Jun 22 - Car Trouble

June 22

Swiping a cow on our way up from Blantyre after innumerable difficulties with our car servicing the day before was enough fun with cars for one weekend. As we took off from Dedza, an hour south of Lilongwe, to pick Cat and Sandy up from Kamuzu Airport, the previous day’s antics were well and truly forgotten. That is, until 30 minutes into the drive at a little over 100km/h when an unholy explosion threw the car sideways on the road, pieces of shredded tyre flying everywhere like confetti. Despite the tread of our front right tyre having just self combusted, the inner rubber of the tyre proper somehow managed to hold itself together whilst we rolled safely to a stop.

We were then descended upon by a cacophony of intrigued but friendly locals from a nearby collection of grass-thatched mud huts who were very quick to lend a helping hand. Kids scattered tree braches up the road to warn oncoming motorists, older boys spun the jack handle furiously to lift the car, and the young adults took the wheel to help change over to the spare. Within 15 minutes, even accounting for the jack not actually being big enough to lift the car off the ground, we were on our way once again, minus a few pieces of plastic guarding around the wheel that had been obliterated by the shredded rubber.

It’s always funny listening to the innumerable car troubles that people seem to run into here in Malawi. Whether it’s the crappy condition of many road surfaces, the ageing population of second hand cars going around, or the plethora of extra obstacles to avoid whilst driving, you seem to hear of many more car trouble stories than back in Australia. Seven punctures in one day on a trip to Zambia, hitting a pedestrian at night, being arrested by Interpol for driving a stolen vehicle, totaling the back of a car thanks to a tree in a game park, a wheel falling off a moving high speed vehicle, driving off the side of a narrow bridge, shattering the suspension four wheel driving, countless stories of overheating, abandoning cars in the middle of nowhere that simply pack it in. You name it… all very true first hand stories from our expat friends in Malawi, and that’s before you even begin on the minibus mayhem.

But there’s one string of bad luck from an English mate of ours which simply takes the cake. Arriving not long after we got to Blantyre and finding an absolute steal of a price on a Toyota Serf, Chris was warned by all and sundry that maybe his ‘too good to be true’ price was, well, too good to be true. Needless to say, one week after taking it on, having had a reputable mechanic tell him that it all looked fine, he was back at the same mechanic now being told that it was riddled with problems. Multiple thousand kwacha and several weeks later, the red beast was back on the road. One week later, however, the mechanic was reading out another sorry diagnostic array. A complete engine overhaul this time, many more weeks and several hundred thousand kwacha.

Two months later, after several increasingly irritable phone calls, Chris finally hears from the mechanic that he hasn’t even picked the car up from his garage, let along started working on it. A few more heated exchanges and the mechanic decides that Chris is a ‘bad customer’ and tells him where to go (so much for ‘the customer is always right’ policy). Several more months later and another mechanic finally picks up the car, only to hit him with the news that several parts need to be purchased because the previous guy has stolen several of them. Finally, with everything ready to go with the repairs, only nine or ten months later, Chris has managed to lose half the parts he struggled for so long to find. Too good to be true? Maybe.

Jun 21 - Cow Collecting

June 21

Trying to screech to a halt from almost 100km/h is no easy feat, especially in the dark of night with a cow having suddenly wandered onto the road. Needless to say, when we managed to thud into the impressively large beast, its head cracking into the windscreen with a rather disturbing ‘cow’s head hitting a windscreen’-like sound, it just capped off what can only be described as a bad day.

12 hours earlier we had awoken to a sunny Saturday, the start of holidays. With Cat and Sandy arriving the following day in Lilongwe, we thought we could quickly get our car serviced that morning, then whip up to the small village of Dedza, an hour from the capital, for an afternoon of reading books, relaxing, and enjoying being out of town.

The first hitch to the day came when the mechanic, a highly recommended guy who services vehicles for big businesses around town, turned up an hour and a half late. Added to this, a part I had bought was apparently not to his liking, so he had to then head back into town and get the right one, further delaying things. Four hours later, having sat around the house waiting impatiently, they told us the 3-4 hour service would only be an hour more. Two hours later it was only 20 minutes more, then an hour and a half after that we finally had our car ready to roll. Got to love Malawi.

Being able to finally laugh that one off we jumped in the car to head off, ready for our holiday to begin. You can then imagine how calmly I reacted when our previously perfect vehicle began spluttering and stalling after driving for less than five minutes. Another hour later, our mechanic having met us at a service station and rather swiftly fixed the problem, we drove out of Blantyre a few minutes before 4.30pm (okay… so it had been my fault buying crappy spark plugs).

The problems with driving in the dark in Malawi are so innumerable that it makes planning your day rather carefully around not driving in the dark in Malawi a very worthwhile undertaking. Given yesterday was the winter solstice and hence the shortest day of the year, we would not have that luxury this time. At dusk every man and his dog (or 'every villager and his sack of maize flour,' as they say here) are frantically scurrying along the road trying to get home before darkness falls, with no sense of danger from the cars hurtling by them. Many of the cars, buses and trucks only sport one headlight, and for some even that is too much, which makes detecting them extremely difficult given the complete absence of any street lighting. Not to mention that several drivers have just finished off their afternoon Greens or Chibuku, with absolutely no notion that drink driving may be somewhat dangerous. Add to this a random pothole or two, almost invisible police road blocks and stray dogs, goats and cows and you have yourself one hell of a difficult drive.

So when the aforementioned bovine wandered into our headlights from the abyss of darkness, despite a good swerve and a few metres of tyre being painted onto the road, we still managed to collect a good portion of his head with our windscreen whilst traveling at the best part of 30-40km/h. Luckily, other than one hell of a headache for the cow, and a bloody fast heartbeat for Heth, everyone went their separate ways unharmed.

