Vic Falls

The falls.

And again.

Eighty-year-old theater in downtown Livingstone, now empty because the owner didn't pay rent.

Downtown Livingstone.

Ouch.

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia – Zambia was a fairly quick drive-through with a few days a Victoria Falls, which is, shockingly, very beautiful. Livingstone is a laid-back town with some beautiful colonial buildings and Connie survived a robbery attempt by a thieving baboon. Other than that, I’ll leave it to photos.

The humanitarian

Plagiarism note: Anyone who has read Paul Theroux’s brilliant, curmudgeonly book, “Dark Star Safari” (if you haven’t, you should) will notice a similarity with his account of border problems in Malawi. It’s purely coincidence, though his account actually helped guide me in my dealings with the border agent.

MALAWI-ZAMBIA BORDER – For a country that hasn’t fought a war, there’s a curious number of police and military checkpoints in Malawi. If you’re on a tour or in a rental car, you’ll probably just be waved through and think little of it, but riding the local mini-buses I noticed an odd pattern. We were almost always stopped and after a brief conversation between the bus conductor and the cops, the fuzz would get on.

Sometimes they would even boot the passengers from the front to get the prime seats (also the deadliest, I imagined, but I don’t think they were thinking that far ahead). They never paid.

So I started looking closely at the checkpoint goings on and saw that the conductors would walk with one hand behind their back, a wad of Kwacha (Malawian money) in their palm and return empty-handed. These bus operators weren’t making a killing - $4 a pop for a five to six hour ride – and not only did they have to bribe these guys, they often had to give them a free ride.

Malawi has many charms – a deeply hospitable vibe, lush forests, a massive azure lake dotted with fishing villages – but under the surface there’s an ugly corruption made uglier by the poverty of the people made to pony up to the greedy bureaucrats.

University, even secondary school, is a pipe dream for many without government connections, let alone a good job.

For most of my time in Malawi I saw the graft flash by, dream-like. It was dirty and disappointing but it didn’t involve me.

On our tenth day in Malawi, we arrived at the Zambian border. We walked up to the Malawian counter all smiles, ready to leave the country and start the next adventure. The sour-faced border agent was not smiling. As he flipped through our passports, he shook his head.

‘There is a problem,’ he said grimly.

‘What’s the problem, sir,’ I asked, puzzled.

‘She has overstayed her visa,’ he said, not even making an attempt to look Connie’s way.

He showed us our passports, mineshowing a 30-day stamp (the maximum allowed for a free tourist visa), Connie’s showing a seven-day stamp. It was odd, indeed, as we had handed in our passports together and asked for the same amount of time.

The scam clicked in my head immediately – stamp short on one end in hopes of a bribe opportunity on the other – and I thought to myself, ‘This son-of-a-bitch will get nothing.’

‘There is a problem,’ I said. ‘It appears your man made a mistake at the Tanzanian border.’

‘He did not make a mistake, look at the stamp,’ the bureaucrat retorted with distinctly uncreative circular logic. ‘There are laws in Malawi and they must be respected…(blah, blah, blah).” He waved the fraudulent stamp, and gave a long-winded speech about respect for the law.

He got frustrated when we wouldn’t play his game and hauled us into his office to intimidate us.

‘You will have to go to Lilongwe and pay ($35) to get an extension,’ he said, still not talking to Connie, the person with the visa problem. Lilongwe was five hours away. This was pure bullshit.

‘No, we’re going to Zambia today,’ I said.

Connie, understandably upset by the situation, then did two things that helped our caused. First she said to the dithering officer, ‘Look, I don’t want to go to jail.’ I felt a sympathy synapse twitch in the man’s small brain.

Then, more presciently, ‘Well, why don’t you call the Tanzanian border to clear this up.’

‘But it’s Sunday,’ he sputtered.

‘Surely the phones work on Sunday,’ I said.

He changed the subject. ‘What if I just let you walk to Zambia?’ still not making eye-contact with Connie. The unfinished end of the sentence, of course, was ‘What is that worth to you?’

