We woke up to another glorious sunny day; one can never tire of the breathtaking sun rises and sunsets in Africa, whether it be over bush, mountains, sea or lakes. Lake Malawi gives you the surreal feeling of being on the Indian Ocean, with water stretching as far as the eye can see, little islands peppering the seascape and gently lapping waves on the white sandy beaches. Fisherman paddle past on their dugout canoes and a gentle breeze helps them on their way.
This tranquillity was kind of shattered as the sun rose into the sky – it was camp admin day. Clothes and dishes needed to be washed, blogging is so far behind, e-mails checked and Robs needs to do some school work.
The physical camp stuff was a breeze and everybody pitched in (also helped by the fact that our clothes could be washed at the camp office). The admin, relying on technology, proved infinitely more difficult and challenging. Network coverage in Malawi is near impossible, it took me around 7 hours to post 2 days of blogs. Gray gave up on his e-mails after ½ an hour and much to Robyn’s delight we couldn’t even begin to connect to Moodle – Saints portal to connect teachers and pupils. Home schooling is proving to be more difficult than expected. She wasn’t going to hang around, in the hopes of getting a maths or some other assignment to do and headed off to the beach with Kirsty.
Kirst has been the biggest surprise of this trip; normally she endures our camping trips by burying her head in a book and humouring us with her presence around meal time, or when we are heading off to do something she might find vaguely interesting. Not sure what the transformation is; 6 months of fending for herself in varsity res, discovering camping can be fun or just plain growing up but she has turned into a regular ‘Camel Girl’. She can set up the tent pretty much blind folded, she can get the fire going (mainly so she can have her regular cups of tea), she is the first to hop up to do the dishes after a meal and not even a moan if the showers are cold. Last night we hadn’t planned on desert but still she had made our favourite camp pud – bananas filled with chocolate and braaied, so the chocolate melts.
Around lunch time one of the local fishermen walked past and offered us some of his catch. For the equivalent of R40 we bought two butterfish, Gareth went off with them and called us ½ hour later. Not sure what he had done but we were treated to the tastiest fish with salsa that I have ever had. Thank heavens he learnt something at chefs school.
After a lazy afternoon, it was time to eat again. With a kilogram of mince at our disposal – back home, I would have decided what I felt like and the family could have had anything from bobotie to lasagne. Here we had ingredients for either curried mince, spaghetti bolognaise or hamburgers on toast. After much debate and input from all, hamburgers won. While I was making them the girls disappeared and returned with 5 beautifully plated pieces of chocolate cake. They decided we needed pudding again and resourcefully went to the chef at the restaurant and organised it.
With the time change and it being winter here, not that one would think so temperature wise, it gets dark around 6:00. We were in bed by 7:30.
Sunset
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