The Amazing Adventures of the Dying Horse

13^th-15^th May – Days 226-228 – Blantyre, Malawi to Harare, Zimbabwe

"Good morning, distinguished ladies and gentlemen!" declared Yvonne, our hostess for the bus ride. We looked at each other sincerely feeling that this would possibly be the nicest bus ride we'd have on the whole trip. TV on the bus, snacks provided and a smiling hostess with polite discourse. The bus was shiny clean and relatively modern, the road was smooth and we rolled on without any suspension trouble.


This lasted for about an hour before the bus suddenly started sounding rather tired while trying to get up a small hill. "Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, we will have to stop for a brief break for the driver to inspect the slight problem we are having." Everyone got out to stretch their legs and inspect the damage in good humour with the driver. I mean, this is Africa and you do get all sorts of trouble from time to time – as we had already experienced many times over – so one doesn't get all too worried about the casual stops along the way. It turned out that the radiator/ventilator of the engine was overheating. Wait for a bit for it to cool down, pour some new water in there and the journey could continue.

Premiers Symptomes

Yvonne served us our complimentary Cokes and muffins. Before I had finished my muffin we stopped again to inspect the engine. Same problem obviously, so more water was poured in. Except for that this time the water didn't want to stay in, but kept dripping through the tank and onto the tarmac. Some African-style headscratching followed. The funniest thing about these moments is that nobody seems to take any action towards trying to solve the problem at hand. It's all about standing there, looking at the thing that is broken, looking around the scenerey for a bit and then more looking at the problem. Not much is said either, the focus is more on the silent discovery of something being wrong. This is what causes the passengers to become more restless and voicing out their opinions of what should be done in colourful display of roadside brainstorming. Sometimes I think Africans would make the best consultants of them all, as they don't waste any time coming up with creative solutions to just about anything. Not all of them are worth considering any further obviously, but at least the effort is there. Back in Europe big money boys need a good ten coffees and a few whiskeys to even start speaking during a case-solving session.

M reads up on bus mechanics

We watched on and got to know our fellow passengers a bit better. There was a girl who lived in London but had come over to visit some family, there was an agitated man who started educating us about how useless the driver and his friends were being about the problem. There was a group of big mamas demanding service and better appreciation of customers. And there was Alan, the mascot of the journey, with his friend the radiographer. These two were a funny pair, the two-metre tall radiographer who hardly said a word and Alan about one metre lower down who couldn't stop talking. They also had some kind of an arrangement over a Justin-Timberlake-trademark hat which they took turns wearing. An hour had passed when we heard that someone from the Malasha office in Blantyre would come over to have a look at the bus and bring a new water tank for the cooling system. We headed off towards the direction of the nearest town to buy some cigarettes knowing it would take a good while for anyone to get to where we were, nevermind for them to fix the problem. We found a hotel and sat down for a beer and a smoke. Not long after, some of the guys from our bus also made their way to the hotel bar.

An all too familiar sight

We didn't dare to stay out sinking pints for too long, as there is always the subconscious fear of things working out sooner than anyone expected. Back at the bus nothing had changed, however. After some more sitting around and an attempt at walking back to the bar, a Malasha pick-up pulled in with the new water tank. Smiley faces and action all around. The kids from the village helped the bus crew out and carried water for them to fill the new tank. I crouched down to look beneath the bus and saw there was still a puddle there. I pointed this out to the mechanic who looked utterly uninterested and, a short while later, rather overwhelmed about having to do some more work. Once it was revealed that we wouldn't be moving on just yet, Alan got busy mouthing at the driver and Yvonne about just about anything, translating to us that he had seen it coming all along but that nobody believed him because he is a foreigner, i.e. From Zimbabwe.


We stood and sat by the roadside for some more hours before there was a decision from someone's part to drive the bus to the Mozambican border post and park it there. It seemed like the damage would not be fixed with what was available at hand, but instead needed some attention at the garage. The evening fell and people were getting more restless and hungry for both food and information. The Big Mama Quartet together with Alan took the lead in pestering Yvonne about the situation and demanding that dinner should be on Malasha. "I need food to take my ARVs (anti-retrovirals, i.e. HIV medicine). If I don't take my ARVs, I will die! Do you want me to die for Malasha??" the head of Big Mamas was furious but also beaming with the attention she was getting for being the troop leader in the passengers' mutiny against « Malasha, the Dying Horse », as the company had been nicknamed by the Big Mamas. As far as Yvonne was concerned, we had stopped being "Distinguished ladies and gentlemen" a long time ago and were not kept up-to-date about what would happen next at all anymore. Yvonne had to battle in between two fires, and the passengers' side was growing stronger as time went on. As we stood united and waited for Malasha's response, Alan kept us all entertained by telling his life story to which the Big Mamas had a lot to comment to. It was like listening to a live soap opera. "Many people think I'm gay just because I don't need a woman in my life anymore after my first marriage. I'm happy being a single father to my son". Alan was truly pouring his heart out. In response, Big Mamas inquired him about all the women in his life and tried to suggest he'd get it on with one of them, a close friend as she was. It was classic motherly herding and pimping in true womanly style, something I recognize in myself all too well.


