Lake Malawi

Posted on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 06:50

  Everyone is enjoying the peacefulness of this beautiful place at Lake Malawi. The Lake is so massive it honestly feels like we are at an ocean resort. We can’t see to the other side of the lake and we listen to the splash of the waves day and night. The beach is all sand and stretches from our 2 story cottages to the water’s edge with palm and flowering trees for shade sprinkled here and there. When the sun is shining the sun and is too hot to walk on. We arrived Thursday and already everyone is slathering themselves with aloe vera to sooth the redness of their skin. We did remember the sunscreen this time!!

The water is just perfect! We swim all day long. Snorkeling is a big attraction. We are thankful we brought snorkels and masks. Lake Malawi is where most of the fresh water aquarium tropical fish come from. Cindy, I actually figured out the snorkeling and I only nearly drowned once… Teresa was panicky about learning to snorkel, too, but she has learned. The nice thing here is you can see lots of fish in a foot of water, so that makes the learning easier. So far, we haven’t persuaded Antionette to try it.  We can see a few fish here and there on at our beach; a red one here, a purple one there, little striped ones, but a walk down the beach past a village takes us to a place where the mountain meets the lake. Amongst the rocks are some of the most beautiful fish by the thousands. Jason has been here 4 times and he had no idea that the fish were so impressive here because he didn’t have a snorkel. He has been snorkeling in Zanzibar and other places and he said he hasn’t seen this many fish in one spot. We don’t know the name of a single fish and we don’t have a book, but there are a lot of blue and black striped fish and yellow ones, orange, green, white, spotted, striped, etc…

Antionette and Jason asked to borrow the binoculars yesterday afternoon. They were seeing smoke coming off the water which is a strange phenomenon of this lake. We had watched the Planet Earth DVD about Lake Malawi and it had shown that the smoke coming off the water was actually a certain kind of insect coming out of the water to mate. We all felt privileged to see this.

We have been feasting on common yellow mangoes. We have been eating so many that some have to stay pretty close to the restroom!! The stomach cramps hit at unexpected times and you have to run. We have also been eating pommelos – which I don’t really know how to spell and my computer doesn’t recognize, but they are those over-sized grapefruits. We have really enjoyed them. We have so much fruit it’s piled on the ground under a tree. We gave up on fruit salads. Everyone is free to go and peel and all they can hold. Common mangoes are the stringiest mangoes ever, so you can’t really slice them. They do wonders to braces!

We have a charcoal burner and cook breakfast and supper there. For lunch we eat at the cafeteria for about a dollar and half each. It’s pretty simple but they do all the cooking, clean up and dishes, so we figure it is quite worth it. This is our vacation, after all. Bread is too expensive so we do without.

Steve found a us a nice little scorpion in our room yesterday and then last night he caught a huge spider and all her babies. There are plenty of bats in the roof making an interesting commotion at night.

I have made my bird list ad I have seen about 70 birds here in Africa so far. Two of which we see back home. We were enjoying the African paradise-flycatchers yesterday. They are mostly orange with a black head and long tail streamers. There are not as many water birds here as I thought there should be. I have been watching pied kingfishers and cormorants, but not much else near the water.

It’s amazing we are only just over the mountains from Mago. We saw ladies in the next village stacking their pottery and getting ready to carry it over the mountain to nearby where mom lives. They planned to walk all night (about 8 hours) up and over the mountains to Belongwe to market. It’s about an 9 thousand feet elevation difference. You have to be really strong to do that! The people here are strong. You can see their muscles ripple under their black, suntanned skin.

The people by the lake are different from the mountain people. We walked through a village on the beach that speaks neither Swahili nor Kinga. They have their own language and culture. Just nearby is another village with another tribe altogether. In one village they are fishermen, in the other they make pottery. They all spend time in the water and are not at all ashamed to be naked! Jason felt a little out of place walking down the beach with a Jonah and Sam on either side of him. He just wanted to get them through the village quick, but then we have them bathing in front of our cottage at times. The people process their cassava and lay it out in the sun to dry. The smell is enough to make you want to puke. It’s bad! They ferment the stuff first and it is absolutely putrid. The fish smell is pretty strong, too.

Although there are cel towers all around, I can’t get online here. My computer keeps saying welcome to Malawi and that’s as far as I get. I know there are vodocom signals here, but the other signals are so strong they over-ride it. I can charge my computer when the generator comes on at night because 220 voltage is fine for computers, but the computer cord is so bad now it takes us a half an hour to get it to work. Every time I use it I really wonder if this is the last time the cord will work.

Emily turns 3 tomorrow. Antionette and Jason’s anniversary is just around the corner. We have really enjoyed our time with them. I was telling Twalisa that we have seen more of them this year than ever before. They visited our place on furlough twice and we have been seeing them off and on for the last two months.

It’s hard to believe one week from today we will be leaving Africa.