Sunday April 24, 2005


Update from Paradise
It’s Sunday and I am resting in my courtyard drinking fresh squeezed tangerine and orange juice, listening to the melodic drumming of a nearby church choir. The sun is out, drying my peanuts recently harvested from my field. Spent some time this morning chopping firewood, as I just got my axe repaired. I had to take the axe by bicycle about 8 miles to a “welder”, who repaired a large crack in the metal handle and ground the blade for about $1.25.

Recently I returned from a few weeks of vacation during our school break. I spent a few days hiking along an isolated part of the Malawi lake coast and then traveled down to South Africa.

The hike down the lake shore, with a pc friend, took about four days. We left the end of the road, following foot trails that led to fishing villages along the way. During the past ten years, a boat service reaches the small villages, before that they had to walk numerous days to get to a market. It is beautiful and rugged country. A small handful of tourists make the walk each year. So we did not “discover” it. It was amazing to find tiny villages in lake coves almost completely untouched by time. They are still carving canoes from trees and making ropes from tree bark. One of the most noticeable things was that there were no wrappers or plastic bags littering the trail.

One village in particular, Tchalo, was extremely welcoming and let us stay in the school, cooked for us, and cleaned up.

There were some really “interesting” bridges across the rivers feeding the lake, but it’s hard to act scared when a woman with a baby on her back and a bag-of who-knows-what balanced on her head strolls across. We cheated and caught a boat out for the last part to save time. Six hours in a Six Flags styled boat you would find in a pirate ride---$ 3. Loud music and diesel fumes---free !! Dehydration and stomach issues from drinking lake water---priceless !!

From there it was off to the capital, Lilongwe, to get visas for Mozambique and Zimbabwe to move on to South Africa. Extremely nice people with timely (in Malawi standards) operation. It was worth it as we saved about $20 by getting the visas early. The rubber stamp ink must be much more expensive near the borders than in Malawi’s capital !!

Myself and four other pc volunteers took a bus, a kick butt bus, with DVD, refrigerator, toilet (working on the way back, but not on the way down), reclining seats with a strange belt-like device used for safety. I think they are called seat belts in the U.S. We were served good food, watched a mixture of Nigerian films (imagine really bad soap operas with poor production about witchcraft and polygamy) and watched classics like Dodge Ball. Now in Africa, showing any knee or above is somewhat taboo; so the car wash scene was a little embarrassing as we had requested the DVD. We shared culture that’s all !

Crossing over the borders was painless and to commemorate each border we played hackysack.
This attracted quite a bit of attention.

Zimbabwe is definitely much more developed than Malawi, and was evident at the borders and towns throughout. They had just undergone parliamentary elections and as standard, there were claims against the current leader for rigging elections (he has run the country into the ground while becoming extremely rich). I was excited to see the protests, just not as we were passing through. No problems though, all is well.

If Zimbabwe was an improvement, South Africa can be compared to states like Kentucky or West Virginia. Good roads, traffic signs, McDonald’s (which I never went to), movie theaters, amusement parks, game parks where people pay big bucks to “hunt” big game (with cameras), and big shopping malls. A pleasant surprise was that very few people walked or biked on the highways, and no, count ‘em, no cattle. There is a large amount of open land for grazing or nothing. One section of the road from Cape Town to Johannesburg is just deserted. Coming from Malawi, where it is government mandated that there can be no more than 19 meters between each person—joke!?!

The country of Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa and the eastern side is mountains known as the Drackenburgs. Just beautiful escarpment! Something like one-half of the Grand Canyon, without the helicopters and planes of course.

We drove along the Indian Ocean from Durban to Cape Town. Durban is a big city styled after South Miami that is easy to get lost in. It was in Durban where I had a small trouble parking our rental car in a lodge lot and caused an embarrassing $700 worth of damage. I say “embarrassing” because an alien had taken over my body and had forbidden me from putting the car into first gear instead of reverse. Which I deftly used to back into a menacing brick wall. Well it happens and no one was hurt!

The coast is quite scenic, though we did not spend much time visiting. Long way to go in a few days! We did visit some famous beaches for surfing (I think they were famous, it’s so hard to tell as beaches can be so shy). One place was home to the Super tube. Wow!

There are a tremendous number of great little lodges and backpacker hostels for $10 a night. Settings include oceanfront, old farmhouses, and converted factories. A tourist bus moved people from place to place conveniently.

Cape Town was by far the highlight and shocking. It reminded me of Seattle or San Francisco with the outdoor feel of the place. Table Mountain is stunning. Almost always a view! The shanty towns (informal settlements) of the 1990’s are quite a contrast. The strange part was the other volunteers’ comments at first were positive. “Wow, they have electricity” and “Oh, look, a two story house.” But this changed as we noticed this was in contrast to the high-walled gated suburbia across the street, it was a tough thing to see. Slowly it improves. (Keep in mind that the shanty town conditions were an improvement for the pcv’s, compared to many of the living conditions in Malawi.)

Cape Town has great mountain biking, hiking, sailing, shark observation, and more.

Thanks for reading and I hope all is well for you and yours.

Bye, Matt.