, and I look on in horror, and other members of the chain frantically fish it out and hand it over to me, apologizing profusely. I snarl “Thanks”, filling the word with such vitriol that it drips as much as my bag, and start pushing my way through the crowd to get out while seawater soaks into my shirt from the sodden straps of the bag. It’s at this moment that a taxi driver decides I’m a prime candidate for his service and asks, “Where do you want to go?” Without even looking back I bark, “I want to go somewhere they won’t drop my fucking bag in the ocean!!!” He wisely backs off, as does everyone else in my way. (Note to self: Appearing to be dangerously unstable and on the verge of violence is an efficient way to get through a crowd.)

Safely back with the rest of the group my hands literally shake with rage (and adrenalin, probably) as I try to open the locks on my bag to assess the damage. Remarkably, it’s not bad. The Aeronaut is supposed to be pretty much waterproof, though I suspect that claim doesn’t extend to dunking because there’s some water in each compartment. I think most of it got in through the small space between the zipper pulls, so the damage is minimal. Clothing and gear is a bit wet, but the only real concern is my external hard drive.

Later that night I hang clothing out to dry and spread out gadgets and knick-knacks and turn the Aeronaut inside-out. The next day it’s all fine, and I test the hard drive and it’s fine too. And I pack it all away and carry on.

And that’s how the luggage system on the Zanzibar ferry works.

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People really do carry things on the top of their heads. It seems mostly to be women, though I’ve seen men doing it too. Baskets of fruit, plastic jugs of water, laundry baskets, cases of soda, bags of potatoes, bunches of bananas – anything and everything. We even saw a woman walking down the street balancing a large rolling suitcase on her head. And I’m pretty sure I saw a guy with a small generator on his head in Zanzibar. And of course they don’t use their hands – the load is simply balanced on the head. It’s everywhere and yet, paradoxically, I have no photos.

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I was expecting the bugs in Africa to be bad. I mean, it’s AFRICA – the land of malaria and mosquito nets, right? Well I think I’ve had two mosquito bites the entire time I’ve been in Africa. Others in the group are getting bitten by mosquitoes and sandflies and things that leave angry welts the diameter of a coffee cup. Laurie left with enough small red splotches on her legs to make one wonder if she might be contagious. I, on the other hand, appear to be completely unappetizing to the insect life of Africa, despite not having applied repellent once. I get more mosquito bites in a hour in Winnipeg than I’ve had in 28 days in Africa. Nice.

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I’ve come to accept it, but it still grates. Everywhere we go, we pay mzungu prices (“mzungu” means “foreigner” or something like that, in Swahili). If the locals pay 500 shillings for a bottle of Krest Bitter Lemon, we pay 1,000. If we get stopped for speeding it’s likely because the petty official doing the stopping simply wants us to throw money at him to make him go away. (Kudos to our driver Dave for not taking this approach – he simply pulled out the recorder device attached to the truck’s tachometer and showed the guy he wasn’t speeding. Nevermind that it’s often impossible anyways, given the road conditions). Shopkeepers, roadside hawkers, cab drivers – everyone seems to be determined to swindle. This is especially odd because overland trucks go through these parts frequently, and it’s pretty easy for the group leaders to remember who screwed them around last time, and to pass the word among the fleet. It’s true that the difference in the prices might sometimes be insignificant to a wealthy western traveler, but it’s hard to develop a friendly and charitable attitude to the local population when you feel like they only see you as a wallet with legs.

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I’ve complained a lot here, but I really can’t complain about the kids. They are almost always excited to see us pass and wave and shout “Jambo!” (“Hello!” in Swahili). And they seem genuinely pleased when we wave back. If we’re walking in a village they’ll come running out of houses to see us, and will often want to hold hands and walk along with us for a ways. They love having their picture taken and then looking at themselves on the camera display. Yes, some of them want money, and the older the kids get the more likely they are to say “No pictures” or to flash rude gestures from the side of the road. I suppose as they get older they start to understand and resent the immense gap between us. But when they’re little they just think we’re fun mzungus and it’s great. And I swear I’ve seen them playing the hoop-and-stick game that looks, to my North American eyes, like it belongs in an episode of “Leave it to Beaver”.

After out spice tour on Zanzibar we had lunch at a local house and the neighbourhood kids gathered to peek at us from the porch. After lunch we went out an played with them a bit, and gave them our souvenir origami frogs and hats and baskets made from leaves. This serious guy wanted me to take his picture, so I did.

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And now, as I said earlier, we are in Malawi. We’ve landed at Kande Beach, on the shores of Lake Malawi, and a small mutiny in the group means we’re staying three nights here instead of the two that were scheduled. (We’re skipping one out-of-the-way spot to add an extra night here and an extra night in Livingstone) Everyone simply decided that after two very very long days in the truck, we want to sit somewhere and do nothing for a while. Well, not nothing. There is sleeping in, and having laundry done, and catching up on the internet (when the power is on). Also, the campsite is full of big overland trucks from different companies, and tonight we’ve joined forces with another Dragoman truck to share in the cost and preparation of a roast pig for supper. It’s on the coals now, which means I am done here.

(Please note: I realized a little while ago that a big section at the beginning of my post on Nairobi did not get published. I've fixed that now, so go have a look here.