Entries about malawi

I’m simultaneously trying to avoid two cows that have stepped onto the road and wave to some very excited children, who insist I should give them more of my attention than the cows. For some obscure reason, this is the moment my brain decides to come up with the perfect comeback to a discussion I lost at a meeting six years back. Welcome to the lonely life of riding a motorcycle through Africa alone.

Driving a motorcycle across half a continent is invertible a solitudinous undertaking. Hour after hour, often day after day. Alone on the bike. Without a radio, let alone human company. While it can be tedious, it’s also something I’ve come to quite appreciate. It’s undoubtedly not for everybody, but before I move to a cave somewhere to become a troglodyte (i.e. hermit), I might share a few of those dull hours on the road.

Naturally, a lot of the time is spent on the actual driving. While I’m pretty comfortable on the bike after having driven it for more than a year, there are still a ton of things to keep concentrating on. Cattle crossing the road, near-invisible speed bumps, children who need a wave or thumbs up. Then there are the outright fun parts, especially when the road’s winding down mountains and hills. On these, I can keep up speed and slalom my way downhill as if I was a racer – it’s about the only time the glorified scooter drivers fast. Not much time for daydreaming if I want to stay on the road.

Elsewhere, on the long straight roads, there’s plenty of time for daydreaming and enjoying the view. The beauty of being on a motorcycle is the perceived vicinity to the nature around you. Not protected by a car’s chassis or windshield, the full force of the wind is a stout reminder. So is the sun’s baking rays warming up the leather jacket. More importantly, there are no blind angles. On the bike, I have an almost 360-degree view of my surroundings – depending on how much I twist around.

I’ve always enjoyed driving, regardless of which of the two types of road mentioned above. But flying through the developing landscapes on a motorcycle, sitting in the elements is second to none. I’m happy spending a lot of my day merely driving, with a smile on my face. It’s a little like sitting on a dark and stormy evening, looking into a fire. It’s mesmerising. Nothing else is needed.

The many hours alone are also a perfect time for self-reflection and, frankly, self-improvement. Something I’ve always insisted should be part of any form of travel. Different thoughts or episodes from the past tend to pop up if there’s nothing else to occupy my mind. Whether it’s finder the perfect answers to those “I should have said” episodes from years’ back or becoming better at accepting dumb things I’ve done in the past that comes back to haunt me from time to time. I don’t per se need to be on a motorcycle to do this, but it does provide me with ample opportunities to deal with the ghost of the past. To phrase it in an overdramatic way.

Other than the driving and the self-reflection, I obviously use much time thinking about what to write home about. Small quirky impressions from the road. I keep coming up with all these fantastic, witty and clever paragraphs or new ideas for this blog. Alas, I can’t write them down, and I simply don’t have the time to stop constantly, get out pen and paper, and write it down every time I come up with something new. So inevitably, once I’ve arrived at my destination and open my laptop, I’ve long forgotten all the Shakespearesque brilliance I’ve come up with during the day’s drive…

Lastly, it should not be understated how similar singing while riding a motorbike is to singing in the shower. It’s pretty must a must. Though practising one’s singing while riding do have the added bonus, for talentless people such as myself, that the helmet will muffle all the terrible tunes I release upon an innocent World that, frankly, do not deserve me adding to the ongoing horrors.

I’ve always liked the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. Capo Verde and Guinea-Bissau in particular. They have a kind “Latino Africa” air to them—a mix between the Northern shores of the Iberian Peninsula and Sub-Saharan Africa. This possibly because most of them didn’t get their independence from Portugal until the ’70s, often in bloody wars of independence. Mozambique is no exception to this.
Initially, my plan had been to spent quite a while in MZ, but the country is simply too big. The distances are too vast on a glorified scooter on which I can maximum do 350-380 km/day. The big draw is the Ilha de Mozambique and the coast, but that would have meant, at least, a 2,000 km detour. Instead, I’m giving the region west of Malawi a short sniff, and put aside the rest of the country for another time.

The immigration officers at the border post clearly disagreed with this approach. I had asked (and paid) for an eight-day transit visa, as these are half the price of the standard one-month tourist visas. Somehow, I drove into Mozambique with a 30-day double-entry visa, regardless, just in case I changed my mind and wanted to go back.
All three officers on duty were very excited and a little overwhelmed when I rocked up at the border and asked for a visa. It’s obviously not every day that happens. All three of them insisted that they were to do the visa formalities and kept having plenty of comments and good advice to the one who ended up actually typing my details into their system. This brought everything to a halt at the border post, and ques of locals trying to get through immigration soon materialised, who complaining loudly of the lack of service. Eventually, the junior officer was told to deal with the ques, which, to be fair, he did admirably fast.

