When I Die of Bird Flu and Other Notes (Blantyre, Malawi)

When I die of bird flu you can tell the researchers I contracted it last Monday on a bus from Iringa, Tanzania to the Malawi border. It wasn't even a so-called chicken bus - it was a regular old bus, but the woman behind me was holding a squawking flapping chicken and the feathers and various other chicken particles kept landing on me. I've been experiencing allergy sypmtoms off and on since so if this is an early sign of bird flu, say your goodbyes.

By the way, your deadline for sending me mail in Chile is here! If you want to send your long lost Dara a letter, get your stamps out and send it to Ryan. See "Sending Me Things" below for the address. Looking forward to my own personal postal Christmas.

Alright, so catching you up on African life, Zanzibar has no bookstores. Well they do, but they don't have books. We'll get back to this later. The island however is fantastically beautiful. Stone Town is a maze of winding alleys where India meets the Middle East meets Africa. The ships are old, wooden, and wind-dependent; the people are almost all Muslim; the children are precious; the man at the Mozambique consulate is really nice and understands my Spanish; and the waterfront evening market is delicious and also where I was kindly referred to as a "white prostitute woman" while sitting innocently with a couple of English girls. I dove off of Stone Town one day which was alright and then headed up to the northern tip of Zanzibar to a beach called Kendwa for 3 glorious days of paradise. The sand was blindingly white and the water insanely turquoise. I shared a banana leaf banda on the sand with a nice slightly dorky dutch med student girl, read "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" in a hammock, played a local game called Bao, ran on the beach, watched crazy amazing sunsets, dove in the worst visibility of my life (like maybe a meter?) but saw my first turtle which totally made up for it, and got a massage on the beach from a local lady aptly named Fat Mama. It was good.

I caught a ferry back to the mainland for a frustrating night in Dar and further fruitless searching for guidebooks on Malawi, Mozambique, or really any neighboring African nations which at this point would have been exciting. I found books on Florida, Fiji, and France, among others, but absolutely nothing useful for the region at hand. At times on this trip, namely in SE Asia, I've been somewhat appalled by the prevalence of Lonely Planet, but that night in Dar, I think I would have given a goddamn limb for a relevant copy. I took a bus south to Iringa. There are about 398 million NGOs operating in Iringa, located at the heart of Tanzania's second most HIV-infected district, but tourists don't go there. It was pretty and very nice to see a normal Tanzanian town. We arrived in the total darkness of a power cut (common) so the friendlly Italian doctor sitting next to me, who also understood my Spanish, took me to a guesthouse so I wouldn't have to wander in the dark. It was very nice of him. The guesthouse was totally local and my 25 word Swahili vocab was utterly useless. An ex-secondary school English teacher with shockingly horrific English did however overhear my pathetic request for "chakula" meaning "food" and kindly translated my order for dinner and water and I slept. In the morning I electracuted myself taking a shower, spent the day exploring Iringa and, headed bookless for Malawi.

I hate border towns. I almost didn't make it before the border closed and nothing sounded worse than being stuck in the misery of the transient, conning, pickpocketing filth of the Tanzanian border town, but I ran and ended up with about 4 minutes to spare. Ah, Malawi. Not that I knew at the time what language was spoken, what currency was used, or what town I was headed to, but I made it. (It didn't take long to figure out the language is Chichewa and/or English and/or a million tribal languages, the currency is the Kwacha, and the national food is french fries - I don't know how these people survive, it's seriously all they eat). A share taxi took me to the dumpy truckstop of Karonga where nice ladies gave me a room to share with a cockroach the size of my head while semis idoled outside the window. The next day I took a series of trucks and minibuses to Mzuzu en route to Nkhata Bay.

Let me describe for you the luxury of the African minibus. On a deluxe "big" bus you get a whole seat to yourself which may possibly even recline, you get bad Nigerian movies, and you even get a refreshing glass bottle of pop with a straw and maybe biscuits. On a "minibus" you get crammed into a metal shell of a van with 400 million miles of bad roads in bad weather on it. The minibus has 12-14 seats, but carries a bare minimum of 25 people not counting the adorable babies swadled in cloth on every woman's back or front, plus several hundred pounds of sugar, cassava, and other goods. Whenever you finally depart, the miracle of the minibus stops for gas in sweltering sun and the windows don't open, metal rods poke through seats into your ass, the fumes you inhale are lethal, and you stop every 4 feet to let people off or more often, on. The most important rule of the minibus is that it absolutely never goes as far as you've been told it is. Instead without fail, you stop in the middle of nowhere and get sold to another minibus supposedly going where you're going - you wait for another hour for that bus to collect at least 25 passengers, and then you proceed until the driver decides to stop and sell you off again. And so forth. The day I sent from Karonga to Mzuzu, all of 200 kilometers, I rode in 4 such minibuses and/or pickups and it took 7 hours. This is Africa.

Mzuzu is just a normal town, but there's a little Western-style hostel there that came as a bit of a welcome oasis after a few days of feeling like the only tourist on the continent. I slept like a baby. The next morning the other hostel guests - an American Patrick, a German Isabella, and a British Dave, and I all shared a taxi to Mayoka Village on Nkhata Bay, to be henceforth referred to as heaven on earth. Four days of swimming in crystal clear, warm, fresh, delicious Lake Malawi, soaking up the local parasites (no I'm not kidding, but they're treatable), diving off rafts, jumping off cliffs, running through villages where kids wave and chase you, playing pool (I suck), playing darts (I won), BBQs, boat trips, hanging out in the open air bar at the edge of the lake... I mean, leaving was next to impossible. Isabella and I finally pulled it together to take off on the same day so we went together to Lilongwe, the dusty decrepit capital of Malawi where I bought some pretty heavy wooden things, and then yesterday we came south to Blantyre which is much more of a city even though it's not the capital and we're still in Malawi so "city" is a pretty strong word. Tomorrow I go to Mozambique.

That's it. You're caught up. I still have no book, but having met people more prepared than yours truly, I've managed to borrow and read and commit a route and some specific information to memory so I'm not quite as clueless as I was at my last border. For instance, I know they speak Portuguese in Mozambique and I know I can dive with whale sharks. What else is there? Anyway, it's wedding season at home and I'm really sad to be missing out on seeing the relevant ones of you in such great circumstances. Thinking of you. Love to all.