Life doesn’t get much better than this! Listening to eighties music while cycling along Lake Malawi. It’s Ladies Night Oh What a Night, and Sweet Child of Mine ringing in my ears, dancing down a mountain road that winds its way along the water. This rivals any Garden Route or Great Ocean road.
I am now sitting on the "beach", with my tent 20m away, and Gareth, Rich and Matt chatting to a mute through pictures in the sand. He’s explaining his fishing skills by drawing fish and making actions for pulling the nets in. The Southern Cross points the way to Cape Town. I’m coming home.
Africa is an unfair place and the haves and have nots confronts me every day. But let no-one dispute that it is beautiful. Tanzania was gorgeous and Malawi is holding that bar high. Everyday I have moments I want to catch but know that I can’t record. They flit past me on my bike. I can’t catch them – I have to keep on cycling. Out to my right a hulk of mountain comes down to the water, a light flashes on the top, and a further light flashes on the water’s edge. The road we take follows one of the two: Pray heavens it’s the lower one.
It has been crazy cycling and solid kilometres that keep ticking away. My legs cannot keep this up for much longer. I am physically shattered, and emotionally never better. It is simply gorgeous and daily I am amazed at this phenomenal experience.
The mute, John, is now drawing a clock in the sand and proceeds to explain how the evening star tells the time of night.
The day’s highs: Waking to the sun on the water; listening to Gwen Stefani and pumping my legs to her quirky rhythm; lunch at Chilumba at the jetty restaurant; long shadowed afternoons of greeting locals whilst winding my way along the cliff face; washing my hair in the lake; coffee now. It is a tough life!
It is never too easy to remember the lows, but they are always there: Hearing the alarm go before sunrise; the last 20km before lunch feeling finished and wanting to throw my bike into the water (if it weren’t for Gareth’s back wheel I could well have!); getting approached in the restaurant by a con man with a kid giving us a heavy story that this was an orphan – the kid ended up being his younger brother and was visibly upset because of the distance from its mother.
Ah yes – high: At lunch we were sat down at the table with our newly arrived food and the thirteen year old daughter of the house says, "Don’t you want to pray?" At first we thought she was asking us to pay for the meal before eating it and we were about to throw our toys in tourist’s disbelief at the ridiculous proposition… until she knelt on the floor and led us in grace. They were wonderful people. And that restaurant held my first authentic African long drop experience – can’t beat that!
Let’s not underestimate the cycling though! It has now been 1450km in 13 days with only 3 rest days, 700 km of which was on a dirt road. That is no joke. Today was our sixth day of cycling without a rest – and we have two to go before we take an extended break at Nkhata Bay. It’s heavy going and we don’t seem to be giving our bodies the time to recuperate. Maybe that is in the mind though – perhaps with each new day of going through the motions we will get stronger and tougher. But for now, my thighs are tight and my back side is not too comfortable and I have strange pang in my back. My skin feels weathered and I feel like a seasoned traveller that badly needs some home comforts and a Laundromat. A fresh salad would be pretty unreal too.
Not complaining – but it would be pretty good!
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