MEAMBLING WITH NTENGO MZANGAS

IN JULIA'S WORDS

4 June

Walking amidst trees, both in Zim and here in Luwawa, Malawi, is a different experience when in the company of Ntengo Mzangas – Carol and Mike, the Tree Friends.
This is because the genus and classifications of things treey are unknown to me and Rehana, and we know only the broadest categories: plantuswelikus, which is pretty much everywhere you look, and an occasional watchoutesia, which usually have claw-like thorns that seem to stretch out in an effort to snag you as you pass.

But with our Ntengo Mzangas with us, we learn a thing or two about the details of the Masaasa Woodland trees, which favour high-lying areas and this part of Africa. Masaasa is all awash with sashaying numbers of brakesteejeeah, with their thin brown pods that explode at a certain time of year with a KA-RRACK atop their canopy.
You get the ordinary ones and Prince of Wales (yes, I’m afraid so) feathery-leaved ones, or micro-leafed ones. Now and then the leaves on the end of a slender branch stands out vivid red, lemon, orange, as if a painted fingernail. The branches are dappled with lichenincredibilous of an ivory-grey tinge and drip with old man’s beard.

Splashes of glamour in the woodland wonderland

Ntengofabulousicosis

When walking with Ntengo Mzanga Carol, one is apt to hear from some way behind – she does meander just so – first a gasp, and then an excited, “Mike, Mike, you won’t BELIEVE what I just found, just look, LOOK!”

We all gather around on tenterhooks. Carol is gawping at a small brown seed pod thing.

“From the combreetum,” she beams, “One of my favourites. Just look at these amazing four-winged pods, and so so lovely to hold.” 
You look closer, and see that it not so much a plain brown as dusky pink. Looking more closely now at the ground around, you also see that there are golden ones littered about, which have fallen down and dried.

Then there are the unlikely magobogobo – which get their name from the sound the dry fallen leaves make when you step on them (pronounce it with a hearty Scottish-Boer gggg sound) - with their buffonfatcurly leaves big in relation to the stick-branches they’re attached to only around the top of their small, branchless trunks, with little brown fruit-clusters.
There’s the big canopy-spreading Luckybean (or more properly, erathriner) – big spreading trees with sprays of flowers unusually dark red in these parts (as you know). And the Cabbage tree. And then dotted all about, stalky flowers like floppy-orange Lion’s ear (Leonardis leanorumii) and Ever Lastings (I keep calling them Forever Afters as if by stubborn mistake).

After lastings, or whatever

Ahead, from where Ntengo Mzanga Mike has ambled off, I hear a soft grunt and go off to see what he’s peering at among the grasses beneath the trees. It’s a fairytaleperfect redcappedmushroom, although its white dots are raised as if braille. “Not exactly sure, but some kind of spongeymumblemumble [I didn’t quite catch the name]. 

Probably urban legend, but the story goes that Viking men used to feed these mushrooms to their women, who would then ingest and digest all the very horrible toxins, and then the men would drink their women’s pee, which would give them the wonderful high without all the side effects.

Safe when passed through a bladder

I catch up to where Rehana’s waiting along the red dust path gazing into the middle distance through the masaasa woodlands to where she’d be able to see the edge of the plateau if it weren’t for all the trees.

Ntengo Mzanga Carol meambles with Mike. She says, “You know Mike I was just reading Mike, Mike, Mike – ooh, yes, I see, look at that dwarf dispebiggeldysplig [missed that name], amaaazing - about this local butterfly, one of the mereamumblemumble [missed that one too] that lays its larvae in Old Men’s Balls so that, when they become butterflies, they’re poisonous and predators avoid them. They’re so successful that other butterflies have started to adopt their colouring – you know, the lemon yellow with tiny white dots and black edges around the wings…”.

NJAYA LIFE 

IN CAROL'S WORDS

10 June 2013

A tall, spreading fig tree soars up above our lakeside veranda and stone-built rooms at Njaya Lodge in Nkhata Bay, its roots entwined in large boulders lapped by the water. The tree has yellow bark, big leaves, and drops thorn-like pointed caps onto our veranda.

One of the lower branches is a favoured perch of a kingfisher. We heard it before we saw it – a repetitive raucous cry, increasing in tempo to a trilling call. We all looked up, to see the peering of a top-heavy head and beak and ragged hairstyle. 
As it flew we saw its spotted body and rufous belly – the markings of a female giant kingfisher. This morning we heard a chorus of calls, indicating a pair of the kingfishers.

