Zomba, Malawi

Zomba is a small town in the shadow of a large mountain. There’s a lot of mountains around here – I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a lot of mountains. Anyhow, we found the Survey easily and after some confusion between me and the director, figured out who was supposed to come along and loaded them on board.

As a footnote to the driving part, in my mind I had imagined being picked up by a guy driving something fancy like a range rover or at least some kind of SUV – but the trip was taken in a low-clearance economy sudan. It handled the paved road well, but not so much the dirt roads.

The trip from Zomba to Cape Maclear took a very long time. It was hot, and I was tired and even managed to doze off (despite the constant games of Chicken being played – you just get used to seeing the car almost crash every 35 seconds or so). One thing that really surprised me on the trip was that it started getting dark by 5pm and by 6 it was dark. Like 9pm dark in Nebraska dark, not just kind of dark. Since it’s late summer here, that really caught me off guard – I guess I should have realized that being closer to the equator means not as much time shifting through the season.

Anyhow, if you thought the part about driving above sounded kind of harrowing – now picture doing it in complete darkness, with a little rain, and with people wearing mostly dark clothes and still hanging out walking and riding their bikes in the near-middle of the street. Plus add in people who refused to turn down their bright headlights until they were almost on top of you.

Eventually the road turned to a dirt road, so we had to slow down considerably – and dodging head-on collision and people was replaced with constantly scraping the bottom of the car while driving through enormous potholes in the dirt road – which were also unevenly distributed. It was about an hour of that before we pulled into the Danforth Yachting complex.

Just as a footnote, I changed the placement of the markers to Cape Maclear, because it turns out that our resort is actually nearer to Cape Maclear than Monkey Bay. I’m saddened by this a little, because I wanted to stay at a place called Monkey Bay – but I’ll get over it. There was a sign on the highway as we were getting close that read “Fat Monkeys” with an arrow pointing down a road. I really want to go down that road now. More later on the monkeys, I hope.