‘That’s exactly what we want,’ I said. ‘I know what you want, but you won’t get it. I think we need to speak to your boss.’

The reptilian thief hauled us around front and launched into another lecture on the law. I knew we had won and just needed to keep quiet while he saved face.

‘I am stamping her through on humanitarian grounds,’ he said with a straight face, again looking at me.

We walked across, apparently refugees fleeing to Zambia.

Get me off this rollercoaster

A lovely view from the mini-bus, but difficult to enjoy when focused on thoughts of fiery death.

KARONGA, Malawi – When the fuel smugglers crammed full jerry cans of their black market goods under our collapsing seat, I should have called it a ride, got out, and hitched from wherever the hell we were. Instead I gritted my teeth and did the same thing I always do – hoped for the best, promised myself I’ll never do anything like this again and then promptly broke the promise.

Connie and I were in the most wrecked mini-bus we had seen, which is akin to saying, “I just ate at the worst Arby’s I’ve ever seen” – a high bar indeed. What used to be a Toyota van looked as if a small nuclear explosion had gutted it, leaving only bits of seat foam attached to twisted metal. There were 25 people inside a creaking disaster made for 12.

Malawi is a stunning, mountainous country rotten with destroyed roads that cut through dizzying terrain with suicide corners that drop off into scenic jungle far below. “Perhaps a tree will catch us before we fall too far,” I thought as our insane driver squealed around corners on what must have been bald tires. He had been stuck behind a sluggish truck for a few minutes and seemed to be trying to make up time.

My neighbor, a Malawian, turned to me with grim resignation. “He seems to be going faster now.”

I envisioned the crash, the explosion, and the few survivors scrambling to exit what was left of the burning van. I thought of the great deal the ride was – a six hour hop for about $4 – and what a cheap moron I was.

Our driver pressed the pedal ever lower, nearly hopping the silver coffin over steep rises, careening down steep grades, and passing as if to dare other potential drivers coming the opposite direction to take the same blind curve. A boulder-strewn river raged far below.

I looked over at Connie. She gripped the seat in front of her tightly. Her face was etched with fear, but she remained much calmer than could be reasonably expected from any sane human being with a survival instinct. Perhaps it was the wrong time for a joke.

“Well, I think we’re either going to die or get their early,” I said.

I was wrong on both counts. Late by a half-hour (but what’s late really, when you’re taking go-when-we-fill-up mini-buses?), we pulled in very much alive, exhaled, and got onto the next mini-bus.

Drink Diaries Vol. 1:

Mmm, chunky. Note the disgusted look on Connie's face.

“Wow,” I thought. “Malawians sure like their dairy products.”

 Everywhere, groups of young men sat around drinking from white and blue milk cartons, looking to be in calcified, strong-boned good spirits.

Upon closer inspection, I realized they were drinking the southern African beer of the people: Chibuku (shake shake). Though referred to locally as a beer, you will be in for an unhappy surprise is you sip it expecting golden, hoppy refreshment.

Chibuku is a thick, gritty, sour amalgam of fermented maize, sorghum and yeast the color of dirty milk. At 3.5 percent alcohol, it makes up for strength in quantity, being sold in flimsy one liter milk cartons for about 50 cents a pop. It’s an acquired taste and one quite a few locals have acquired a bit too much.

Southern Africa is no haven for fine booze (with the glaring exception of South Africa’s wine region), but I’ve managed to sample an array of local drink, ranging from awful firewater to delicious craft beer.

Having a national beer is like having a national airline, and like the latter, no country lets lack of quality  or safety get in the way of this point of pride.

In Tanzania there are several local lager but the king, both in strength and taste, is Safari, a malty, slightly sweet and extremely drinkable lager. Cheaper, and much better for cauterizing wounds, is Konyagi, the local sugar cane fire water.

Malawians are very proud of their 3.5 percent alcohol Kuche Kuche - I was told by several Malawians that it translates roughly to “drink until the morning,” and you would have to in order to loosen up. Their motto is “Mowa Watu Watu,” which means “A beer of our own” and it’s brewed, of course, by Carlsberg of Denmark. The watered down malt liquorish beverage’s main attraction is its cheapness, followed closely by the fact that it is, indeed, beer.