When we went by boat to a neighbouring bay we also saw about five or six pied kingfishers, hovering above the water. Julia took photos of the fish eagles!

The first birds to welcome us to our new abode were our regular companions, the pied wagtails. A pair of them hop along our veranda and swoop to the adjacent rocks in the water, calling out a high-pitched tchee sound. We have met wagtails at every camp we have been to, inquisitive and friendly.

Before sunrise we heard a mournful mewing cry – a trumpeter hornbill?

The stone walls and rocks are sun spots for dozens of blue-tailed lizards, just like we used to admire in the Sabi valley when we were kids. They are eye-catching, but elusive camera subjects.

The best swimming is below our veranda, the water lapping around the tumbled rocks. We clamber under the veranda railings, lower ourselves down and step across the rocks to swim in the clear water. Mike was surveying the scenery when his eyes alighted on a huge leguaan, dark brown and yellow, sunning itself on our rocks below the fig tree, two metres from where we were standing.

A couple of days later as Mike was coming down the stone stairs to our room he startled a young leguaan. The sinuous creature hurtled down the rough steps before him, through the narrow archway and onto our veranda. Mike called out a warning as it slithered in terror across the smooth surface of the veranda and hurled itself into the darkened cavern of our room. 
Perched on a bed, I was just as terrified, and shrieked as the leguaan scuttled around our room, beneath the beds and around the walls, before hesitating near the bright sunlight of the open door and throwing itself out. It slithered across the short width of the veranda and leapt onto the rocks below.

We now see that at least two slim young leguaans actually live in a crack in the stone walls of our villa, just below the roof! (In fact, they live directly above Julia and Rehana’s room!)




A HOLIDAY ON OUR HOLIDAY

Easy to see why we got so stuck here

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

We had our first holiday on our holiday at Njaya Lodge in Nkhata Bay. We left the icy mountain for tropical lakeside bliss, taking five hours to travel 130km – the final descent to the lake was on a potholed, astoundingly beautiful tree-lined road. 

Luwawa's maasasa forest was astounding. We walked and we walked and we walked. People stopped and stared, then smiled when we greeted them in Chichewa. Jules took lessons from Kika, who worked at Fish Eagle Bay Lodge at Nkhotakota, and she’s teaching us. A group of four teenaged girls each gave us hugs after we greeted, pressing their soft cheeks against ours.
When the sun disappeared behind the forest at night, winter set in. The generous supply of firewood did little more than heat our legs to our knees. Our backs were frozen. Four layers of clothing were not enough. It was 10 degrees Celsius when we went to bed and must have been around 5 degrees at dawn.

The second night was worse than the first. My thermal underwear proved no protection for the ice that crept into the marrow of my hips and shoulders. I lay awake and wondered which of them would be the first to be replaced. 

On our last morning at Luwawa Lodge we drove our cars to the indigenous forest and pulled off on a narrow track leading off it. As we set off for our farewell walk an old man came to talk to Mike. He couldn’t understand why we were parking so that we could walk along the road. I laughed: we're doing it again, spending a lot of money to live like the poor for a few hours each day.

The drive down to the lake took us through the most spectacular landscape of mountains flanked with trees. Open stretches were dotted with towering outcroppings of steel grey and black granite. I could drive that road a million times and never tire of it.

The owner of Njaya Lodge at Nkhata Bay, Paul, didn’t want us to camp on his lawn, so he offered us cottages for the cost of a campsite. We chose two at the water’s edge; the lake lapped our stone wall. 

Mike and Carol were in the lake morning, noon and night. Jules and I ambled for three days to a beachside bar to watch cricket – South Africa/India, West Indies/Pakistan, England/Australia.

We ate at the lodge. Their food was a bit better than good, especially their peanut sauce and banana milkshakes. The pool was free and both Jules and I were on top form. We got soft and lazy. The toilet was a mere 31 uphill steps away. It was hard to decide when to leave, so we put off that decision for about six days, I think.

And then we stuck to our pattern and left a place where a sheet had us sweating in bed, for Nyika National Park where a sheet of ice coated our windscreens in the morning. 

We drove all day last Sunday, most of it on 160km of disgusting gravel road, up into a mountain plateau (didn’t know you got those, but I saw one with my own eyes.) 

Jules and I arrived first at Chelinda Lodge, drove past the campsite, downed the welcome drink Laurent offered, checked out the chalet and chose the easy option. We had a pyromaniac’s dream of a fireplace, built deep into our bedroom walls. The coals were hot enough the next morning to set a log ablaze in seconds. I fed it armfuls of dry pine logs.

