From Zanzibar to Zimbabwe

We took about 10 days to make our way from Zanzibar to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. After a brief stop in Iringa, Tanzania, to break up the driving, we hit the shores of Lake Malawi (which looks more like a beach than a lake, it's so massive), working our way down the coast before heading west across Zambia through Chipata and Lusaka to Livingstone.

We met some interesting people along the way. There was Freddie, the foreign exchange agent, who came to meet us (complete with his calculator and wads of kwacha) at our lunch stop just before crossing the border into Malawi. He was much nicer than the currency hawks who surrounded the truck when we crossed into Zambia at Chipata and started threatening Mwangi when he refused to do business with them because they wanted to offer him one rate and a much lesser one for the muzungus (white people). Then there was the hard case "Daddy Roots" who gate crashed our volleyball game at Kande Beach and had us in stitches from the moment he stepped onto the court and said "Right, it's time for us to pull up our socks"... and then reached down to pull up his own red Santa socks! And then there was Patrick, who sold wood carvings just outside our camp at Chitimba, and who taught me how to play bao. I thought we had a good rapport going - until he tried to do a switcharoo and dick me over when I tried to buy some stuff off him!

There were also some delicious drinks and concoctions devised on the trip, like the Amarula spiked hot chocolate at Iringa, Anzac's "mangolicious" (konyagi and mango juice) and mine and Megan's "witch doctor" (vodka, mango juice and sprite). Obviously the witch doctor was the finest of the three!

For much of the time, this part of the tour seemed marked by a degree of what I'm calling "Malawi Madness". To be fair, the dress up party/spit roast/bucket punch night at Kande Beach was probably the point at which it all kicked off! The day before we had pulled names out of a hat and bought that person a $5 costume for the party... as luck would have it, I got Tim. Funnily enough he didn't seem to appreciate the sparkly crop top and matching mini skirt that I chose for him, and he hurled some particularly nasty abuse when I presented the piece-de-resistance - a wicked man united branded, 80s style head/wrist band combo! In my defense, his outfit was on a par with most of those bought for the night - and a great deal nicer than those which were bought for Dieter and Werner, the 70 year old Germans in the group! I think I got off relatively lightly with my pink and purple princess number, although admittedly the lycra sleeves were so tight that they were starting to cut off the circulation in my arms by the end of the night.

The next day, as we were driving to Senga Bay, it started to rain. Only "it never rains in Africa... it pours". That would have been fine if the truck had been water-tight, but as it poured, the rain started dripping through the windows at the front of the truck and collecting in puddles on the table and on the poor souls stuck up front. As a result, to make space and avoid people drowning in their seats, Mwangi and I rode in the cab up front with Mwai and Nick. It was there that I had the most bizarre conversation of this trip. Nick and Mwai were arguing in Swahili, but words like "moon", "earth" and "universe" filtered through. They must have seen my confused face and at that point Nick drew me into the conversation to try to settle a point. He asked me this question: "Neena, tell me, where do you go when you get to the end of the water?". Are you baffled at this point, because I certainly was. Turns out the logic behind the question rested on the fact that there's always water around the edges of all the maps of the world... and Nick wanted me to tell him what happens when you go over the edge. This was the start of a long and surreal discussion where I tried to explain:

• that the earth is a globe - like a volleyball, not a sheet of paper
• that gravity keeps everyone and everything (including the atmosphere) on the planet and there is no see through mirror holding our world together
• how gravity works (eek - it's been a long time since I was last in a physics class... but I guess at least I was taught the basics at some point!)
• that you can't just keep digging into the centre of the world, but if you could, you'd come out on the other side of the planet (and not in some alternate world with really small people a la Gulliver's Travels!)

In a sign that may indicate my powers of persuasion are either rubbish or non-existent, we had to agree to disagree. Nick's final, matter-of-fact statement on the subject was that God's ultimately responsible for it all and so we can never know.

Slightly less surreal aspects of Malawi Madness include the empty shelves in the supermarkets and the lack of coke and other soft drinks in all the stores, the long queues at petrol stations (before the tankers had even arrived to fill up the station), the 2 million kwacha we paid for fuel in Zambia, the zebras that wandered around our campsite in Lusaka, and watching an elephant swim across the Zambezi river at Livingstone, using its trunk like a periscope/snorkel! Admittedly some of those weren't actually in Malawi, but the madness definitely started there!

As an aside, I've now worked my way through 2 pairs of jandals (and still counting). My havaianas were fixed at least half a dozen times before giving up the ghost completely the night of the dress up party (wonder if the dancing and conga-style fashion show had anything to do with it?!). Meanwhile, my bling covered Malawian number lasted less than 24 hours before calling it a day on the roadside as we waited for some tyre bearings on the truck to be fixed. Mwai's assured me that my new ones will last the distance though - they're from Bata, which is a Kenyan brand and we all know now (if we didn't before) that Kenya's the best country in the world!