The real gem in Malawi was the generic Malawi brand liquors, though. At less than a dollar for a 200 ml bottle, the brandy, gin, and vodka line is dangerously cheap, and surprisingly okay. The sweet brandy improved a few rough days at sea.

Botswana’s St. Louis Export – the strangest name for a local beer – is your typical national lager: inoffensive and Budweiserish.

In formerly German Namibia, the beer scene improves, and you can even find thoroughly decent craft beer brewed by Camelthorn Brewing in the capital, Windhoek. They make a great German-style hefeweizen and my favorite, an American-style red ale, balanced and slightly bitter. Even the old stand-by, Windhoek Lager is a cut above its neighboring national beer rivals, though the cheaper Tafel is not worth the 30 cents savings. The main commercial brewer, Namibian Brewing, even has a tasty seasonal bock beer, made only in winter for those frosty 70-degree days.

If you really want to drink southern Africa, though, it’s all about the Chibuku. Even the smallest one-road outpost has a Chibuku shack that never closes, where locals sit on rough-hewn wooden benches and dance the afternoon away to ear-splitting reggae. ‘Shake shake’ is the drink’s motto and nickname, referring both to drinking instructions and the effect it has on the consumer.

 The ‘international beer’ is gulped, not sipped, perhaps because it tastes a bit like milk that’s gone a couple weeks past it’s sell-by date or maybe because no one drinks it to stay sober. One thing’s for sure: the only thing that makes Chibuku taste better is more Chibuku.

 I met a Zimbabwean in Botswana whose father used to work for Chibuku. He was very proud of his father’s work and he himself helped pay for college by working for Chibuku. He drinks Windhoek.

Dead rats and dirty mats: three days aboard the Ilala (Part 2)

Slummin' it.

A tasty snack.

There's plenty of room. What could possibly go wrong?

Little did they know.

                                                                      It was like that.

LIKOMA ISLAND, Malawi – Dawn broke soggy and still as the sky turn from murky black to pale gray. A dead rat floated out from the ship. It was the most miserable sunrise of our lives.

I sat against the wall where I had slumped for the night, watching the water drip off the side railing, mustering the energy to change into dry clothes, hoping for sunshine. Connie scratched a neat line of mysterious bug bites that had cropped up after a couple fitful hours on a rank, rented mattress. My fellow travelers blinked into the realization that Monday had merged into Tuesday and slowly stirred. The comatose Burundian continued to snooze.

Anchored off the shore of Likoma Island, in view of the rugged green mountains of the Mozambique coast, hundreds of passengers along with tons of goods, were ferried to the shore skiff by skiff the only speed the Ilala knew: slowly.

Storm damage was light, considering the suddenness and ferocity of the previous night’s squall: clothes and sleeping bags soaked, but the guts of our backpacks, electronics and all, mostly unscathed under our protective rain guards. The underdeck of the ship resembled a Third World laundry, with drenched clothes hanging from every inch of wire and hook-shaped metal available.

A fish eagle screamed as it flew towards the boat, dove for the water, and plucked the dead rat from the water.

Built in Scotland in 1951 as a steam ship, the MV Ilala replaced it’s less fortunate predecessor of the same name after the first Ilala sank in a storm in 1946.The engine was later converted to diesel, though many of the important bits are still original, requiring creative engineering from the crew when something breaks. Depending on who you ask the name either refers to a village in Tanzania (the Tanzanians claim a northern portion of the lake, a matter of some friction between them and their Malawian neighbors), the word for ‘bird’ in Tanzania’s main language of Swahili, or, roughly, ‘something big’ in the Malawian language of ChiTumbuka. Malawians seem to prefer the latter explanation.

A plaque on the ship’s bow show’s it was rechristened by Malawi’s first post-independence dictator, “His Excellency The Life President Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamzu Banda.”

