MARTINA'S WORLD TRIP

MALAWI: June 27 - July 15, 2004
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Sunday, July 4th, 2004 - Mount Mulanje Day IV
Today we returned from the Lichenya Basin to Likabula. Again, we hiked for about five hours and the terrain on our way down was even more scenic than before. For most of the time the path descended smoothly through rainforest-like vegetation. Everything around us was lush and green. Several times we crossed a little stream that later on turned into pretty waterfalls. It got a little steeper at the very end of the trail and at some point I almost sprained my ankle. My knees were aching after so many hours of (unusual) workout and I felt my legs trembling on the way down. When I stumbled and felt that my shoe didn’t get a grip, I was so scared to twist my ankle that I rather threw myself forward to fall on my hands. Clever thinking in the first place but instead of hurting my foot, I hurt one of my hands. I must have hit a sharp stone or something because my left hand was bleeding when I got up. It wasn’t very bad but I had nothing to clean the wound since I left my first-aid kit at the hostel in Blantyre. Yeah I know, not very smart... all I could do was wrap my hand in a tissue and do Reiki on it while we continued our way down. At least, it stopped the bleeding and later on I would see that I had a tiny hole in my hand. It took weeks to heal and I can still feel the scar.

We reached Likabula village in the early afternoon. As we still needed to make it until Blantyre, we decided not to go all the way back to the Forest Station but to wait for a lift right where we came off the mountain. We paid Ramson and told him that his job was done but he was gentleman enough to stay with us until he could be sure that we would be okay. The thing is that we waited quite some time but no car passed by. Well, one or two did but they didn’t stop. In addition to this chain of slightly unlucky events, we realised after a while that we were standing in the middle of a horde of tiny red ants that were getting all over us and our backpacks. They didn’t bite but we would keep finding ants on us for the next few hours...

After we had waited for more than half an hour, Emily and I decided that we would start to walk towards Chitikali. We knew it was about 10km but we couldn’t waste anymore time if we still wanted to catch a minibus to Blantyre before it got dark. We said good-bye to Ramson, one of us took the big rucksack and the other one carried the two smaller backpacks. When we took off, we were still in good spirits but soon it became obvious that it was hard to stay motivated without knowing how much of the way we had already accomplished. The only way to measure our progress was by checking the time. But simply knowing that we had been walking for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes, didn’t tell us how that would translate into kilometres or how much was still ahead of us. As I have absolutely no sense for estimating distances that exceed five metres (don’t forget where I am coming from), I totally relied on Emily when she said that we might have reached one or two kilometres yet. Then again, she was English and they measure in miles, so our mutual understanding of distances was not necessarily the same. Overall, I quickly got discouraged. In the end, I don’t know for how long we were walking, maybe 20 minutes or half an hour (it probably seemed much longer than it really was), until a white pick-up truck came up from behind and stopped when we lifted a thumb. We climbed onto the cargo area and got a ride until Chitikali. Just by seeing how much of the route remained from where we were picked up, we were extremely glad that we didn’t have to walk all the way!

The nice thing about this ride was that – for once – we had plenty of space. The truck was not loaded, except for us and our luggage, and although the road was bumpy and we had to cling to the edge of the cargo area, I did enjoy the view of by-passing tea plantations and beautiful estates. In Chitikali we had a direct minibus connection to Limbe and from there back to Blantyre. We arrived at the hostel around 6 pm. The funny thing was that we ran into two British guys Emily had been travelling with before and who also stayed at Doogles. Chris and Oliver were on their way from South Africa to Tanzania. They were travelling for a total of six months and had bought a jeep in Cape Town to resell it in Dar Es Salaam. We all had dinner together but I went to bed early. The whole Mount Mulanje adventure had been very tiring but was absolutely worth it... thank you Emily!

P.S.: If you are reading this because you plan your own trip, you might be interested in Chris’ and Olly’s travel web site – a very nice one by the way. You can check it out at: http://www.getjealous.com/getjealous.php?username=ohuggins
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