Ku Chawe Trout Farm

Williams Falls.

A view down from the Zomba Plateau

After two days in Blantyre, Annette is ready to leave. We catch a ride in the rain past fuel lines twenty cars long to the bus station. Next bus to Zomba isn't for another three hours. So we walk to catch a mini bus (equivalent of a tro tro) to Limbe, the next town over, and another one to Zomba. The minibus is the most loaded down yet. Things are packed and repacked.. People squeezed, alternating shoulders forward, shoulders back, layered to fit. We sit, knees pressed into the seats in front of us for close to an hour or so before it leaves Limbe station. As usual, a parade of items for sale passes us while we wait. Cold Fanta in glass bottles. The good kind with real sugar instead of corn syrup. Hand-tied bags of water. Processed corn nuts. Sunglasses. Samosas. Styrofoam boxes with unknown edible contents. A huge platter of rice with small blue bags for measuring servings to order. Bags of french fries fried in metal sinks over charcoal fires. The rain chases them off, but only for a moment.

We pull off through a gauntlet of minibuses strewn about the station like toddlers' toys. We exit town through one lane of traffic. The other is taken up by cars and trucks parked in both directions waiting for gas to arrive at the Total station. There are probably forty cars and trucks in the queue. Maybe more. As far as I have been able to piece together without the worldwide web, BBC or New York Times, here's why:

Malawi is one of the poorer nations on earth and deeply dependent on foreign aid and investment (forex). Fuel cannot be bought on credit. Everybody who tells me this story makes that point early on. So I figure I should just go ahead and get it out of the way. The Malawian president supposedly bought a private jet with foreign aid money. He may have even done this on credit in anticipation of the money coming. Well, the money was late. Word about the jet got around. Two homosexuals were arrested in Malawi for being homosexual, leaving the foreign community (Europe and the U.S.) up in arms. And fuel was trickling in to begin with through one main road that is under construction on the border with Mozambique, or so a early afternoon drunk Malawian female tour guide told me. So, the story goes tat upset by the jet and the human rights violations, the foreigners threatened to cut aide if the prez didn't change his ways and apologize. The Malawian president scoffed at this. Some say he was egged on by his friend, Mugabe. In this effort to show strength and independence (albeit a heavily dependent economy and national budget), the tiff escalated. The British ambassador was kicked out. Forex was stopped. So fuel trickles into the country only at the rate for which the Malawian government can pay cash for it. Very slowly. And that is the story of how Malawi got its petrol queues.

The traffic of Limbe, however, quickly fades into the green lush mountainscape that is southern Malawi. Rows of corn two-and-a-half feet high fill the foreground. The roadsides host steady stream of people on bicycles, people carrying wood and makeshift stalls selling green and yellow mangoes and bright red tomatoes. The road is mostly straight and mostly paved. Our speed is scary. And I can't see our the windows. If I slouch so I can see, I end up with my knees in my chin. So I do my best to look out the back window at what we just sped by.

The bus driver drops us at the bottom of the hill after the one traffic light in Zomba. We walk one hundred happily-dry yards to the guidebook recommended Tasty Bites. It is a crowded outdoor cafe with a steady stream of ice cream coming out. It has the right proportion of white people (about 10-20%) to know it is a good place. Behind it, the granite walls of the Zomba Plateau, decorated for the holidays in bright green foliage, rise five hundred meters toward an ominous sky. I order the beef curry and rice for 450 kwachas. Annette the chicken shwarma and chips and an order of veggie samosas to split. They come last and are the best. On the day we arrived in Malawi, the exchange rate was 250 kwachas to the dollar. Today it is 160. We ask the waiter how to hitchhike to the Zomba Plateau and how much we should expect to pay. He explains that it is about 10 kilometers. Malawians pay 200 kwacha, but they will try to charge us more. We should say we paid 200 kwacha last time we went and see if that works.

We walk up the main road to the first turnoff up the hill. There's a pullout just after the turn, so we hang there. The first few cars don't stop. The sixth one does. A man wearing a South Africa hat is driving. He leans across the young man in the passenger seat to greet me. “Are you going to Ku Chawe?” he asks. We are. “Where are you from?”

