Out The Tail of Malawi, and Over The Great Zambezi

I made my last post in Blantyre Malawi, and we are now in Gorongosa Mozambique, so we have covered plenty of ground since then and experienced a lot along the way.

From Blantyre we rode down another big escarpment to Chikwawa, which was a lot of fun for Wiz but kind of sucked for me because I was testing out my new spare foam tire that is puncture proof. It seemed like a wise purchase because I can't find any spare tubes in Malawi with a small enough gauge to fit into my rear tires rim, but the foam tire is ungodly slow. It's kind of like riding on a flat tire, so it just sapped all of my energy and made the day hell for me. It also didn't help that the temperature kicked up about ten degrees when we got to Chikwawa. We crossed the Shire River and got to Ross Perkins' house. Ross was the last Peace Corps volunteer we stayed with, and he spoiled us like all the other volunteers with a great dinner and hospitality. Needless to say the first thing I did was take off that God Forsaken tire, and put back on my tube.

We were a little worried about biking through Chikwawa and Nsanje districts because they are known for being the hottest and most desolate districts in Malawi. We managed to cover both districts in one long day of riding...but man that was a long day! I'm still not sure how accurate the computer on my bike is, but it showed that we covered exactly 75 miles in one day, and much of that was on dirt roads. We got into Chikwawa around 7:00pm checked into a guesthouse, had a hearty meal of goat and rice after washing the layer of dirt off of us, and crashed out for the night.

The next morning we were pleasantly surprised to see that Nsanje boma was nestled into a beautiful little valley with forests and mountains all along the border, while the rest of Nsanje and Chikwawa were flat as a pancake...I'd say the landscape is very similar to East Texas (I probably also draw the comparison because the main industries there are cattle, cotton, and sugar cane). We had another thirty kilometers on the dirt road before we reached the border. We realized what a podunk border crossing this was when we stopped in one of the border towns for tea and saw how shocked everybody was to see travelers passing through. A crowd of children surrounded our bikes and stared at our katundu, and a guy who we had tea with, said that the last tourists to come through passed in January. The border guards got a good laugh when we told them we were biking to South Africa, and with that we shot out of the absolute bottom of Malawi.

It was just as bush on the Mozambique side, we got the same stares of disbelief from the villagers we passed by. The immediate differences were a lot more abandoned buildings Freelimo flags instead of DPP posters, Bon Dia instead of Muli Bwangi, and beer in a can instead of a bottle. So Wiz and I decided to celebrate our border crossing by shotgunning a Laurintina Negro at ten in the morning. There was nobody around to witness our spectacle, but the dark beer had a much stronger affect on our riding ability than we expected.

We took a break just outside of a large refugee camp to get some shade and eat some bread rolls and peanut butter for lunch. We still haven't figured out what the inhabitants were refugees from but the UN tents were old and tattered, So it seemed like they have been there for quite a long time. Everybody we talked to was very nice, and patient with our limited Portuguese mixed with Spanish and Chichewa (Chisena is the local vernacular and its another Bantu language close to Chichewa).

We got to Mutorara around 3:00pm and decided to stay at a Pension run by a really awesome old couple that took very good care of us. We took an evening walk to check out the Zambezi which we still hadn't seen but knew it was on the other side of the hill. We got off the path that the Senhora at the Pension told us to follow as we followed the sound of a church choir. When we realized we didn't really know how to get back on the path we climbed up a big rock to see where the heck we were.....Bam! holy cow there was the massive Zambezi river in all its glory glowing underneath a beautiful sunset. It was an exhilarating moment, we were overlooking the entire town tin shanties and mud huts mixed with abandoned Portuguese buildings, and modern houses that you would never see in an equivalent sized town in Malawi. Everybody beneath us was carrying out their evening chores; The fishermen were bringing their boats in with the days catch, women were carrying baskets of clothes on their heads they had washed in the river, naked children were bathing and playing in the rivers inlets, and the last few travelers from Sena were pushing their bikes across the 2.5 mile long bridge that we would ride across in the morning.

Most of all we were blown away by the sheer size of the Zambezi river. It seemed to me to be every bit as wide as every section I have seen of the Mississippi. The bridge that spans it is Ponta De Donna Anna. It is an industrial marvel built in 1934 with just a railroad track and a small catwalk. riding our bikes across was a trip; weaving around women carrying fruit on their heads, and having motorcycles weave around us on the narrow catwalk. We stopped every now and then to look for crocodiles and hippos, and just admire the skyline; from the Zambezi wetlands to the Mountains off in the distance. The rest of the day was the long hot ride to Caia, on an empty dusty road.