*
Still a little unsure of my stomach I chose not to eat breakfast before our next travelling day. We started with a short drive down to Zomba where Geoff went off to get our repaired wheel and the rest of us spent an hour exploring the densely packed stalls of Zomba Market. This is a large market with a number of brick halls in it as well as hundreds of wooden stalls. Two of the buildings are filled with fruit and vegetables while a third sells only grain and rice and a fourth sells fish that, judging by the smell, is already a long way past its edible date.
We left Zomba on a very bad road which had once been tarmacked but had deteriorated to the point where it was very nearly undrivable. It was made worse by the standard of local driving and a use of signals so eccentric as to border on the surreal. Most drivers use their left signal to indicate to traffic behind them that there is traffic ahead of them, their right indicator to indicate that there is no traffic ahead of them and both indicators together to indicate that they are too drunk to be able to see whether there is traffic ahead or not. Nobody ever uses them to indicate an intention to turn. The result was a fraught and unpleasant couple of hours being rattled around like marbles in a tin can listening to Geoff blast the horn as time after time he was forced to lean on it to encourage people to get out of the way.
There were occasional distractions.
We drove for several miles through tea plantations where there were hundreds of pickers all dressed in yellow oilskins against the dreadful weather.
At a point where the road was being repaired we were diverted past on a sandy track and looking at the work being done it became obvious why the roads disintegrated so easily. It was being constructed by laying a paper thin layer of tarmac on top of an equally thin layer of coarse gravel which was laid directly on top of the sandy ground.
We were forced to stop to tighten the nuts on one of our wheels near a coffee plantation where we got out and stretched our legs for a few minutes and took a few pictures in the grey light of the rain soaked morning.
A funeral procession of dozens of slow moving mourners blocked the road. We tried to pass and an angry mourner, appalled at our disrespect banged on our windows and shouted abuse.
At Mulanje town we turned off this highway onto a dirt track and once again I noticed that the quality of the dirt roads was actually much higher than the tarmac ones. We paused to let someone climb on board. He turned out to be the leader of the porters who would go up Mount Mulanje. A few minutes later we reached a group of single storey brick buildings. Before we had even come to a halt a group of locals were gathered trying to sell us things. Geoff was having none of it. He told them sharply that no-one would be buying anything today and that anyone who hung around wouldn't be welcome when we did buy things in two days time. Reluctantly they all packed up their selections of traditional carved animals, traditional carved tables, traditional carved boxes and traditional carved CD racks and left.
Geoff turned to us.
"Now, " he said "I've decided that those of us going up the mountain will be going today. In about twenty minutes. The weather has cleared up for the moment and as we can't guarantee tomorrow we will go while we have the chance. Sheila, Barry and Bob have decided to stay behind so how do the rest of you feel ?"
There were some grumblings and misgivings but Louise, David and Sarah all agreed. An hour later, rather than the expected twenty minutes, they were on their way.
Mount Mulanje is an isolated block of mountains covering about 245 square miles. It rises from a flat and featureless plain 2000 feet above sea level. The granite peak, Sapitwa4, is the highest in central Africa at almost 10000 feet. The whole mountain is covered by a variety of trees, brachystegia, imported exotic pines and eucalyptus and the endemic Mulanje Cedar from whose aromatic wood so many of the carvings are made. This tree is unique to the massif. Typically it reaches 140 feet with a clear trunk to about 60 feet and a base diameter of 5 or 6 feet. However over-felling and poaching of the wood is causing severe deforestation.
The house where we were staying was two bedroomed with a small dining room, a kitchen and a toilet and shower room. The bedrooms each contained two primitive and uncomfortable beds, the dining rooms a couple of chairs and a table, the kitchen a sink with a single tap and a gas ring and the toilet a similar sink, a flush toilet and an unhygienic looking shower.
It was because of my continuing stomach problems that I had decided not to do the optional ascent. At lunch I had foolishly decided to eat a few sandwiches, having not eaten for the previous twenty four hours. It had been a mistake and several more trips to the toilet convinced me that not climbing the mountain had been a good idea. It also convinced me not to eat in the evening. Nevertheless I did join the others while they ate and when the meal was over we sat around talking. Part of the conversation demonstrated exactly what was wrong with Barry. I had told the story of how when I was in Cuzco in Peru I had given a pen to a child begging in the main city square. The next day the same child had come up to me and proudly showed me that he still had the pen. Barry of course could do better. In his version of the story he had not given a beggar a pen because that would have been encouraging a dependency culture. Instead he had sat down and given the child an English lesson. Several other children had come until he was taking a whole class. The next day the child was back with one of his teachers from school who insisted that Barry should go with her to the school and teach a class of the teachers. He had ended up, or so he said, as a guest lecturer at the University.
I have no idea whether story was entirely true, entirely fictional or somewhere in between, and I don't really care. It simply illustrates the kind of automatic self-satisfaction bordering on piety that made up almost all of his conversation.
When the conversation died, murdered by the tortuous nature of Barry's anecdotes, we all retired for the night.
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