In the end, Yvonne came around to take food orders from everyone on the bus and we all marched into a restaurant nearby, Big Mama Quartet being the loudest in announcing our deserved triumph. I had started feeling feverish a while before and was not so triumphant, but dragged my shivering self there to have some chicken. After the dinner, the pick-up that had returned to Blantyre in the meantime came back with some more tools and parts. The mechanics commenced work yet again. Yvonne and the rest of the bus crew moved to a hostel in town and left us to sleep in the bus to the outrage of Big Mama Quartet. Alan and few others sought shelter in town as well while the people who remained on the bus took out whatever they had to shield them from mosquitoes. T displayed his lack of experience with mosquito repellent by attempting to spray his ankles in the dark and instead shooting it straight into his eyes. The owner of the restaurant came to the bus to look for Yvonne who apparently hadn't paid for the food. He felt sorry enough for us poor souls onboard the Dying Horse and invited us to come back to his restaurant for free teas in the morning.

The mechanics hard at work...

Morning was tactics time for T and I. We'd now spent the whole previous day and night not advancing anywhere and had only this day left to get to Harare in time to meet my parents the next morning. It had become clear during the night that the mechanics could not fix the problem, in fact they were still at it at 7am when we woke up. We made a decision to try and get on any other bus that would pass through the border if Malasha would not be getting us on another bus by 10am. We all went for our breakfasts while waiting for Yvonne to get back and inform us about what was going on and had a good laugh and a mean dig at Malasha to keep us from getting too frustrated with the situation. After breakfast she did appear but with no news whatsoever apart from convincing us that we would continue the journey one way or another. Some of us were getting slightly sceptical to say the least. One of the managers from the Malasha office in Blantyre showed up at the border as well and had to take the same mouthful from Big Mamas that Yvonne had been receiving the whole previous day. He stood there blank-faced and denying himself of all the blame and responsibility. Somehow he did convince all of us that another bus would come and pick us up and we stayed put.

Free breakfast!! L-R: Big Mama#1, Alan, someone else, Radiographer man, London-girl, ridiculous-trainers-woman from the Big Mama Quartet

At 1pm the rescue came in the form of another Malasha horse, seemingly more alive than our first carrier. We all got in, found space and finally crossed the border after having to wait 27 hours for the moment to come. The rest of the journey was free of complications, apart from the open pisstake aimed at Yvonne for changing her rhetorics during the course of the evolving catastrophe. While we were waiting around at the Zimbabwean border for everyone to get back into the bus, we witnessed something that made our days. Another bus pulled in at the parking area and, while driving past a small building separating the road from the parking space, scraped off half of the windows on one side of the bus as it drove too close to a bit of the building that was sticking out. “It's your fault!”, Alan came laughing and pointing at me, “I saw the driver looking at you while he was pulling in”. The driver seemed just as uninterested about what he'd just done as our mechanic had seemed about fixing our bus. Looking at the damage he'd caused to his shiny luxury coach from his side mirror, he just smiled. We felt the pain of his passengers as we got onto our second horse and drove off into the darkness and towards Harare.



We'd arranged with Alan that we could get a lift with his brother so we had things sorted when we arrived at the bus station in Harare. We said our hearty goodbyes to all the people we'd shared the experience with and got some pointers from Big Mama about Zimbabwe, where she was from as well. It took us a while to find our hotel in Harare but luckily Alan nor his brother seemed to mind all that much after the long long ride with Malasha. Instead Alan focused on playing tour guide of Harare and teaching us how to blow the vuvuzela, so we'd be ready for the World Cup. That is, if we'd actually got a proper one instead of the toy trumpet we got for free in Kampala.