Nyika National Park is beautiful, even in the middle of burning season. The protea and the rest of the fynbos are lovin’ it. I’m reading Darwin and, according to him, you find fynbos all the way to the tops of mountains in Ethiopia. 
I drove into the park and couldn’t take my eyes off the rutted and ruined road, so the next day I admired its purple, gold and yellow roadside grass for hours.

Burning season in the Nyika National Park

We toured the park the next day, and although we had cursed the hours on the 110km of corrugated road on our way in, we drove those damned roads the whole bloody day. Jules and I inadvertently found ourselves in Zambia, which couldn’t have been more than 20km from where we were staying. The road was so bad though, it took us more than an hour to get there.

I realised that we were in Zambia when the park official at the gate to which we had driven wasn’t wearing the same uniform as his colleague who had let us in on the other side.

“Are we in Zambia?” I asked.

“You’ve been in Zambia for some time,” he replied.

He offered to let us through the gate but didn’t know whether we needed a visa or a car import duty. So we took a few photos and decided to go back to Malawi, back up that awful road.

Zambia to the left, Malawi to the right

The drive out of the park was quite charming.  We spotted five elephant in the distance, and smartly cleared a tree that one of them had probably knocked into the road. The best part the drive was under a forest of indigenous trees, down a not-too-bad-in-most-places road.

And I’m sad to report that we had an accident. It was particularly bad for Big Red Car. A truck drove into it. It’s okay, just shaken. We’re okay, just shaken.

On the road descending to the lake from Nyika plateau, a container-bearing truck came around one of the many hairpin bends. He was on my side of the road and hadn’t left room for me. My only option to the left was to plunge off a steep cliff, so I hooted to warn him. He tried to swing away but his cab was already in the bend, and his tyres bashed into Big Red Car.
The bull bar absorbed the impact. It has been knocked a bit out of kilter. The front grill is buckled a bit and the bonnet lid’s a bit out of sync.

Minutes after the accident, we faced another Prometheus-like test. With shaking legs, I drove our bruised car up a brutal, rocky pass infested with narrow switchbacks to a campsite outside Livingstonia. I managed all except the last one, which was too tight for our big car. I had to stop. Put it in reverse. Take it back a bit without going over the edge. Brake again. Put it in first and pull away without sliding off the edge.
My legs were jelly when we reached the top and I rushed for the toilet.

I’ve hardly moved today. Mike climbed under the car this morning, loosened the bull bar’s bolts and readjusted it a bit. Jules and I, mostly Jules, washed off most of the thin red dust that coated everything. 

I am sitting at a table at Mushroom Farm campsite at the top of a mountain. The mission town Livingstonia is a 5km walk away but I didn’t have the strength today.
Below me are ridges of lesser and further-away mountain and hills, stretching north where Tanzania awaits. The lake down below is a sea of blue. I am high, high up.

High on a mountain

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Sunday, 16 June 2013

We are leaving Malawi tomorrow. We’ve run out of places to visit and Tanzania’s less than 100km away. We are at FloJa Foundation just outside Ngara. It’s a preschool and a campsite run by a Dutch couple.

At Livingstonia we had a very visity time. There were two Germans driving a Landcruiser from Bavaria to Cape Town. There was Steve, the cyclist we had spotted coming up the pass from Nkhata Bay and again just before the truck collided with us.
Steve arrived, plonked himself down in one of our campchairs, introduced himself and spoke non-stop for three hours. That’s what cycling around the world on a bicycle does to you.
There was also a young English couple, Martin and Sophie. He was a bit supercilious, seemed he had been living in Uganda for a couple of months and thought he knew everything about Africa, even places he hadn’t been to.

Jules and I walked to Livingstonia, up steep slopes in the hot sun. We didn’t want to complain too much; we were constantly being overtaken by women and children carrying heavy sacks of maize on their heads. Carol saw a girl collapse on their walk to Livingstonia. There’s a maize mill at the top of the mountain. Donated by Irish Aid.

Livingstonia was way weird, exactly what you expect from a mission station. The mzungus who came to spread the word of God kept dying in large (by their standards) numbers. After they realised it was the mosquitos what was doing it to them, they moved to colder climes.

According to everyone, Dr Robert Laws built that town, named after the man who had inspired him. But I saw in the museum the cart hoked to locals to pull the mzungu up the mountain, and there were photos on display of one white stonemason and many black stone hewers. I hope those massive chunks were sourced somewhere nearby.

