Ben has developed a new fascination for creepy crawlies (except for spiders), lizards and geckoes. He got some amazing photos of this beautiful lizard (far right) in the Giant’s Playground. We were quite excited to see stick insects at Robert and Sheila’s house in Windhoek. You don’t think of stick insects being wild – just in jam jars owned by small school boys!
The dead lizardy thing was in Kenya, the big millipede in Lebanon and the HUGE dung beetle in northern Tanzania.
Nambia’s tourist attractions are few and far between. Some are totally mind-blowingly awesome. Some are quite cool. Some are not much to write home about at all. We have no idea what category each fits into until we have driven for many hours to see them. Apart from about six “motorways” and around town roads all other roads are dirt tracks, some require a meaty 4x4.
Fish River Canyon fitted in the first category and has been compared to the Grand Canyon by many. It was one of the most amazing views I have ever seen. It’s hard to convey the view in words, and photos miss out on the 180° panoramic view and look a bit diddy and pathetic compared to the real thing.
Quiver tree forest is hardly what you and I would know as a forest – 250 trees spread out over a wide area doesn’t even rate as a small wood. But after driving for 3 hours and counting the trees on one hand 250 does
seem a bit of a forest! The trees are very odd and look
like they are nervous and quivering but that isn’t how they get their name. The locals used to hollow out branches and use them as a quiver for their arrows.
The Giant’s Playground sounded very exciting but I think we built this one up too much in our minds. It consists of lots of boulders stacked on top of one another. Quite something it you’re a geologist. Perhaps were becoming tourist attraction snobs! It was quite impressive and they stretched for miles. We felt a bit nervous at one point when all we could see were rocks, rocks and more rocks and no idea where the car was. I climbed up one particularly large stack, met a colourful lizard and spotted the toilet block in the car park.
Em has asked me to write this bit… the first thing that comes to mind is weird, weird, weird! The southern half of Namibia (below the capital, Windhoek) is covered in commercial farms, though it doesn’t look like anything could live here; animal or vegetable. The space here is BIG. We didn’t fuel up at the border as we still had half a tank. This was a mistake as there is very little in terms of civilisation. We were relieved to see a town on the map and the signs were counting down the kilometers quite quickly. When we arrived I was a little surprised to see half a dozen buildings and a small disused petrol station. Grunau turns out to be a farm and a hotel and maybe three houses and nowt else. I mean zippo, not a sausage, www.nothing.com. The true enormity, sparsity and aridness dawned on me. All the horror stories we’d heard and read of people breaking down, getting lost, dehydrating and dying in Namibia came flooding back. Fortunately a new shell garage had been built a few k’s up the road. We stocked up on water, cash and fuel and drove on. The garage was a hive of activity of mainly whites with their big 4x4s but also some locals who hang out there as it’s the most exciting thing this side of the bend in the road 300km away.
For our last 4 weeks in Africa we’ve hired a car. Our dreams of a meaty 4x4 were dashed by cost and availability; instead we have this Nissan Tiida (apparently you don’t get them at home), which is a little tame by comparison, but does have air conditioning! We kitted up with tent, roll mats, sleeping bag and basic kitchen equipment for less than £70. It’s been really nice to be sleeping out, under the stars in our little tent – it feels like very familiar territory for us. Although, the ground is a little different from what we’re used to – more sand than grass. Most nights, Ben has been cooking dinner on a braai (BBQ), which has been very yummy and quite romantic as we’ve watched the sun set.
We arrived in Cape Town (a flight from Blantyre) in the middle of a South African holiday. The 16th December is celebrated as the start of the Christmas period (which usually starts in October in the UK!). The streets were filled with people of all ages, races and colours watching youth bands (consisting of drums, trombones and trumpets) who made up a huge carnival marching through the city. It made for such a vibrant atmosphere, with much excitement in the air.
Cape Town was a massive contrast to our life over the last month and a half. There were more white people than we’ve seen in one place for a long time. Women wear fashionable clothes, in contrast to beautiful, printed material wrapped round their waists. There are amazing, historical buildings. Table mountain is beautiful, the clouds tumble over the top. Long Street (backpacker street) is full of young trendies, alternative shops, restaurants, clubs and bars.
We spent one day looking around the Victoria and Albert Waterfront. The docks are still very much a place of work, but this has been combined with rejuvenated buildings, tourist shops, restaurants, shopping malls and very swanky marinas, expensive apartments and luxury hotels. There were groups doing street performance – African singing, drumming and circus skills – and all made for a holiday atmosphere.
Sadly, we experienced the darker side of life in Cape Town on the way home. Ben had all his paper money stolen from him when a guy threatened him with a knife. Thankfully the guy didn’t try and take anything else, Ben was very level-headed and I, just a few yards away, had no idea what was going on. We then spent an interesting couple of hours trying to report it to the police!
As well as the really bad unplanned hiccups we have also had some amazing strokes of good luck. The last few days was one such instance. When we were in Nairobi our host said we should meet up with her brother in Malawi: And so we came to be staying in a three bedroom house near Blantyre that belongs to a Dutch doctor and his family currently back in Holland for Christmas. We were also given the use of a car for the duration of our stay, not the doctor’s Land Rover, but a perfectly adequate car nonetheless. The family’s three staff were all still employed on full salaries so we had a night watchman, a gardener who also washed the car and a maid who washed the dished and washed and ironed our clothes. And yes, ironing our scruffy backpacker clothes is necessary because as they hang out to dry a small parasite sometimes hides in the folds of the clothes then when they sense the warmth of your body they bury into your skin and lay their eggs which hatch leaving you with little grubs squirming away in a little blister. We were also persuaded that we’d be doing the doc a favour by eating the meat from his freezer (long power cuts are common) and drinking the beer from his fridge (didn’t understand that one as much, but didn’t want to argue).