The Ilala’s top speed is leisurely*, though it usually travels at half that, taking a week to circle the lake, acting as a vital connection for villagers in three countries to get their goods to market.

The ship’s captain was Daniel Ngwira, a 30-year-old who bore a striking resemblance to Tupac Shakur and somewhat resented the comparison. Ngwira had worked his way up from swabbing the decks to piloting the ship in just five years, following his studies to the treacherous seas off Ethiopia and as far as Brazil. He seldom smiled.

His dour demeanor broke only when I found his weak spot: I asked for a tour of the ship. He had been working for six weeks without a break and seemed happy to break the monotony.

“Other people are scared. They think that one day (the ship) will just break,” he said, as he showed me around the captain’s deck.

The thought had occurred to me as the ship pitched and rolled the previous night and I was not comforted by the fact that his navigational maps dated from the 1950s.

Ngwira spoke matter-of-factly about the Ilala, without the overwrought reverence many ship buffs have for such historic vessels. “An old thing” he called her more than once.

I asked if he ever became scared during some of the brutal storms that popped up on Lake Malawi from time to time.

“I can’t think about that, I can only think about keeping the boat going, because I don’t want to be the 30-year-old captain who took down the 60-year-old Ilala,” he said.

“Amen, brother,” I thought.

The tour lifted my spirits and the sun broke through in the afternoon, though we were still moored off Likoma Island some six hours after we arrived. With the sun, the brandy started flowing again, Connie and I played cards with a friendly Swiss couple on the top deck and we achieved something resembling enjoyment for the first time since the storm.

Eventually, we even left Likoma Island after just eight short hours and, as we approached Mozambique, the crew raised that country’s peculiar book and AK-47 flag and anchored off a coast of verdant mountains and tiny villages of thatch-roof huts. The German and Burundian couple we had befriended ambled into the skiff that was ferrying passengers to the border post, smiling and waving as they took off for what they expected to be their next adventure.

A short time later we saw the skiff returning, empty except for the crew and our friends. As the couple walked sullenly back to the top deck we noticed their packs were sodden and they were soaked from the chest down. After wading through the water to get to the beach – the skiff couldn’t get any closer to the shore – they were told by the border agents that they could not get a visa at that post. Always a surprise on the Ilala.

We invited our unfortunate traveling companions over for a cheer-up drink and began to discuss the climatic possibilities of the evening and the best places to find a dry night of sleep. As we looked nervously to the sky and plotted our sleeping spot for the night, we got the weather report from the crew.

Westerners like to assign mythical powers to Africans, assuming they can divine the actions of wildlife, the medicinal qualities of plants, and, most popularly, the weather. Most often, this is bullshit.

“I think it will be calm,” said the captain.

“The sky is clear, it will not rain,” the surly canteen manager said, pointing at a cloudy, sunless sky while trying to evict us from our precious dry sleeping spot in front of the private cabins of better paying customers.

“Fuck all of you and your little boat, too,” replied the sky, opening up with another storm after we stupidly set up our sleeping bags on the top deck again.

But we were prepared this time and, as most of the passenger’s had cleared out at Likoma Island, the benches in steerage class in the dry underbelly of the ship were clear and we managed our first meaningful sleep of the voyage.

The next day broke clear and calm and we enjoyed our final hours on the ship before docking on the stunning, rocky, bird- and baboon-rich coastline of Monkey Bay. We were all smiles as we gathered our things and disembarked. Wearing my sandals, I forgot my shoes on the boat. They were promptly stolen.

*Top speed is 15 knots, but 8 knots is the norm.

Dead rats and dirty mats: three days aboard the MV Ilala

The Ilala.

Transporting passengers and goods at the first stop.

The market outside the Ilala in happier times.

NOTE: The blog’s in Tanzania, I’m in Namibia, so I need to catch up. There’s all kinds of odds and ends I’ll have to throw in later, but I’m going to get caught up, skipping for the moment some gems from earlier in my travels. Also, I'm having trouble uploading photos, so I'll have to add them later.

Part 1

SOMEWHERE ON LAKE MALAWI, Malawi – The MV Ilala was everything I had hoped and feared.