Immediately after entering Mozambique, it became physically visible how vast the country is. The contrast to Malawi, one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, was enormous. In Malawi, every road I drove down was full of people walking or cycling between the villages, which all lay within relatively small distances of each other. In Mozambique, the roads are deserted, and villages are wide and far between, making racing down the streets a much more enjoyable experience as I don’t have to watch out for my fellow and softer road users continually.
Mozambique also saw my first run-in with other motorcyclists. A UK-couple living in Malawi overtook me on their 1200cc BMW (compare that to my 110cc). I had a chance to catch up as they had a road-side break a couple of kilometres further ahead. We were heading to the same town and met up in the evening for a couple of beers. Of course, they asked on details about my bike of which I knew nothing. Interestingly enough, though, the longest trip they have ever done on their comfortable beast of a machine was a short 3,000 km journey down into Mozambique and back. That’s only a couple of hundred kilometres more than I have done on this trip so far. Compliments such as me “being their hero” for attempting to get to Cape Town on a glorified scooter was mixed with comments questioning my sanity. All in all, what could be expected.

My last overall impression of Mozambique was the draught. It might not have turned into a humanitarian catastrophe just yet. Still, with an unusually warm dry season and months till the rains are expected, things looked bleak from a layman’s perspective. Most riverbeds very complete dried out, including some of the mayor feeder-rivers to the Zambezi. On multiple occasions, I passed villages where the locals had to dig down into the dry river beds to create small puddles of water for bathing and washing their clothes and dishes.
This is in itself not life-threatening, but if there will not remain enough water for the locals’ livestock, this could crash the local economies complete, with no small share of human misery following in its wake.

As I roll backwards over the side of the boat, I let gravity pull me and all my extra kilos of equipment into the dark blue depths. I’ve so perplexed that I forget to give the OK sign to the dive boat when I’m pushed to the surface. Typically, the “James Bond entry roll” plunges me into salty ocean waters, but Lake Malawi’s water is (obviously) freshwater. It’s a wonderfully fresh experience – as far as I remember my last freshwater dive was in 2013.

Diving in Lake Malawi is like jumping in an enormous aquarium tank. The water is fantastically bright, and I’m surrounded by thousands of small colourful cichlids endemic to the lake. The aquarium comparison is in no way an overestimation, as 50 to 80 percent for all aquarium fish are cichlids. Just visit your local pet shop, and then imagine the aquarium being 580 km long and 75 km wide.
And it’s not only underwater Lake Malawi has charm. Soft, sandy beaches cover its shoreline in white and yellow colours, and hikes and drives on the mountains surrounding the lake offer stunning scenery of the green landscape around the deep blue lake. I know that this blog entry has begun to sound like a commercial by Visit Malawi (I’m not even sure such an outfit exists), but I’m genuinely excited about what Malawi and its lake have to offer. There has been a decent amount of visitors, but nowhere near what the country deserves. People are lovely and helpful, it’s cheap, and the only reason not to go is that too many people have no idea about what (and where) Malawi is—and maybe that it can be a little tricky to find international flights.

Malawi is one of those hidden gems that is rare to fall over in this globalised world of mass tourism, guidebooks and the internet. But somehow, even with my meticulous pre-trip research, I failed to realise how awesome the country was until I was actually here. It’s not just the quality of the few things you can do around the lake. Hell, here’s eco-lodges tucked away on mountainsides, excellent hiking opportunities all over the country and even a couple of decent game parks for the safari-people.

I cannot completely rule out that the excitement of being back on the road again for a long trip, influences my choice here, but from talking to other travellers, everybody seems to agree. Malawi is one of those few places (like Colombia, Iran or Cape Town) that everybody who has ever visited unanimously agrees are fantastic destinations to visit.
Regardless, there are new places to see and new people to meet; thus, my twelve-day jaunt, 1,000 km through Malawi must come to an end, and I must move on. Not that I’m complaining, I love travelling, in the sense that I enjoy moving from A to B almost more than the actually hanging about in place A and B. So next up will be a short few days’ transit through Mozambique to Zimbabwe – a land best known for its terrible economy and even worse ex-dictator. I’m sure I will have a blast!

