I felt kind of like I was being run out of the country. The visa guy telling us that we had 24 hours to get out of ZImbabwe was like the Sheriff saying, “Boy, don’t let the sun set on you here in my town.” I could relate to him. I had often felt annoyed by how many people I knew in Texas who had overstayed their visas. One of the girls whose school fees I had paid, had graduated high school, gone right out and found an inseminator (boyfriend, same thing), and had promptly gotten pregnant. Then, when she was 8 months along, used her shoppers visa to cross into the Rio Grande valley, had her first baby there in an American hospital, and never went back. Now she has 3 kids, and a bun in the oven, and her visa has long since expired, so if she goes back to Mexico, she can not return here where her undocumented husband and 3 American citizen kids live, without paying a coyote to bring her across illegally. It almost caused the end of our friendship. I understood her desire to bring up kids here, where they have so many more opportunities, and her kids can get a better education, but her willingly not caring about the laws here made our relationship awkward. So, here in Africa, I tucked my tail between my legs, and Mike and I rode the bus to Lilongwe, Malawi.

Mike wanted to hike up Mount Mulanje in southern Malawi, and do some camping, and I was game. But first we spent a couple days in Lilongwe, the capital, staying at a hostel and getting showers, registering our visas, and eating at restaurants. On the day we were going to head to Mulanje, I woke up itching, and immediately knew it was crab lice. I had gotten crabs one time in college, from my girlfriend, and recognized the feeling right away. Shit. I guess the sheets on the bed in McMurphys famous backpackers hostel were not washed regularly. Shame on them. If there had been internet back then, I would have gone immediately online, and warned future hostel guests. I walked down to the pharmacy, and asked the pharmacist what he had for crab lice. He stepped back when I said “Crab lice”, with a disapproving look on his face, but turned around and picked up a bottle and put it on the counter. Kwell Shampoo! Just like in the States. I bought the bottle and went back to where we were staying, and gave myself the treatment. There was an old joke about how to get rid of crabs, and I told Mike I was gonna try that method. First, you shave off half your pubic hair. Then you set the other half on fire, and as the crabs run across the shaved area, you stab them with an ice pick. Mike looked at me askance. Kidding, Mike.

Mike had the sniffles as we got on the bus from Lilongwe to Mulanje, and when we reached the tiny town of Mulanje, he wasn’t any better. We decided to climb the trail anyway, and set off up the long trail. Mt Mulanje was not a big mountain, and it had a circuitous trail at the top, with campsites every so often along the trail, and we aimed for the first one. Once we started climbing the trail, it was narrow and arduous. One side of the path went straight down, and the other side went straight up. As we hiked, every so often, we would hear “Hup!”, either behind us, or above us, and then a guy would come trotting up the trail barefooted, and pass us, or the guy above would be trotting down the trail, with a long board balanced on his head. A long board. Some of them were 30 feet long, and rough and big, and freshly cut out of a tree. We had to squeeze ourselves against the rock side, and let the board carrier pass. Looking down at them after they passed, I saw a number spray painted on the top of the board. 20, 25, 35. It turned out to be how much it paid to carry that board down the mountain to the lumber yard at the base. 35 Kwacha, the currency of Malawi, was about 5 dollars US. A guy we talked to said he could make 2 trips a day, or maybe 3, depending on how early he got started from the bottom in the morning. He was happy to earn the income, running up and down the mountain, and in fact, the board carriers were the affluent guys in the town. And the fittest. I could not imagine carrying a heavy, long board on my head, and running down the 2 foot wide trail. I wondered how many had fallen over the edge.

We got to the top after 5 hours of climbing, and walked the trail to the first campsite, and pitched our tents. It was beautiful up there. Cool, and fresh, thick forests. That night, Mike took a turn for the worse, and by morning, after a cold night of huddling in our tents, Mike was pretty sick. I fixed him some chicken noodle soup, and went out walking while he rested. I heard sawing, and walked until I came to where two guys were sawing the boards out of tree trunks. They had rolled the 30 foot log up a ramp built of sawn wood, and rested it on top. Then, with a long saw, and one guy balanced on top of the log, and the other guy standing on the ground below it, they worked together to saw out the boards that were being carried down. Hard labor. There was a pile of sawn boards, all marked with the price for delivery down at the bottom.

Back at camp, Mike was feeling awful. We talked, and decided to pack it in, and walk back down the 5 hours to Mulanje. It took us all day. Mike was stumbling along miserably, with his heavy pack, and I counted it a miracle when we finally got to the bottom, all the way dodging the board carriers every 10 or 15 minutes. We found a rest house, which were all over southern Africa, in towns, where travelers could stay while waiting until the bus came in the next day or two. In front of the rest house was the biggest avocado tree I have ever seen. Enormous, maybe 50 feet tall, and avocados ripening all over it. The tree provided the only shade in the town, and lots of people rested in its voluminous shadow. Every so often, an avocado would let loose, and come dropping down from up high, and I found that one hitting my shoulder as I rested there, practically paralyzed my arm. But not paralyzed enough to prevent me from grabbing it as it landed, so I could have it for dinner. Big juicy avocados. Yum. The town itself, was surrounded by tea fields, something I had never seen growing before.

We stayed there for a couple days until Mike got better. I found in the local shop, that by the checkout counter, they had a box of ketchup-pack-looking pouches. Only 3 Kwacha. And they were not ketchup, but were filled with cane liquor. I bought a whole box of them, and stashed them in my pack, to tuck into the letters that I was sending to my friends in the States.