The edifices they built still stand today – a church that would not look out of place anywhere in Bonny Scotland and a hospital that performs surgery.
The university and the college are a little bit of a sad joke. Livingstonia University has only one faculty – of education – a tiny library and classrooms instead of lecture halls. The technical college is housed in a building where the missionaries taught artisan skills to the local population.

The huge church built at the top of a mountain

The college the missionaries built to educate the locals

A guide attached himself to us as we trudged up the mountain. Joshua is 27 and described himself as a “failure”. He has a newborn baby and is struggling to save money for a car mechanic course. He's poor, but he has huge hopes for himself and his family.
His baby is named Hope. Joshua said his wife had “failed to give birth”, so the baby was delivered by caesarian section at the Livingstonia Hospital.

He took us to his house after the tour of the town. He introduced us to his father, who had only one tooth left in his smiling, silent mouth, and his younger brother Thomas.  

Joshua went inside to fetch his baby. We waited outside. I could see into the lounge. There wasn’t a stick of furniture. On the unplastered wall was a picture of Jesus, his hands outstretched and a pulsing heart in his chest.

Joshua came out with his wife and Hope. We weren’t expecting Thema, who sat down gingerly on the cement stoep. She had only been discharged the day before. The baba was beautiful; as was every single baby we’ve stopped to stroke in Malawi. I understand why Madonna went so Gaga about Malawi’s children.

Joshua, Thema and Hope

In that small house, Joshua’s parents raised 12 children. His older brother had died recently of Aids, and Joshua was mad about it. He said Malawians believed that people who went to witchdoctors instead of hospitals killed themselves. 

Our last stop, the FloJa Foundation, is a melding of the names Floor and Jan, who moved here in 2010 and started a preschool for the local children. They have the most amazing garden, filled with everything we've been longing for – dhania, rocket, basil, several varieties of lettuce, mint, peppers, pawpaw, etc, etc. We’ve been picking and cooking and packing herbs for the road.

The lake’s been roaring all day, fat waves whipped up by the wind crashing onto the rocks. There’s a flock of seagulls here. I did a double-take when I saw them first, but the cawing is unmistakeable.
We’ve haven’t been walking much along the lake, or swimming. There’s a constant stream of people washing clothes, crockery or themselves.
We seem to be on the corner where the men bathe, quite naked. They always come down in groups, so bathing is a long, drawn-out affair. Naked boys cavort in the lake all day, the girls hide behind their cloths when they bath, even the young ones.

In the hot tub at FloJa

Final thoughts about Malawi:

* Even the worst apprentice builder in Cape Town could build brick houses better than those here. Someone needs to teach Malawians the importance of lintels. In their yards, piles of brick that have been delivered but not yet used melt into mud. Someone needs to tell them to add cement.

* Every few hundred meters there’s a sign advertising an aid agency’s good works. Every agency you can name is in Malawi. After farm aid the next big thing is gender development. Most Landcruisers in Malawi are driven by mzungus doing everything and paying for it.

* Then there’s the volunteers, who PAY large sums of money to come to Malawi to help. People set up development organisations to make money from earnest German, Dutch and American youngsters who dig boreholes and teach.

* Even though there’s more churches and mosques than development agencies, Malawi is awash with Christian missionaries. One fat ugly one (aren’t they all?) at Senga Bay was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a fixed-wing plane proclaiming that God is his propeller.

* Malawian drivers are bad, bad, bad. At worst, they drive on the white line but many favour driving on the wrong side of the road. They overtake on blind curves in chugging vehicles belching black smoke.

* There are bicycles everywhere but we spotted less than 10 women riding them. Steve the round-the-world cyclist was taken aback when I raised it with him. He only realised then that although he was in bicycle heaven – there are many, many more of them than cars on the road – he never saw a single woman rider. The women trudge everywhere with heavy loads on their heads and babies on their backs. Guess the gender development programmes aren’t working yet.

* Malawians are fantastic people, with great bodies. We spent most of our time in the country in the rural areas, and boy are these people fit – young and old. They are beautiful, especially their children. Their names aren't as quirky as I had hoped for, although I did meet a Writewell (Rightwell?) in Livingstonia. And Julia met a Blackson in Senga Bay.

* Their beggars beggar belief. They don’t ask, they demand. They shout. They hold out their hands, palms wide open. Give me money, give me dorrar, give me pen, give me biscuits, give me cake, give me food, give me ball, give me sweets, give me job, give me, give me, give.

* That lake! It has to be seen to be believed. Beware though, it’s hard to wrest your eyes away.