Leaving Malawi

We arrive at the Mzuzu bus station a few minutes after 11 p.m. after a Christmas with one thousand drunk Malawians at the Nkhata Bay beach. Moses and Jenipher drop us off in his shiny gold eight-seater Ford Expedition. The station is a gladiatorial amphitheater of a place. Ten steep steps surround a bus staging area on two sides, gates on the other two for combatants to enter and be dragged away. A few empty buses sleep on the arena floor. A cluster of long distance Christmas travelers sprawl along the steps. Some are stretched out sleeping. Others drinking sodas and talking. Maybe fifteen or twenty in all. Unidentified sacks of cargo obscure the entrance to the Taqwa bus booking office. I presume they are filled with corn, rice or sugar, and that they will ride underneath us to Dar Es Salaam.

We drink Fanta, play Skippo, and stretch legs in anticipation of another long bus journey while we wait. Around 1 a.m., a man tells us we nee to go around the corner to the Kotota Filling Station. The bus is there. Annette leads the pack, anxious to secure two seats next to each other on a bus without assigned seats. “Mohamed Coach Livery,” the ticket says. “IN ALLAH WE TRUST” is written on the back in large capital letters. It is an orange bus with “Bismillah” written across the top of the windshield. The seats are red an comfortable. The interior lights are red, green and blue, making it feel as much club as mode of transport. After two failed attempts, Annette gets a nine-year-old boy to move so we can sit together. The seats don't recline. There is no air conditioning, but the windows open. The bus is dark. We both doze in and out of sleep for the next several hours as we wind through the mountains to Songwe, Malawi's most major northern border.

We arrive at the border after a typically early Malawian dawn. It's a few minutes before 5:30 a.m. I say no to the steady stream of black market money changers, piss on a tree, and strike up a conversation with the two other white guys on the bus. One is Brazilian and lives in Seattle. The other is from Minnesota and on vacation from the Peace Corps in Uganda. With Annette's prompting, I brush my teeth. The border doesn't open for another hour, so we play some more cards. We pull through the Malawian side, one more stamp on our passports, a few minutes after 7 a.m.

The Tanzanian side requires Visas. And, for some reason, the bus crew decides to rotate all of the bus' tires. I change kwacha for Tanzanian schillings, (multiplying by ten in my head, despite an exchange rate of six), spend fifty cents on a breakfast of fried dough balls, and wait. I think about our time in Malawi.

Between the mountains and the lake, it is an absolutely beautiful country. And rainy season didn't amount to much while we were there. Just a few brief storms and some refreshingly cool overcast days. Parts of days, really. Our time there was mostly shaped by our last four days with Moses in Mzuzu. He is a recognized civil society leader, maybe in his late 30s or early 40s. He is definitely a member of the small educated Malawian elite in one of the poorest countries in Africa. Despite the fuel crisis, we spend a portion of every day riding around in his SUV with the windows open and air conditioning blasting. He doesn't have to wait in line for fuel. He has a staff member at work that does it, and gets his personal supply then too. He does, however, have to use his mouth to create a vacuum when siphoning food from the 55 gallon drum he keeps at the house into his Ford.

We spend an even greater portion of each day drinking and rubbing shoulders with the Malawian elite at the country club. It is a nine-hole golf club, but nobody seems to even know how to play golf there. Instead, they drink Jameson and water and talk politics. And talking politics mostly consists of criticizing the current regime. The mood ranges from cynicism and drunken depression to optimism accompanied by elaborate plans for regime change. These in a whisper of course, despite the fact that everybody in the club feels the same.

The conversation is interesting, although tiring after a few days. We joke that Moses one day may be president of Malawi. We joke, but the brains and ambition are definitely there. And, perhaps, the networks. Inevitably, as the nights wear on, the conversation gets more colorful and comical, complete with the inane ramblings of a few old important drunk men. Sometimes on the subject of the recently passed Chief Justice whose funeral we just attended. Sometimes on the state of the country and its economy. Sometimes, just inane babble. Often invitations for us to move to Malawi. And it is almost all men. A bit too much unchecked chauvinistic testosterone for me at times.

We pull off again a few minutes after 9:30 a.m. Malawi's lush mountains continue into Tanzania outside the bus window. It starts to rain as we pass a crane unsuccessfully trying to tug a truck out of a ditch off the side of the road. A man disconnects the chain from the back of the truck and covers his head with a piece of cardboard. After Mbeya, the rain clears. The mountains become high plateau. A waterfall cascades in the distance, a streak of white the length of a hillside. I imagine lions and leopards but only see an occasional cow or goat. And lots of hoed rows in various stages of sprouting. We eat bananas, oranges, peanuts and wafers we buy through the bus window. I dream of Zanzibar. And water we can swim in without worrying about bihlazia. And the arrival of our Christmas present—my sister—in Dar Es Salaam tomorrow.

I make it through most of the battery life and a large portion of the 12,438 songs on my Ipod on shuffle before we arrive in Dar. It is 2:30 a.m. when we wake the woman at reception at the Dar Es Salaam YMCA. But there are rooms available. And anything is better than that bus.