In the mosquito darkness of Nkhata Bay we watched the sacks of maize and flour, vegetables, livestock, and massive logs loaded by hand onto the 60-year-old converted steam vessel. A mini-market sprung up outside the buzzing, stinking, overcrowded ship, with locals slinging cheap eats and trinkets to the Malawians boarding for the major market to market route the Ilala plies between Nkhata Bay and Likoma Island.

Connie and I ascended the steps, first through economy and second class, where Malawians reclined on bags of maize and vegetables, every possible sleeping space taken, every sweet and vile odor of the market filling the air, and finally to ‘first class,’ surely a moniker the Malawian staff invented to mock foreigners. 'First class' gives you the privilege of throwing down your sleeping bag on the open top deck of the ship, a dicier proposition in the rainy season than we realized.

The foghorn sounded and the noble Ilala, survivor of decades of rough seas and civil war, chugged off slowly into an inky, starless night, speckled with the dim lights of dugout canoes that looked like a Chinese water lantern procession.

Connie and I drank from sweaty bottles of Kuche Kuche beer and cheap brandy with the few foreign travelers aboard. A German taxi driver traveling with his Burundian girlfriend, whose English became progressively more difficult to understand with each drink, toasted us for stumbling onto such a weird journey in such an obscure corner of the world. We watched in fascination as the Ilala made it's first port of call, an island without a proper harbor, necessitating the ship to stop far offshore and painstakingly ferry passengers and goods back and forth in rough seas, via rickety motorboats.

As the night wore on, the German passed out on the hardwood, open-mouthed, one arm curled around a bar stool, still wearing his dirty converse. We all had a good laugh at his expense before laying down on verminous mattresses strewn haphazardly around the bar - the only covered section of the top deck - and drifting off to blaring reggae, Chichewe banter, and tip-toeing of a steady drizzle on.

Soon after I fell asleep to thoughts of the journey ahead, though, the rain picked up. I felt a few drops and simply turned over, away from the edge of the boat, thinking, “It will pass. It never rains long here.” It was the first of many cockeyed weather predictions.

Without warning, we were doused by a sobriety-smack of a lake squall that sent soaking, horizontal sheet of rain across the deck, sending backpackers and barflies alike scrambling for cover. Before we had time to pack our sleeping bags our clothes and shoes were waterlogged. It lasted five minutes, but washed every good feeling, along with dead rats, cockroaches, and garbage overboard.

Soaked, shocked and without a place to lay down (the Africans onboard had wisely snapped up the prime spots ahead of the storm), we huddled in a tiny, sheltered area below decks, sitting on the sodden, filthy ground next to a more fortunate group of Malawian soldiers fast asleep on their mattress. No one slept amongst the group of foreigners, save the Burundian woman, who seemed immune to consciousness.

We shivered through the night and waited for the sun. No one spoke.

The tally

One of the many animals we've seen on our anti-safari. Mr. Chameleon crawled up my leg as I was putting up the tent.

Day 28. Livingstone, Zambia. Our trip by the numbers so far.

Miles traveled: 2,450

Countries visited: 3

Miles logged on anything other than local transport: 0

Modes of transport: Bus, death-trap mini-bus, shared taxi, motorcycle, ferry

Angry bus church sermons: 1

Days at sea: 3

Nights in the tent: 8

Nights with air-conditioning: 1

Days on safari: 0

Members of the Big 5 spotted: 2

Wild animals spotted: elephants (3 herds), cape buffalo (1 herd), giraffes, warthogs, impala, baboons, vervet monkeys, one overly friendly chameleon, and countless incredible birds, including the African fish eagle and lilac-breasted roller.

Robberies: 1

Scams attempted: 1

Scams thwarted: 1

Bribes solicited: 1

Bribes paid: 0

Arrests: 0

Cell phones lost/broken: 2

Bug bites: lost count

Times I have violated Aunt Goldie’s plea to avoid street food: more than I care to tell Goldie

Serious intestinal problems: incredibly, 0