I’m basically a backpacker with my own wheels. I have no spare parts, no camping gear, no big plans for my bike once the trip is over. I am, in other words, a terrible overlander (the people who drive their motorbike, jeep or truck across continents). They will happily spend days at a time driving, camp out in small secret coves and live directly out of their vehicle, which they will undoubtedly repair themselves when they have a problem. They have often also built or modified their machine themselves.
Instead, I travel as light as possible, rough it in the hostels and sometimes cockroach-filled local and hook up with fellow travellers for all the silly side trips that people travelling without their own wheels tend to go on. And I know absolutely nothing about motorbikes, relying entirely on mechanics when an issue arises on my bike. In that sense, I’m kind of trapped between two different styles of travel. But as long as I don’t get dragged into conversations about the specs of my bike with real overlanders, I should be fine.

However, there are a few differences between the two ways of getting around. Having my own wheels do require a lot of extra planning. Which roads are sealed, how far is there between gas stations, and where to I sleep if I can’t reach my next destination in a day’s drive. I can’t just rock up at the bus station, tell them where I would like to go and then expect a driver to drive through the night to get me to my destination if necessary.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the extra planning. People who have travelled with me will know how happy I am for travel planning. But I do miss out by doing the driving myself. The proper overlanders I have met (on every continent I have ever travelled) seem to care more about their vehicle than the country they are in—to the degree that the continent they are driving through doesn’t matter much. Cairo to Cape Town, across Asia, or America north to south. Any of the above would be fine as long as they can drive their beloved machine.

It is, however, much more enjoyable to observe the African landscape and its peoples through the window of a bus or shared taxi. It’s tough to do when the bulk of my attention must be surrendered to watching out for potholes, crossing animals and minibuses going down the wrong lane. But there is no greater loss by driving myself then the lack of contact with the locals. Taking public modes of transportation – all insanely overcrowded – is unavoidably a direct way to immerse oneself into the local culture. Sharing peoples’ uncomfortable day-to-days way of getting from A to B leads to conversations, home-stays or, as a minimum, a change for observing people, their behaviour and culture from up close and for hours at a time. On the bike, the closest interaction I have with people around me is waving at the kids as I fly by or by having a quick chat with the men and women crewing the gas stations.
The bike does make travelling both more accessible and cheaper. No more waiting around for hours for the minibuses and taxies to fill up; no more expensive private hire of taxis or motorbike to take me to the weird, far-flung attractions and destinations, I inevitable insist of visiting; and no more dragging my luggage around with me. And of course, the exciting challenge to see if I can actually manage to drive a glorified scooter all the way to Cape Town. Maybe I do have an overlander hidden somewhere within me.

I’ve got a dumb idea. Fun, exciting, but dumb! Why not drive, the small 110cc motorcycle that I’ve been driving for the last year or so, while working for the European Union in Tanzania, all the way down to Cape Town?

“Motorcycle” is probably the wrong word – glorified scooter will probably be more correct. Setting out for a 12,000 km (that’s 7,500 miles for the Americans) in Southern Africa, on a glorified moped is dumb. Silly at best. Particularly when taking into account the lack of driving skills in Southern Africa, or that a city bike probably shouldn’t be driven up a mountainous gravel road in rural Lesotho, or that the 140 km I can travel on a full tank (on smooth, plain tarmac) often will not be enough to take me to the next gas station… At least the diplomatic plates will spare me some of the bribery attempts and easy the border crossings.

Regardless, I’m sure plenty of people called Amundsen dumb when he decided to go look for the South Pole and Edmund Hillary insane when he decided to climb Everest. Adventure always require some caution thrown to the wind. I did the same in West Africa, and many more people seemed interested in that adventure, so I will once again be doing my fair share of travel blogging here on the site and post a daily photo on Facebook. Consider this the official relaunch of the Road Blog!

Highlights will include Lake Malawi, Mozambique’s Coast, the Zambezi River, Victoria Falls, the highlands of Eswatini and Lesotho and, of course, Cape Town – and many, many hours spent on the road with an increasingly sore bum.

I will set out from Dar on September 24th and expect to be in Cape Town before Christmas.

PS. If anyone is making a poll on when the bike will break down, my guess is on one of the first days in Lesotho. Then again – I know absolutely nothing about bikes.