“What the hell was he thinking!” was Heth’s immediate reaction, a little shaken.
“Heth,” I laughed, “he’s a cow.”

Jun 14 - Ole Ole Ole!

Egyptians in Blantyre

June 14

Just when you think you've seen everything this country has to offer, you end up somewhere like a football match. And not just any match either. Malawi versus Egypt, the current Africa Cup title holders, in a World Cup qualifier. By all accounts it was to be a whitewash - the Malawi Flames being no match for the professional outfit of the Pharoahs, even if it was on our home turf. But that didn't stop thousands upon thousands of energetic locals finding their way into Kamuzu Stadium for a day of singing and tension to spur the local team on.

A 0-0 draw would have been nice given how much Malawi had thrown at the Egyptians without any reward, saving some face against the strongest of their group before the return leg in Cairo. After all, Malawi had disposed of the struggling Djibouti 8-1 two weeks earlier at the same ground, then held themselves to a respectable 1-0 defeat in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then, three and a half minutes into stoppage time, several spectators already pouring out to beat the rush, with the ref 30 seconds from blowing his whistle for the final time, the red, black and green slotted through an incredible goal, and the crowds went completely insane. Malawi had just knocked off the single strongest football nation on the continent, and the eruption in the shoulder to shoulder stands was nothing short of apocalyptic in celebration. The rhythmic dancing and jumping, indescribable to watch, looked as though it would collapse all four stands simultanouesly, and no doubt the roar could be heard kilometres from the ground. If there's one thing these guys no how to do, it's party when things are good. And right that second, they weren't getting any better.

I've seen hysteria at football grounds, whether an Australia-Uruguay qualifyier several years ago which we took 1-0, or an Aussie Rules match when 90,000 strong lift the roof of the stadium at the start of a game, but nothing quite comes close to the frenetic, almost-surreal chantings of a stadium full of Africans. This was most definitely one to remember for a very long time to come.

MA-LA-WI! MA-LA-WI! MA-LA-WI! OLE... OLE, OLE, OLE... OLE... OLE!

Jun 9 - Ele's on the Loose

June 9

These beasts are bloody big, right? If you haven’t seen a wild African elephant up close, with over 6-tonne of pure muscle staring at the insignificant little human figure in front of it, you may not quite understand just how threatening these animals really can be. Given a single move that a well grown adult considers not to its liking, he’ll flip even the sturdiest of vehicles without so much as raising a sweat. So as you can well imagine, physically relocating several of these behemoths from one Malawian game reserve to another, over 100km away, is not exactly a stroll in the park. The locals here aren’t the best at anything to do with organisation, so getting the South Africans in for this job was probably not the worst idea in the world.

Helicopter spotters complete with stun-dart armed rangers, massive craning equipment and elephant sized trucks; there was nothing small about this operation. Apparently all went well over the several weeks of work, with all the required elephants being bundled up successfully from Liwonde and delivered completely unharmed to Majete... hats off to all concerned. The problem, and of course there a problem, lay not in the transporting, but in the fencing. When 6-tonne of pure muscle gets a little disoriented in new surrounds, added to this a pinch of homesickness creeping in, a few flimsy fences ‘aint going to stop it. So as it turns out two of the bigger of the group decided on a little field trip through Southern Malawi… and this isn’t exactly a lightly populated region of the country.

If I was a local Malawian, minding my own business grinding my maize for dinner or lazily slinging my kid over my back and wrapping my chitenge around them, and I was confronted with a large grey monster over one hundred times my weight coming crashing through the trees, I’d shit myself too. Unfortunately for one unsuspecting villager, their reaction to the visiting elephant wasn’t seen as favourable by the oversized intruder, and the poor villager was consequently squashed into nothingness. More distressing however, was the reaction of the authorities who had let this bewildered beast wander off. With the South Africans unable to bring all their fancy equipment to the area where the stray elephant had now wandered (only a few kilometers outside Blantyre), the organisers decided to take matters into their own hands. Dumbo, simply trying to make his way back to Liwonde, was subsequently shot.

Jun 7 - Africa the Country

June 7

‘That’s where Madonna gets her children from, right?’
That’s about the extent of people’s knowledge of this tiny little peaceful country in central southern African that we live, a land area only half the size of the state of Victoria just below the tourist Mecca of Tanzania with its infamous Serengeti. Most people can’t even tell you what continent Malawi lies in, let alone spell the country’s name. It therefore doesn’t come as a great shock when you hear stories such as mailed letters commonly being misdirected to Mali – completely the other side of the continent.

Walking up the Boma Path, one of the most beautiful and most trying routes up Mount Mulanje, with some of our close friends, we heard a story from Ange that typified the world’s knowledge of this little known Commonwealth country. An international NGO worker recently tried to send a package to some of her colleagues in Malawi from her home city in the United States. After two months the delivery hadn’t yet reached Blantyre (which admittedly, isn’t that unheard of here), so she approached the delivery room of the company to find out where the package was ,given the company sends everything via registered mail.
‘Oh, it’s right here on the desk,’ came the official’s reply, obviously nonplussed by this oversight. Disbelieving, she asked why it hadn’t been sent. The reply she got?
‘The postal office sent it back because the address is wrong. You have written Blanytre, Malawi. There’s no country printed on it. You forgot to write that Africa is the country.’

Even Madonna, despite her ‘bond’ with our country, has spent less time here than your average holidaying tourist whilst ‘officially’ acquiring her orphan… but that’s another separate story in its own right.