Visitors and Vacation

3/22/08

I didn’t take time in the last post to tell a great story about what it takes to get things done over here.  The visitors visa you get when you arrive here is stamped into your passport and is good for 30 days only – John looked at our passports and discovered it as I had thought it was good for 60 days.  So the last time we were in Mzuzu, we went to the immigration office as we understood that we needed to apply for a temporary residency permit to extend our visas for the 6 months we will be here.

Since we don’t get to Mzuzu very often, we were already about 2 weeks past our “legal” date when we went, and we were chastised by the immigration officer for being here illegally.  He said, “do you know that this is against the law?  What would you think if I came and did this in the US?”  We were appropriately contrite, and apologetic and he extended our visa for 3 weeks to give us time to complete the paperwork needed and to get another passport sized photo for John, who’s photos we took for this purpose were in the still missing luggage.

So before we left Mzuzu on Tuesday, we went back with all our paperwork in order for a “quick stop to take care of this on the way out of town.”  So we go back to the same place and are told we need to “go to room 2”  except that none of the rooms have any numbers on them and we walk down a long hall and finally find 2 rooms that are numbered room 1 and room 2 – the only numbered rooms on the floor. 

We wait for the chief immigration officer, and present our paperwork, which he checks and confirms is all in order except that we need 2 copies of each of the 2 forms, and their copy machine is broken.  So off we go to try to find somewhere that has a copier, in the rain, and when I walk down to the place a ½ block or so away where I saw a sign, I can’t find a shop where the sign points.  We go to find our driver to see if he can help and drive off only to see the place about ¾ of a block away with the sign blown over.  Get our copies, go back. 

The chief immigration officer is busy so we wait again, give him our copies and he starts to collate them, and his stapler is broken.  Fortunately he is able to fix it, and declares everything in order so we should go back down the hall to pay our 5000 kwacha (about $35) each.  No computerized system here so the clerk has to complete the receipt with carbon copies by hand, one receipt for each of us, then the forms have to be stamped, each copy (including the carbon copies) with the official stamp, whacking the ink pad and the copies a total of about 10 times. 

Total elapsed time, 1½ hours, for what should have been a 15 minute deal max. 

 3/25/08

Our friends who will be staying with us, doing some volunteer work for 2 weeks and looking at the possibility of coming back next year for 9 months or so, arrived without a hitch 3 nights ago.  We were a little jealous of the fact that all their luggage arrived, and were also grateful for it, since Mary Ellen has 6 some stethoscopes to give as gifts at the Nursing College for the graduates, and it would have been horrible to lose them. 

I’m going to go back later and talk a little more about our time in Lilongwe before they arrived as we had a chance to meet with John’s friend from the Peace Corps, and he took us to meet a wonderful man, but there isn’t going to be time to do that before we have to leave internet territory I don’t think.  Instead I’m going to talk about our day yesterday at the Nkhotakota National Park.

We decided to rent a car again and drive our friends back up north via Nkotakota, since that is somewhere we almost went to when we came back in September.  It is a very large, completely undeveloped park and wildlife area, where there are no roads, so all safaris are walking safaris with a guide and a rifle escort from the park service.  We are staying at the Nkhotakota Safari Lodge, which is a short walk from the Pottery Lodge, a slightly more upscale accommodation we are told, and where you can also learn to make pottery by the local craftspeople. 

I am sitting on the porch of our room about 30 feet from Lake Malawi watching the sun come up and listening to the breaking waves roll in.  The rooms are large and comfortable and charmingly furnished, so I’m not sure how the lodge could have been any nicer, but I’m sure it is.

Yesterday we went on a full day walking safari which I thought was going to be “tailored” for the mzungu level of fitness and energy,  Wrong – and while we were all about half dead by the time we finished, it was that very satisfied kind of half dead you get after accomplishing something you know is a real feat.  We were eagerly anticipating seeing some exciting wildlife, as last week, they saw a lion take down an antelope and were close enough to hear the lion’s heavy breathing as it ran by.  They also so Water Buffalo and Elephant, but game viewing is very difficult now during the rainy season because of the dense growth and ready availability of water. 

We walked about 5 miles through grass that was twice our height part of the time, dense forest, across streams (we all fell trying to step on the slippery fording rocks) ate lunch next a picture postcard waterfall that was probably 500 yards wide (our guide told us that it was maybe a tenth that size in the dry season) which I’m attaching a photo of from where we sat for 15 minutes for a rest stop.  There were not trails where we were, we were simply walking through the forest and grasslands.   I slipped on a large rock that sloped down into the water and had to have our guide help me up as I couldn’t get any purchase with my downslope foot as the rock was slick from the water (just a bit of a bruise on the side of the leg and a little scrape on the knee fortunately since we were a long was from the start of rangers house.

We saw some crocodiles there, and got bitten by some big ants that you had to actually rub or pick off your skin as they got a hold of a piece of skin and couldn’t be simply brushed off.  Later in the walk we smelled an elephant close by, but didn’t see it, saw some fresh zebra and water buffalo tracks, and saw quite a few baboons after lunch – the guide said that baboons are often near animals, but not that we could see yesterday.   Despite the lack of animal sightings, it was a magnificent day in the wild.  Much of the time we weren’t even on any trails, but our guide knew the area well enough we could just tramp through the woods and then find a trail periodically to walk on until we veered into the woods again. 

On the way back we went to see the tree in the village of Nkhotakota that memorializes the place where David Livingstone signed a treaty with the local chief (who at that time was Arab as Nkhotohota was one of the worst terminals in Africa for slave trade, mostly to the east.  John and I knew some of the history from our readings, but Frank our guide added some great detail.  One of the reasons Livingstone is revered in Malawi, even thought he represents the Europeans who went on to colonize them, is that he stopped the despicable slave trade.