Diplomatic Mission

12^th May – Day 225 – Lilongwe, Malawi

A small introduction to one of the stranger coincidences on this trip so far:

Between our trips to Dzalanyama and South Luangwa, we'd spent the night in Lilongwe. During this time, our wanderings had taken us into a petrol station where we sensed that we would be able to find a drink or two and some cupcakes. As Mama-T paid up, Papa-T was perusing the local newspapers, great peruser that he is. Were there no newspapers, he'd have perused something else – local advertisements, fire extinguisher instructions, the labels inside his own clothes, whatever he could find – at great length. Today though, there was a selection of local newspapers, and on the front cover of one of the local newspapers, was a picture of a not-so-local gentleman. With a thoughtful “Mhmmm!” (generally an indication that he has found something but is still processing the information) he alerted the rest of us to this gentleman who turned out to be someone that he had played football with many years ago and had lost touch with for well over five years. Reading the article associated with the picture, we discovered that he was now an ambassador in Malawi, of all places! We got in touch before leaving for South Luangwa and were invited over for dinner and to spend the night. The world is quite small.

We were originally planning to go to Zimbabwe through Lusaka but after the type of animated conversation that precedes all of our decision-making (be it which route to take or who should go and pull the curtains tonight) we ended up going back through Lilongwe to see these old friends before taking a bus to Harare from there, if we could find one. M agreed to this plan provided that I promise to “walk the plank” if we were late for her parents in Harare on Sunday. I crossed my fingers and made the promise.

It was a nice evening, we were wonderfully looked after and doubtless ate from the finest china of the whole trip (and probably for many years before that) from their great cook, met their small yet energetic adopted Malawian daughter, and relieved their fridge of a few bottles. Thankfully, Mr. Ambassador had an early morning and so we didn't end up having a very long night. He'd also offered to give us a lift to the bus company's office and, good guests as we were, we didn't want to make him late for state business. It's never too late for a brandy though, it seems, and so we went to bed slightly later than we probably should have done before getting up slightly earlier than we wished we would, said a bit of a rushed goodbye to my parents before zipping off towards the office of the company which would be taking us to Zimbabwe – the grandly named “Malasha Flying Horse”. Gentlemen, place your bets!

p.s. In keeping with Lilongwe traditions, we have no pictures.

R&R

4^th-8^th May – Days 217-221 – Dzalanyama Forest Reserve, Malawi

I didn't feel much fresher the next morning. In fact, I spent a good while in the toilets before we left to the airport to meet T's parents, drove the whole way there with the window open in the taxi and, once there, locked myself up in the ladies' for some more gagging to the disgust of fellow facility users. I still tried to put up a smile and convince Francoise and Dave that I was actually happy to see them even if I probably looked like I had been handed a pair of rotten eggs to keep company to. T in the meanwhile had disappeared somewhere just in time to miss his parents' arrival through the magic gates. I bet Francoise and Dave were impressed at our efforts at welcoming them...

The road to Dzalanyama

The happy reunion!

And they waste no time throwing maturity straight out of the window

Apparently these guys cycle 2 days to Lilongwe with these wood stacks, for 15€

In the end we managed to find T and the happy reunion started with a trip to the supermarket where we picked up our food supplies for our stay at the mystery location that had not been disclosed to T and I before Dave and France arrived. The only thing we knew was that it was going to be all R&R. We'd be spending the next four days at the Dzalanyama Forest Reserve about 40kms outside of Lilongwe in a cozy lodge in the middle of nature with no electricity. So we bought a reasonable mountain of food and took a good while to get through the tills, where Francoise was seemingly appalled at the lady for not even a breaking a smile when France paid and said thank you. T, knowing his mother's ways and attitudes towards customer service people, giggled and guided France out the door before any further drama would evolve on the spot. I bet Francoise was impressed at how Africa was welcoming her after the long time since her last visit.

A selection of Dzalanyama's abundant wildlife

Nothing would get us down, though. We arrived at the lodge with plenty of wine and gin (for everyone but me who was on the bastard bug killers), saucisson (for T as a souvenir from Europe), a big pile of mixed antibiotics and worm-killers (for my giardia-infested system and Dave who had scraped some skin at footy lately which needed special attention to prevent it from going green), several pairs of binoculars (mostly for Dave to check out the birds and for the rest of us to identify them for him), cigarettes (for us with a bad habit – thus everyone but Dave) and most importantly: Jungle Speed (for all of us). We whiled away our days catching up with each other,sleeping late or getting up early respective of which age group we represented, going for walks along the trails around the lodge, reading books, battling with hurricane lamps while trying to get them on or off without burning the house down, catching up on our fist-washing, etc. T and I also desperately tried to get some speed into Jungle Speed while challenging Dave and Francoise at this marvellous game. We accomplished giggle fits and broken fingernails, but quite frankly not much improvement on the speed issue.

