Am back!!

After a much needed break from the bush I am back online and happy to be. With my time finished at Lion Camp; I took a well deserved break and spent some time with a good friend in Lusaka volunteering at an HIV clinic she is setting up there and a week in Joburg shopping! I took a flight to Lilongwe where I hung out at Mufasa backpackers for 4 days and met up with Tiffany who has been doing Cairo to Cape the last few months. We then took a long sweaty chicken bus(about 11 hours of it...and yes! there really was a chicken)


The bus took us to picturesque Nkhata bay on the shores of Lake Malawi, the lake of stars, there we spent spent 2 nights there waiting for the ever so unreliable Ilala which arrived a whole day late. The Ilala ferry is an ancient contraption that prawls the waters of Lake Malawi ferrying people, grain, boats and a lot of unidentified Katundu from one port to another. The Ferry runs fine, is fairly clean and has a friendly kitchen that produces edible food. The problem is the loading and unloading at ports, this takes anywhere between 2 to 8 hours!! Most tourists book the top deck as its spacious, lots of fresh air and unlike the rest of the ferry not crowded. The ferry is most of the islanders only form of commercial and individual travel it gets packed with all sorts of cargo. I slept in my tent which we erected on the top deck most of the way and quite enjoyed the trip when the ferry was actually moving.


My tent and random guy's cute toes!


Needless to say we arrived in Likoma in one piecealbeit hours behind schedule. Likoma is the last Malawian port before Lake Malawi changes to Lake Niassa on the Mozambican side, our final destination. It is also the home of a beautiful precolonial church built by the Portuguese when they inhabited the island years ago before Malawi took it back.
To get out of Malawi and catch the speed boat to Mozambique we had to first find the immigration officer to get our exit stamps. He wasn't at his office, nor was he at the air strip, we even looked for him at his house and finally caught up with him at the local drinking hole. This was his "satellite office" he said and while he stamped us out he chatted about Big Brother Africa putting up a really good defence for Munyaradzi his favorite house mate. Another speedboat and half an hour later we were at Cobue on Lake Niassa which is really Lake Malawi on the Mozambican side. Once again our driver had to wade through the water and run on the beach in search of the immigration official who would stamp us in and no surprise like his counterpart across the pond he too was at his satellite office; a bar on the beach. Another hour later and we were at Nkwichi lodge my new home. The lodge is about 90% green and ecofriendly which means I have a lot of adjusting to do in terms of my diet and way of life. We are battery and solar powered here so definitely no tv and menu is determined by what is available or what the villagers bring to our doors to sell. I live in a hut and I have my very own beach access on the shores of a freshwater lake!