Travel
Day 16 – Mfuwe to Lusaka: Plans Are Made to Be Changed
Plans are made to be changed. The original plan was six hundred kilometres of the Great East Road on a local bus, a full day of dust, tarmac and endless African savannah. That morning we heard that a jackknifed truck was blocking the Great East Road near the Luangwa Bridge, with traffic stopped in both directions and no clear idea of [...]
Day 15 – South Luangwa: Learning to Look
On the second morning I brought the camera. The day before, I had gone out with binoculars and a phone, the way you do when you are still just gawping at everything. Today I took the proper kit, a Sony ZV-E10 with a 70–350mm telephoto lens, the camera I mostly use for my video podcasts, and something shifted. I spent the day actually [...]
Day 14 – South Luangwa: A Guest in Their World
We were up at five, a light breakfast at half five, out before six into the cold on an open vehicle, the last stars going out. The first safari of the trip was not a drive but a walk. Malama, our guide, took us into the park on foot, with an armed man alongside him, and the whole speed of things changed. A walking safari is not about [...]
Day 13 – Nkhata Bay to Mfuwe: The Seam Between Two Countries
The alarm went at four, and we left at half past, into a night with a huge moon hanging over it. I was exhausted and could not sleep, and I did not much want to; the first hour of road in the dark, the lake somewhere off to the side and the moon over everything, was one of the strange, good parts of the day. This was the one we had been [...]
Day 12 – Nkhata Bay: Three Candles and a Drum
The first morning in eleven days with nowhere to go. We woke in the wooden stilt house out over the lake, the veranda, the hammock, the water right there, and for a while did nothing about any of it, which was the whole point. This was the first real stop of the trip, and after the train and the border and the twenty-two hairpins, waking [...]
Day 11 – Livingstonia to Nkhata Bay: Down to the Lake
Woken by the lake, this time. The night before we had seen it only in the dark; that morning the whole drop below the Cob House veranda ran down to Lake Malawi, and the water turned briefly gold and pink before settling into blue. The bathroom beside the room was the size of a small house, with one wall left open onto the valley. We were [...]
Day 10 – Mbeya to Livingstonia: Twenty-Two Hairpins
We left the Beaco at half past six with a packed breakfast and a driver called Tumaini, who told us it means Hope. Hope took us as far as the border. The border at Songwe is the most broken-down crossing I have seen, apart from one. Dusty shacks, long stretches of dirt track you cover on foot, everything provisional. It took us close to [...]