We had an uneventful trip travelling the 60km to the park gate, payed the $20 for our extra days stay and received no receipt (guess some game park official made an easy $20 today).
From here Gray took a short cut (will he ever learn) to a town called Rumphi. The road was the ‘same old’ but the scenery was picturesque and beautiful. As we descended through hills, we were aware of the many villages and subsistence farming taking place on the hillsides. Even here, in the far north eastern section of Malawi, it is more populous than we have encountered in Namibia or Zambia. Rumpi was very much a little village and the one and only ATM was off line – so we are still without local currency.
The next town, Mzuzu was a lot larger and busier. We needed Malawian kwacha, diesel and meat and salad ingredients for the next few days. We drew the maximum allocation of kwacha allowed (at the second ATM, the first was off line) and headed off to the garage, and then the next and the next – 6 garages later we were more than a little concerned, as no diesel was available in the town. The little red petrol light on the dash board was flashing and all we had was 40 l in cans. We had visions of looking for accommodation in Mzuzu, not a pleasant prospect. In desperation, I suggested to Gray that we try a service station that I had seen as we entered the town, we retraced our steps and to our huge relief they were able to help us. We were still unable to fill up our 120 l tank as we didn’t have enough kwacha.
We returned to town and drew more kwacha on another card and headed off to do some shopping. Three ‘supermarkets’ later; we had managed to get coldrinks at one, toothpaste at another and a frozen chicken, tomatoes, bread, cabbage and ice at a third. This whole exercise took us over 2 hours.
So far our experience of the Malawian people is that they are friendly but not the genuine friendliness of the Zambians. They are more in your face and for the first time this trip I feel we need to be aware of keeping an eye on our belongings.
Eventually, we were on our way down to Chinteche on Lake Malawi. The road was tarred and one of best we had travelled on since Livingstone. We arrived at the recommended camp site to be informed that they were closed for 2 weeks to do alterations. We were beginning to wonder if we were meant to be here at all.
We travelled on for another 5km to Makuzi Beach Resort, a place we had read about in one of our travel books, as they had no one else staying there were very happy to accommodate us. It is beautiful here; we are camped on a grassy patch overlooking a bay surrounded by palms and other tropical plants. The beach is dotted with little thatch umbrellas as the water gently laps up to them.
It is so hot and humid here, in sharp contrast to the previous 3 days on the plateau. We set up camp and went swimming, the water is warm and gentle and little fish nibble at your feet. Robs would be in paradise, I wonder how Bush school is going? We got a SMS from Al to say she had scanned a letter from Robs to us. So far we have not been able to retrieve it and my next deadline to send one to her is tomorrow. Communication problems aside, we headed off to the bar overlooking the lake.
Here as we sipped on our Malawian G&T’s (a good malaria remedy, haha), all the struggles of the day melted away. It is truly stunning; we could be in Mauritius or the Seychelles. We watched the sun set in hues of pink and orange and then a full moon rise over the gentle waters of the lake. We returned to our camp and too lazy to cook, made toasted cheese and tomato jaffles over the fire. We think we may just spend a more days here in paradise.
Sun set
Moon rise
No comments:
Post a Comment