We went via
Blantyre, Malawi’s other major city, with the intention of stocking up on a few
key items and spending the night, leaving only a small trip of one hour to get
to the mountain the following day.
Blantyre
was a bit of a crazy city, although I suspect it will have nothing on some of
the cities ahead of us. In Blantyre we did make one good find, Mandela Café,
which had lovely salads and cakes as well as an art gallery next door. We
stayed at a small guesthouse in Blantyre which was well priced and offered
breakfast in the morning, useful in helping us to get away early the next day.
Little did we know the trouble the guesthouse would cause us…….
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| Mandela Manager's House: Beautiful cafe and art gallery |
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| The veranda lined by a pretty garden..... |
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| .....and yummy chocolate cake with coffee |
The road to
Mount Mulanje was pretty uneventful, although at this point we did conclude
that many Malawians can not ride their bicycles in a straight
line, scary given the number of bikes on the road. We didn’t see many people on
bikes in Zambia, but in Malawi they are everywhere. It makes sense really, but
would help if they didn’t continue to veer into the middle of the road!
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| Hazard: Millions of bikes on roads in Malawi with many people who don't know how to ride a bikes! |
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| The road to Mount Mulanje |
Our first point
of call at Mount Mulanje was the Forestry Office; unlike for Kilimanjaro,
limited information is available on climbing Mulanje, and there are no
pre-organised tours, so you need to do this yourself at their local office.
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| Mount Mulanje entrance |
The man at
the Forestry Office was fairly helpful and set up a guided walk
starting the following day. He was also able to provide details on a couple of
options for overnight accommodation close by. We opted for the local church run
lodge and campsite on the mountain, although we were a bit shocked at how expensive
their chalets were; between $60-$75, steep given they were quiet with no other guests! The guy at the lodge didn't seem willing to negotiate on price, so we broke our rule of staying in a room
where we had a single night only and opted to camp. This would turn out to be a
HUGE mistake as we discovered later that evening. While setting up camp we had
guys and children coming to us trying to sell “walking sticks”, asking for
food, money, clothes and pens, basically whatever we would give them. I know
some Malawians are struggling at the moment but it really was super annoying
when they are able to walk freely into a paid campsite! And again, the “give me” culture that we
had come to know well in Zambia continued.
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| Mount Mulanje: It was very difficult to get a clear photo of it as there was always a haze |
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| Tea plantations on the way up to the mountain |
Then at 7pm
things went drastically downhill as Mike starting vomiting constantly; I joined
in the fun a few hours later, although not as bad. We worked out pretty quickly
that we both had food poisoning from the guesthouse we had stayed at the
previous night, more specifically a breakfast sausage. I had two bites and gave
mine to Mike, who ate his and mine.
Camping in
a roof tent does not go well when you encounter food poisoning and we both
spent the night in the front seats of the car, making a dash to the bathroom or
bush and desperately waiting for light so we could arrange an overpriced chalet
up the hill.
Two days
and two nights of sleep and no food (except crackers) at an overpriced chalet, more
annoying guys at our door (even being in a chalet and sick didn’t keep them away- “Can I have a
pen”- “No”, Can I have a shirt?”- “No”; “Can I have shoes?”- “No”) and we felt
well enough to leave. And I should make a special mention to the pharmacy in
Livingstone who sold us a whole lot of travel drugs before we left; thank you
to “Health & Glow” or “217” as they are fondly referred to, for saving us!
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| Chaos in our room after a couple of days hauled up! |
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| Need I say more? This is so typical! |
So we didn’t
get to climb the mountain, which I should add was amazingly beautiful, but at
that point we didn’t have the energy for climbing it and were just ready to
leave!
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| Pretty Mount Mulanje |
We headed
back up north, again via Blantyre for a few items and to eat our first food in
just over two days. We decided that we would spend the night this time in
Liwonde, as it was a bit further north and closer to the Mozambique border crossing,
better for the following day. It was also a reasonably sized town with a
National Park nearby, all the better for accommodation, or so we thought!
Upon
arriving in Liwonde it was starting to get dark, so we felt a bit of pressure
to find something fast. We had a few leads and felt pretty confident. However,
what we didn’t know was that Liwonde is a meeting spot for EVERY aid agency in
the area, and nearly every place we tried was either full or totally overpriced
due to aid workshops and conferences. In the end we stayed at a place called
Hippo Lodge, an amusing hotel because it was trying so hard on the surface to
be beautiful but in actual fact was just ugly and pretty rubbish. It was also
expensive and we paid the equivalent of AUD100 for a very underwhelming room. And so again we encountered the curse of aid!
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| Hippo Lodge at night |
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| Did I mention how beautiful it is???? |
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| I'm worried that this photo makes our room look better than it was. Not worth $100!! |
The next
morning we hit the road early, ready to leave Malawi which we felt had turned its
back on us, the fun definitely at an end! This feeling was not helped by the multiple
police stop points, ALL of which asked us for a “gift”, and all of which were
flatly rejected. Yes, it was time to go!
After
narrowly missing a cow determined to play on the road we finally made it to the
border town of Chiponde, already feeling pretty fed up only to be inundated
with the usual riffraff as we parked the car to head into Immigration. These
guys are always super annoying and I’m not sure if it’s because we’d already
had enough but they definitely seemed worse than normal, blocking our doors,
trying to peer into the car and just not understanding the meaning of “no”!
However it
was our last encounter with a Malawian official that made us glad to be leaving
most of all, as the Immigration Officer accused us of overstaying our visa of which
we actually still had another 5 days left. The stamped date was written in
reverse order (i.e. YY-MM-DD) and he
tried to tell us it had expired. We made the point that if he read the date
literally it would mean we could stay to the year 2027, but humour was not
something he understood. There was a bit of a stand-off, perhaps to see if he
could get anything from us, but in the
end we got through payment free and felt a
tinge of happiness to be leaving Malawi after a rough 5 or so days.
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