T trains for a future job in management

Jungle Speed casualty #768769

During our time at the lodge, we had a cook, Lucius, and some kind of a general caretaker, Flaxton, at our use. Before and after every meal they prepared for us, Francoise came up with new names for our dear helpers along the lines of Julius, Confucius, Clapton and Plankton, so that in the end all of us had serious trouble remembering what their real names were and none of us dared to give it a try to their faces. They were henceworth mostly known as 'hey you' or an embarrassed smile before starting a sentence when speaking to them.

"My aim in life is to appear on your blog" he said. And here it is!

D, F, M, and an overgrown creature from the forest

...which M decides to deal with once and for all

All in all, we had a wonderful session of Rough and Ready, as it is known.

Clapton, Confucius, and the security guy who was usually too drunk to be coherent

And the one everyone has been waiting for - the infamous "ants in the pants" picture. Lesson learnt - watch where you walk!

2nd-4rd May – Days 215-217 – Lilongwe, Malawi

It was an all too familiar feeling. The alarm went off far too early and I woke up after going to bed far too late and wondering if it was really such a good idea to have that final beer last night. No time to hang around in Mzuzu though – we had to get down to Lilongwe as my parents were already in South Africa and arriving soon. The all-too-familiar trudge to the bus station at the crack of dawn began.

This time, however, we didn't make it to the bus station – after a few minutes of walking, a car pulled up and a couple of guys jumped out. “Are you going to Lilongwe? Get in, we'll take you down there”. For the price of a cheap bus, we got the entire back seat of a car and we'd avoid the trudge from the bus station at the other end. A good deal for us, and nice for the guys as we financed their trip down to the capital to get their car fixed. A few stops en route gave us a break and suddenly we were being woken up from a slumber we'd accidentally fallen into at the door of Mabuya Camp in Lilongwe. One of the guys used to work as a tour guide and thought this was the best deal we could get. We wandered in and took a room in a true backpacker crash-pad – bar in the reception, overland truck parked in the courtyard, grassy areas all over the place, and a weird and wonderful mix of people going from one place to another. That, and an antique German fire engine which someone was driving around. As you do.

M gets herself into the only picture of Lilongwe that we managed to take

Lilongwe itself could be the strangest capital city I've been to with the possible exception of Banjul. It was clean, everything seemed new, there were no people, cars or streetlights and seemingly no centre of town. On the one hand it felt like a small village, and on the other it felt like a large town which had just been built and was waiting for people to move in. It was perfectly pleasant but not particularly lively or interesting. We set about finding a place to eat and to have an evening walk. “But you mustn't walk around at night anywhere in Lilongwe, it's dangerous. We cannot recommend it”. Even walking to the next block would be risky (apparently) and given that we didn't know the place, and that it seemed very quiet at the best of times, we followed the advice for once and hopped into a taxi, cruising the wide, dark and empty streets to find a bite to eat, ending up at “Don Brioni's Bistro”. It was tasty.
Meanwhile, M's giardia bugs were plotting their revenge after she'd attacked them with drugs in Kampala and they picked the next morning to stage a surprise attack. We trekked off to the nearest clinic to get some medicine for her and, just when we were considering what to do for the rest of the day, she providing a spectacular bout of sickage into the bushes. It seemed that a day of rest would be on the agenda. And if there's anything we do well, it's days of rest. Snoozing, football and the odd beer saw us to the end of the day, before an early morning wake-up to head out to meet my parents at the airport the next day. Final decision – maybe we should come back to Lilongwe to see a little more of it later...

30th April-2nd May – Days 213-215 – Mbeya, Tanzania to Mzuzu, Malawi

As we were promised, we were picked up from the hotel in Mbeya at 6.45. Not by a bus, but by our friend from yesterday in a taxi. We were driven out to a bus park where we were put onto a bus to the border, our ticket was paid for and we set off. The bus didn't continue to the border but stopped instead half way in Tukuyu, and we were shunted onto another bus. If we'd had any suspicions about the deal we'd got yesterday they were growing now, but there wasn't anything we could do about it yet. The bus eventually set off towards the border, where we discovered that we weren't the be dropped at the border at all but about a 2km walk away. We tottered down the hill towards the bridge that marks the divider between Tanzania and Malawi and in the pouring rain our suspicions grew further. Certainly we hadn't got what we had been promised and I started wondering whether the Axa bus station on the Malawian side of the border existed at all.

