Learning the ropes in a new country always makes us uncomfortable during the first few days. In Malawi people don’t speak Kiswahili anymore and we return to (sometimes pidgin) English. Gone are the easy street food lunches. Now it’s beans and rice twice a day, unless we cook pasta and tomato sauce on our little camp stove.
As in Burundi, we can save a lot by changing dollars on the black market. But they are quite essential to pay for visas and hard to come by. So we want to hold on to them. But, smart cookies that we are, we found a way to exchange money from our European bank accounts at the black market rate. The trick is to pay some shady app with terrible reviews in pounds/euros/dollars and hope that it will send the converted kwatcha to a local money kiosk where we can then pick them up.
While waiting (for up to 72 hours) for the transfers to go through, we slowly make our way south along lake Malawi. There is very little traffic (thank you fuel shortages) and the road is flat, with only a few potholes. We don’t want to call anyone fat. So, the landscape is dotted with overweight baobab trees. For the first time in months we meet the wind head on again and it’s slowing us down a lot.
In contrast to Tanzania, Malawians feel no shame when asking the white people for three times the local price for food, rooms, etc. So, it’s back to haggling. This, along with kids shouting “mzungu” hundreds of times a day, is definitely on the list of things we will not miss about Africa. But we also experience some trail magic in the form of two overlanding couples who feed us chocolate, oranges and pasta with tomato sauce.
Due to our slow progress (averaging about 40km per day) and the amazing lake campsites we get to stay at, this stretch of the journey feels less like roughing it in Malawi and more like a beach holiday (complete with cold cokes, outdoor showers, nice swims and ornamental peacocks).
To keep up appearances – this is a tough physical adventure after all – we decide to push the bikes up a steep, rocky dirt road for 9km, gaining 600m of elevation. It takes us three hours and about one litre of sweat each (a statistic we’ve recently started to record). The reward is a stunning view from the plateau overlooking lake Malawi and a stay at Mushroom Farm – a fancy backpacker lodge that boasts toilets and showers right on the cliff edge.
We order kombucha, chew on macadamia nut cookies and try every item on the (fully vegetarian) menu. Over dinner we get to chatting to the other backpackers. As expected 2/3 of the crowd is German (Lina is of course delighted) and the rest is mostly English. We are all slightly shocked by the performance of a local band. It involves a lot of hip thrusts and gyrations to tunes that will be stuck in our heads for weeks. Definitely not family friendly.
The next day we celebrate Ben’s birthday in style, with plenty of good food, a soak in a cliffside bathtub, cocktails and cake. Lina even gets a massage to mark the occasion. After another day off and a final tinkle with a view we are ready (but reluctant) to move on. A beautifully smooth road high up on the plateau awaits us, sporting views that could almost be in Canada.