We realised a while ago that we weren’t going to manage our original Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa plan in the time we had available. Or if we did life would consist of long bus journeys followed by a day booking the next bus leaving us fed up, tired and cursing our plan to ever leave home. So we took things a bit “poley poley” (slowly slowly) which the Africans are very good at! Enjoyed the places we did visit all the more for it and flew to catch up the distance.
Oh, and one other thing; on the journey to Blantyre the police had closed the road for the president’s cavalcade to drive by! He had his window down and was waving to everyone as he passed. How cool was that?
In the summer of 2007 my (Ben’s) Dad went to Malawi with a load of Scouts to build stuff at a Scout camp site near Zomba, south Malawi. The UK Scout association realised that they owned the site, thought it rather silly that UK scouts owned a small camp site in the middle of Africa and nothing much was happening to it so they decided to hand it back but only after doing it up a bit.
I thought that as we were passing we’d pop in and see what they had done and check it is still standing.
One of the UK scouts liked it so much that he has taken a job as assistant warden out there. It sounds kind of fun for a week or so but Sam has been out for over six months proving that he’s got what it takes and it’s not just a passing whim. The village is a 45min walk down a big hill and Sam does it two or three times some days, he also built his own house.
The camp site manager called Shay (pronounced Shy) is a very happy chap with a wife, 7 kids and 1 grandchild. He kept saying what a great job my Father did and how he'd never forget the UK Scouts. On the photos Dad showed us the work looked a bit rickerty, but in the context of Africa the building work looks great and some of the best handywork in the area.
We met some Malawian scouts who sang a song or two for us so we taught them our trademark "Little Green Frog" and "Baby Shark".
Food on the camp site was prepared by Shay's daughter and Sam and was the most local of dishes, including flying termites (less their wings) and deep fried. Surprisingly tasty! In the towns you can see people near bright lights catching the termites for the family meal. They fly for a few hours at dusk then fall to the floor, shed their wings then scurry off to live in the ground.
As I mentioned before, parts of this trip certainly aren’t a holiday because a holiday should be all fun, traveling on the other hand can be grueling and tough. Having just had the most relaxing and magical 24 hours, we then had get off the island and get to Lilongwe. The ferry is an old diesel workhorse that belches out oil and fumes. The “1st class deck” simply meant the top deck, rather than any hint of luxury – there weren’t even any seats to speak of! For $1 you can hire a filthy mattress to sleep on the deck. We slept quite well, and it certainly helped to pass the time – as will washing the oil and grime out of our clothes! At 5am we were woken to be told that it’s time to get off and that the bus is ready. We’d been assured that it would be a luxury air-conditioned coach. In fact it was an old bus that was supposed to take 66 seated passengers and about 15 standing – this in Malawi is taken merely as a suggestion, or even a challenge! With the bus considerably overloaded an announcement was given which, after everyone said “Amen”, I realised was a prayer to ensure safe travel.
We have learnt to treat journey times as conservative estimates, e.g. one journey in Tanzania quoted as 12 hours, turned out to be 18! This journey, given as 7 hours, lasted a bit over 9. Each hour lasted longer than the previous. It was hot, babies were screaming, anything and everything was shoved in our faces; elbows, clothes, bums and a naked breast onto which a small baby clung, some people were a bit smelly (not least us), a sleeping guy kept falling on Emma and one woman managed to spill half a bottle of coke down my back.
Eventually we arrived at Lilongwe bus station. A place that we returned to two days later to find it swarming with pickpockets, cheats and other types of people that the rest of Malawi is happily lacking. Having every possible zip padlocked shut made sure that we weren’t victims, unlike a few other travellers we had met previously.
As if taking a year out a traveling around the world and stopping off at two awesome little islands in Lake Malawi wasn’t indulgent enough, we splashed out BIG time on a resort called Kaya Mawa which is Chechewa for Maybe Tomorrow. As with Chizzie, two Brits¸ who traveled here long before Lonely Planet did, decided to build not only a backpacker lodge, but possibly “the most isolated and luxurious lodge in Africa” - says the Lonely Planet when they finally caught up. To give you some idea, it was the most expensive place we have stayed in – ever. Our Honeymoon accommodation didn’t come close! The island now has an air strip (currently being upgraded to a tarmac runway to take small jets) just because most Kaya Mawa guests come by plane (some probably own a plane). The resort has been done really well and impact on the local environment and population has been kept to a minimum. Any impact from Kaya Mawa on locals has been positive – clean running water, employment, health advice, community projects, etc.). Against the advice of the Malawian tourist board they only employ staff from the island. The whole place was built using local labour and not a single power tool was used in its construction. One hilarious anecdote was that the roof spars were cut on the mainland and dragged to the shore by a 70 strong church choir. When they finally arrived on Likoma (they had taken 18 months to source, cut and transport) it was discovered that they had been cut in half so as to fit on the ferry better!
Anyway, the food was possibly the best I’d ever eaten and was brought to us on a tray, carried by a local Likoma girl (on her head, of course) across the slatted rope bridge that joined the rocky islet on which our chalet stood to the rest of the resort (resort sounds too tacky for what this place was, but I have no other word). If we needed anything we just used our walkie-talkie to summon the staff! Dinner was served on the beach, the table lit by two lanterns, one of which I knocked over and somewhat spoilt the moment. Once we’d brushed off the petals we had an amazing night’s sleep in our four-poster bed with the sound of the water lapping outside our windows.