Immigration again was painless and simple and, although the relief wasn't as strong, we felt a similar happiness to be out of Tanzania as we had had leaving Ethiopia. We hadn't felt hostility from Tanzanians in the same way as we had from Ethiopians but I felt that we were treated in quite a strange way. While the Ethiopians had tried to scream money out of us, I'd felt many times in Tanzania that people were friendly to us under false pretenses. A smile, a “hello my friend” and then we realised that these people were only interested in relieving us of our cash. The bus guy in Mbeya was about to add himself to that list of people. The Malawian immigration guys were all smiles and welcomes, and we asked where the Axa bus stop was. “Ah, it's in Karonga – you can take a shared taxi there for 500 kwacha”. The guy paused for a second and then asked “Did you buy a ticket in Mbeya...??” We nodded. His smile disappeared and he shook his head. “It's all lies”, he said. His analysis was backed up by the guy who organised the shared taxis. “I just want you to know so that you don't expect anything that you won't get. This ticket is not worth anything here”. We cursed Mbeya bus man but resolved to go to the Axa office anyway just on the off chance, but deep down we knew that we'd been scammed. A fitting goodbye from Tanzania.

Arriving at Karonga, we made for the Axa office and I asked the guy about the ticket. He gave me a look that said “Oh no.. not you as well...”. He'd seen it all before, he said, and apologised over and over for our loss but said that Axa didn't have any offices outside Malawi. They were trying to get the police involved, he said, and asked me for details about where we got the ticket and who sold it to us. He told us then that the Malawian police had asked them if anyone who fell for the scam could come over to Mbeya with them to identify the guy and I'd have loved to go across, but my parents were arriving to Lilongwe airport in a few days, so we decided to just accept our loss and get on with our lives. We got a real ticket down to Mzuzu, and waited for the bus to depart. Malawi does seem friendlier than Tanzania – people stop for a chat here and there and even the homeless hustlers at the bus station just stop for a chat to find out how you're doing. Old men in immaculate suits would stop for a chat as well, and the atmosphere was light, a refreshing change from the bus station's we'd seen in Malawi's larger neighbour. Hearing about our adventures in Mbeya, many people fired out comments which reminded me of the Sudanese attitude to Ethiopia – nice country, difficult people. We were going to need a break and Malawi seemed like a great place for it.

The bus eventually rattled off – the tarmac road was a blessing and the bus, even though it looked like the kind of city bus that you would get in Europe, was a lot more comfortable than we'd had for quite a while. With the lake to our left and mountains to our right, we chugged along and the tiredness slowly evaporated. We pulled into Mzuzu and walked across town to a hostel called Mzoozoozoo, hoping to find a bed for the night. It looks just like the backpacker hostels I remember from years ago in Europe – a weird and wonderful mix of people sitting around, the feeling all over that you've just wandered into a friend's house and can just set yourself down and relax. We did exactly that, aided by burgers, sausages and mash, and Kuche Kuche beer, surrounded by American Peace Corps volunteers, a German girl who'd set up a restaurant in Nkhata Bay, a retired English couple who'd come out here years ago, the friendly and slightly eccentric Swiss owner of the place and a bunch of Malawians who'd come in for a drink or 3. Jazz music blasted out and we learnt to play bao, a backgammon-like board game played with marbles whose rules I repeatedly failed to understand and was demolished at by one of the American guys who lives in a nearby village and plays it a lot. We returned the favour by beating him at Jungle Speed, and retired to bed far too late after too many beers, with a blanket ban on alarm clocks and the intention to leave to Nkhata Bay, just down the road on the lake, the next day.

Mzoozoozoo - the place to be. If you're in Mzuzu, that is

Having woken up in the afternoon, though, M was feeling the onset of similar symptoms as she had with the Giardia in Kampala, and so we spent the day lying around. I consoled her by having a few more beers while she was on the soft drinks, and whiled away the evening sitting on the veranda and in the lounge doing nothing much of use. Yet again, in Mzoozoozoo we've found a great place for that, possibly the best so far on this trip. It can't go on all night this time though, as the daily bus to Lilongwe leaves at 6am. Rgh.