Just
outside the doorsteps of our lovely little hotel was conveniently a fish market
complete with secondhand clothes piles, fat cakes, soda pop, and homemade
samosas. One of the final legs of the journey was upon us oh hallelujah and we
were told to expect maybe a 1 or two hour ride up to Mzuzu. We find a few
busses going that way and they heckle us for our business. We now feel that we
are pros at what scams to look for so we go through the basic questions: how
much is your ticket, does that include baggage, what time are you leaving, are
you actually leaving at that time, if the bus is not full at that time do you
leave still. Okay cool. Now what time will you arrive? 5 or 6 hours?! Well we
were not anticipating that, that sucks a bit.
 |
| OMG comfy seats and Cher! |
We wait on the bus in really comfy
seat for about an hour, Cher’s greatest hit music videos are on as well as some
90’s classics. Derek and I enjoy ourselves thoroughly. The bus leaves the
station with a few extra passengers standing in the aisles, maybe they are
getting off soon or someone is and then they’ll have a seat. We quickly come to
find out that they don’t and will not. I hope that it is against the law in
Malawi and that this bus company was just breaking that law but the bus was
oversold and there were many people that stood for the whole 7 hours. Yes this
trip ended up being 7 hours long. I’ll return to this exhaustion later.
Coming out
of Lilongwe it was actually very beautiful. There were beautiful gardens and
well maintained streets. I want to assure everyone that the hotel we stayed in
is not an accurate representation of the rest of the city. Brandon tried to
reality check my horrified face walking into the hotel the previous night
saying that my standards were probably too high for a third world country. They
were not. Lilongwe was quite pretty from what I saw.
Traveling
through the highlands of Malawi and in between taking non-consenting pictures
of each other sleeping, and trying to politely ask the man standing in the row
next to our seats to move his butt out of June’s face we absorbed the sites.
Malawi is a tropical country, very green and lots of agriculture everywhere.
There were fields of corn that stretched on for miles, banana trees everywhere,
and tomatoes that were grown on the side of the main road. We saw that Malawi
also has a timber industry and at one point through our open windows (remember
the ONLY open windows on the bus because people apparently don’t like fresh air
and cool breeze) Derek yells OMG throws the window open and takes a deep inhale
of the air outside. It was pine. They were harvesting it and were burning some
pieces, which gloriously wafted to our deeply inhaling nostrils. It was
glorious and smelled like home. My eyes may have teared up a bit there.
Don’t let
my depiction of the sites outside the confines of the bus fool you into
thinking this was an easy trip. With people crammed into aisles and the
twisting and turning road through the highlands, people were falling all over.
You’re probably thinking well, why weren’t they just holding on? Well you see,
there were no overhead hand grips, just the shelf that people packed all their
belongings into so that they don’t have to waste time at the end of their trip
waiting for their bags to be unloaded (sound familiar?). I guess you could hold on somewhere but here’s the
kicker, no one is wearing deodorant (in all reality, we really weren’t
either…). So either they hold on to the back of your seat and fall on you if
they are not prepared for the sudden curve or they find something to hold onto
and you have the ripe human stench engulfing you. Sometimes you just can’t win
and have the unfortunateness of both. Sorry June for calling the window seat on
this leg…
Just like
with every other bus we were on, this bus stopped at least once an hour. Maybe
one or two people got off and then like 10 got on. Not a good ratio but all we
cared about was that we had seats. When the bus pulled up to the little road
side village, just like in the middle of the night with the memes and bananas
and little boys and hard boiled eggs, these people ran to the bus side with
goods on top of their heads selling bottles of water, bottles of pop, bags of
chips, boxes of cookies, eggs, bags of tomatoes, and our favorite samosas. They
were dirt-cheap and so every time the bus stopped we would have our eyes peeled
for a man with his samosas and then almost buy his whole stock. Oh and to wash
down the greasy deep fried goodness, I’ll take an orange Fanta too. I like to
see it as us eating our feelings.
After 7 long
hours we arrived in Mzuzu so close to our destination but we needed a break. We
were overwhelmed with everything, we wanted real food, and to like relax for
just a second. We found a supersize grocery store indulged in some deli
sandwiches and set off to find a ride to the beach. We found a mini bus which
was essentially scrap metal tied together with wire and made our way down the
mountain. It was quite uneventful, maybe I was just too tired to think about
anything but we arrived in Nhkata Bay found a taxi to take us back up another
mountain to our lodge, we had finally made it. Or so we thought.
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