Sending letters was fun. I wrote a lot of people regularly. In every town that was big enough to have a post office, they had a philatelic counter, where I could find out how much a letter was to the states, and buy amazing, exotic stamps to make the postage. Butterflies, animals, scenes of local people, the stamps were gorgeous. Mostly, I wrote on aerograms, a one sheet paper that you could fold up after you wrote on it, with the address space on the front. I would sit in the sun, and write really tiny, covering every inch of the paper except the small space where you put the address and the stamps. Mike and I took to joking, when we would fold up the aerogram to send out, “Well, that’s some weight that I won’t have to carry tomorrow.” Our packs were so heavy. We had gone through the natural selection as we traveled, of getting rid of the things we were tired of carrying, and probably wouldn’t need, but even so, hoisting the leaden things on our shoulders was a trial every morning. I even considered getting rid of my camera and binoculars, so tired was I of having them clank against my chest as I walked. I didn’t, but I thought about it every day. Then I would see something photo worthy, or some exotic bird in the distance with my binocs, and was glad that I had them. Mike had a sort of eidetic memory. He had brought a thick book, Birds of Southern Africa, and as we traveled, in the evenings, he would memorize the information, and every couple days, would grab a clump of pages, and tear them out, having put the info in his mind, and throw them away. Well, that was weight he would not have to carry tomorrow. The book got smaller, the farther we traveled, until one day, he threw the last of it in a trash barrel. He became my go-to ornithologist.

We headed north, toward Lake Malawi, which is a lake that is so large, that it had visible tides. It was beautiful, and we swam a lot, as we traveled north along its shore. We would hop a bus, or a truck, and head onward until one or the other of us would say, “Let’s stop here.” We never really consulted each other about this, we just spontaneously decided. It brought us many interesting adventures. The Malawian people were friendly and hospitable, and the journey, with the exception of our heavy packs, was fun and interesting. We would walk into a town, and find the market, and throw our packs down, and I would sit with them while Mike cruised the market and found food. And warm beer or warm coke. While I sat there, kids would come around, and sit or squat near me, and stare at me. Staring was not considered rude in Africa, and I got stared at a lot. And why not? Here I was, a white man, often in areas where white men were not often seen, with an enormous square black backpack, with pots and pans tied on the outside, and a camera and binoculars hanging on my chest. I would have stared at me, if I were them. I would sometimes take out my harmonica, and play Oh Susannah, or Home on the Range, and the kids would scootch closer, and closer, until by the time Mike came back, arms laden with fruit and vegetables, I was surrounded by kids, all talking at once, and laughing. Sometimes I would let them pass the harmonica around and hoot on it. Sometimes a kid would chat me up in English, and I would ask where a good place to stay was. Kids are the secret. Kids would always be the first to come around, and once they determined that we were not scary, the adults would come over and talk to us. It was like traveling with National Geographic.

We came to a town called Karonga, which had huge beaches on the lake, and a great rest house, and we stayed there for a week. I got to know the housekeepers. One day I found them on the beach, washing sheets in the lake, and spreading them out on the sand to dry. I guess they didn’t have toomba flies in Malawi. I went over and helped the women, grabbing one end of the sheets, and twisting them with a woman at the other end, until they were wrung out, and helped spread them to dry. After all the sheets were dry, and we had folded them up, I was covered with sweat. The women took off their shirts, and waded into the lake about waist deep, and were rinsing themselves. Not to be left out, I took off my shorts and t-shirt, and washed them, and then walked naked into the lake and swam around. The women were stunned. I had figured that nudity was not an issue to them when they took their shirts off, but I doubt that they had ever seen a naked white man’s body before. When I came out of the water, they gathered around me, and had a discussion about my body. They pointed at me and were yakking it up in ChiChewa, the language of Malawi, which I did not speak. When they pointed at my penis, and the discussion became more animated, I felt like covering it up, and saying, “Hey, it is not that small.” The women asked me many questions while we sat there drying in the sun. Only one of them spoke English, and she served as translator for the other 3. They wanted to know about America, and about Swaziland and my experience teaching there. After a while, we gathered up the dry sheets, and walked back to the rest house. I am sure that the gossip around town that night was about the Umzungu (white man) who went naked into the lake.

Eventually, we headed north toward the Tanzanian border. Our map showed that if we went about 5 km north of the border, we would come to a town called Mbeya, through which passed the Tanzam Railway, which we could take to Dar Es Salaam, the capital, 12 hours away across the country, and from there, a ferry out to Zanzibar, our ultimate destination.

We got off the truck we were riding on, in a small town that was still about 5km south of the border gate. From there, we could walk to the border, or we could get on the back of a bicycle, and a guy would peddle us to the border. Mike and I looked at each other. Walk or ride? We decided ride, and the last I saw of Mike that day, was him on the back of a bicycle, with his heavy pack, and a small Malawian guy energetically trying to get his heavy load headed out. We agreed that if we got separated, we would meet at the train station the next morning, and buy passage to Dar Es Salaam. It was almost an hour before a bicycle came back from the border, and I got on for my harrowing journey on his overloaded bicycle on the bumpy dirt road. When I got to the border, Mike was nowhere to be seen, and I walked into Mbeya and found a rest house for the night.

I had made it all the way across Malawi, without coming to the attention of “His Supreme Excellency, Dr. Kenneth Mzuzu Banda, President for Life.” Which you had to say, the whole thing, any time you referred to him in a conversation.

Lake Malawi is the bomb!  

Dr Banda, president for life, was a dictator, and not really a doctor of anything.