“Louisiana,” Annette answers.

“Oh! I have been to Mississippi.”

Annette stands up from her curbside seat and approaches the car to explain that she is really from Mississippi.

“I was actually just stopping while this young man runs into the Metro Cash and Carry to get me something. But you shouldn't have any trouble getting a ride.” He goes on to explain he is the only Malawian with a Ph. D. in Physical Education. He is a professor at the local college. Went to Virginia Tech. Spent six weeks in Mississippi, but can't remember the name of the town. We spend the next five minutes naming every Mississippi town we can think of. But it is none of them. He gets out of the car to say goodbye. I hand him a card and tell him to e-mail us when he thinks of the name. In a final covert effort for a ride, I ask him if this is the best place for us to stand to get a ride. “No,” he explains, “most people are going to the club just up on the left. You should go past that.” But his directions quickly lead to, “Get in. I will give you a ride to that spot.”

As we continue to guess Mississippi towns, he keeps driving up the hill. Finally he insists on driving us all the way to Ku Chawe Trout Farm, our accommodation for the evening. Zomba, the sky, sun and clouds stretch out below us as we wind up. With every 20 kph turn, we grow more thankful not to have to carry our packs up this far. He takes us up Down Road and saves us from having to climb Up Road.

The trout farm is quiet. Just inside the gate, five men are digging a trench for a water line. Its pools and cabins are all empty. We are greeted by name (the benefit of one of our only reservations of the trip) by man with a smile named Christopher. We say goodbye to the professor who has already picked up two passengers for the ride down. He refuses the 500 kwacha bill I try to shove in his hand. We look at two options for the 2,000 kwacha cabin we reserved. The first is spacious with pots, a deep freezer, and a sitting area. But our only food is some trail mix, a few apples and two bottles of water. The second is half the size but smells like fresh cedar. Annette chooses the smaller one.

We drop our bags and wander out in the drizzle. We walk past the empty trout pools. The only trout in sight is in a stylized head-over-tail turn printed on a piece of paper on the inside of our cabin door. A few faded signs label tall trees around the picnic area. Cinnamon and cedar it looks to be. The picnic area yields to a campsite occupied by a tent and a 4Runner, two Jerry cans of fuel on its roof, its contents lavishly spread across a picnic table under a gazebo at its rear. We ask the tent's inhabitants for a corkscrew, learn they are from New York, and thank them anyway. The trail passes a vacant, labeled guardhouse, and follows a stream before petering out. As it peters, the rain picks up. We turn around. We walk back past the entrance and take a left toward Williams Falls.

As we climb, the view opens to reveal a ridge line half-enveloped in mist. The forest smells sweet. Wet pine. And a smell halfway between honeysuckle and rosemary. It evades description. It comes from a trumpet-shaped white flower. It all looks like the world does through the super vivid setting on our camera. Ten thousand shades of radiant green. A red-leafed plant that looks almost fuchsia. And brilliant pink and purple bougainvillea. It all reminds me of Romancing the Stone, which has filed itself most likely incorrectly as my parents' favorite movie from my childhood.

A man walks by with a log on his head, five meters long, 15 inches in diameter. He is barefoot. So is the man walking his bike down the hill. His bike stacked six feet high with logs. Children walk by with bags of petite peaches, passion fruit, berries and rock crystals for sale. They call this the potato path. The potatoes are grown on the northern side of the plateau. They follow the path to the market in Zomba, along with wood, fruit, and people. The potatoes are mostly yellow egg-sized things. A path to the left leads us to Cascade Falls—fifty meters of water three inches deep, cascading in ripples over smooth black granite.

It's dark by the time we make it back to the Trout Farm. Annette brings out the dessert wine, the one purchase from our wine tasting excursion in Stellenbosch, South Africa. I cut through the cork with my knife and pop it into the bottle. Our confiscated corkscrew a la Swiss Army knife is probably languishing somewhere in Senegalese airport security. Surely it is not having as much fun as we are. We sip wine from the bottle while I skunk Annette at successive hands of cribbage before we crawl into a twin bed together.