Life At The Intersection of Nothing and Nowhere: Our Chalet Had TWO Showers!

While we were sad to leave the atmosphere of Butterfly we were super excited to start our vacation we had been dreaming of for the past few months. We packed up our things and said goodbye to the owners, fellow volunteers and small geckos in our rooms and headed over. You know they say patience is a virtue? Yeah well this place was completely worth the wait and all the travel. For 10 USD each a night we had a beautiful private stone chalet with two bedrooms, a private bathroom (complete with flushing toilet!), and not one but TWO showers: one indoor and one outdoor.

Every morning we woke up, walked down to the restaurant and ordered a French press of specialty Mzuzu coffee, which was a nice break from the instant we normally we drink at home, and drank it over looking lake Malawi. Afternoons were occasionally spent going into town. It was about a 20 minute walk on a foot trail through the trees. While I never spotted any African wildlife, Derek one day found large monitor. Don’t worry, he still has all his fingers and toes. Town was on the water, full of small shacks selling anything from USB speakers to dried fish, to individual bags of alcohol. Avocadoes were sold for about 25c (US) and tomatoes even cheaper. Grab a few onions, a lemon (if you could guess if it was a lemon, a lime, or an unripe orange) and you have some homemade guacamole which you can eat by your hands or smeared on bread. You could also purchase stalks of sugar cane for something sweet, bags of frozen water, and our favorite, shitenges.

I actually don’t know how to spell this word so you probably cant Google it but these are the large pieces of fabric that women in Africa utilize to dress themselves, wrap things in to put on their head, or use to tie babies on their backs. Highly functional. Each different southern Africa country makes different patterns or prints. In Namibia we only see a select few ones but now that we were in Malawi close to all these other countries the various options were just overwhelming. Once we selected our various prints we were directed down a small alley to a man in a shack with a sewing machine. Over the course of the week he made us girls 7 wrap around skirts and the boys 3 pairs of drawstring shorts. They were our favorite souvenirs and I really liked the personal side of the process. With broken English we explained to the shitenge lady what colors we wanted or what kinds of prints we liked. With Uncle Jozy we talked about the length and that we wanted it to wrap around and which part of the print we wanted. With the boys shorts Derek went back for a second pair and asked for something slightly different like making the crotch shorter and Uncle Jozy did it perfectly. If this man could live with me and make all my clothes, I’d be happy and wouldn’t need my mom to take me shopping anymore.

After hiking back up to our lodge we would go for a swim. Sometimes for the second time that day and mostly likely not the last. We could relax in the fresh water, cooling off from the hot humidity of Malawi, take a canoe pretty much anywhere our hearts desired (there aren’t many safety precautions in the third world we pretty much had the giant lake at our beckoning call - if we wanted to try canoeing to Tanzania I don’t think anyone would have stopped us), and our favorite, snorkeling. If you haven’t Googled Lake Malawi yet, please do so now, the waters are absolutely crystal clear. Like you can see 20 feet down in some parts. There are over 500 species of fish in the lake meaning when you stick your head underwater with some goggles on, its like swimming in a fish tank. 1 fish, 2 fish, red fish, blue fish doesn’t even cut it. There were yellow and silver and orange and blue and green and iridescent and even some crabs! I felt like Ariel, most particularly at one point I was playing around on some rocks and shimmied my butt up one by strategically moving every time a wave crashed into me. I may or may not have started singing Part of Your World while some Europeans questioned my sanity.

Speaking of Europeans, Mayoka Village, just like Butterfly Space, hosted a bunch of travelers from all over the world. There were Israelis, South Africans, Europeans, Brazilian (wearing speedos), other Americans (Peace Corps Volunteers included) all backpacking through Africa and all over the world. There were people by them selves, in groups, in pairs, old, and young, it was a really great experience to get to hear about their lives and to share our stories as well.

Dinner was always a featured meal that needed pre-ordering, it ranged from pizza night, to Indian night, to barbeque night. It was all prepared fresh, homemade, and for the most part organic down by the water and served after dark. It was just so good.

Evenings were spent after dinner hanging out, being really classy drinking individual bags of alcohol mixed with various Fanta flavors. My new personal favorite that was discovered only in Malawi was Fanta Passion Fruit. Don’t know what distributer that was but I made sure to get my fill before I left that country. Occassionally we would go for a night swim which thinking back was probably quite dangerous. In the third world there are no lights anywhere and while we were told that there are stories of crocodiles on the southern part of the lake, you never know. It was worth it sitting out on a floating raft looking at the stars, if only that darn moon wasn’t so bright…

We would shower (indoor or outdoor, nighttime also had less competition for the fire heated hot water), sleep, wake up and do it all over again. It really was in a true sense a vacation. I think everyone is guilty of planning vacations and then packing their days with excursions and activities. This is fun and great and all but I think a lot of times we forget that we are “on vacation.” While I fully support doing everything there is to do and having as many experiences as you can, make sure that you take that time for yourself. Wake up leisurely, have breakfast freshly made to order for you, look out at a body of water or a mountainous landscape or a desert plain and do some self reflection. Let’s be real, even if you get restless doing those things like I normally do at least you did it and maybe for the first time in your life, nothing will be expected of you. Being in the Peace Corps you are already distanced from life and technology and whatever but I still have a cell phone that I can contact a whole 100 people with, and other methods of contacting my family and friends back home. In Malawi, we had no cell reception and internet service only in the bar and restaurant area which only worked sometimes. If you wanted to just go hide from the world, you totally could. I’m also willing to bet that if you never wanted to go back to the real world, no one would ever be able to find you to force you to.

By all means if you have the opportunity to go see a wonder of the world, go see it, if you have the chance to go to a city you have never been before go do it, but if you have the time to just go off the grid and get away from the world and immerse yourself in another life, do that. whether its on a lake in sub-Saharan Africa, or a dude ranch in the Western United States, or a cabin in another part of your state. Just go and don’t worry about a thing. Worse comes to worse, if you hate it, you never have to do it again. J