…from Lilongwe is long even though Malawi is not a big country.  We arrived at the bus station extra early to make sure that we got seats in the front because I suffer from a horrible case of motion sickness (I often use sea bands, which are great, but sometimes I also need to take extra measures and I take motion sickness pills, like Bonine). Plus public transportation has been rather unpredictable thus far and one can never be too sure when buses will actually depart, so better early than sorry.

Once we got there, we found the bus that goes to Mzuzu (AXA). According to the man who you buy tickets from, the bus would leave at 8 am….so we had about two hours to kill. All of a sudden, there were talks that the bus would not actually go to Mzuzu. So after clarifying and haggling about departure time, we bought our tickets.
While waiting we met a couple from the Peace Corps who had made the trip to Mzuzu several times and assured us that the bus stops there.
At about 8 the bus was not even half full and by now we have learned that buses usually only departs when the bus is full, so we started to worry a bit about when we would actually leave. At about 9, we started to annoy the driver about getting a move on but he wouldn’t budge. Luckily about an hour later we started to make way.
While we were waiting around at the station, we chatted with the couple and people watched. There is a lot to observe there. And it’s a mix of crazy, sad and a new version of reality. There is a lot of poverty, you see it everywhere. Ok, I know that there is a lot of poverty in the world, but I’ve never really been confronted with it, not to this extent. The people who work for the bus companies have to, literally, fight with each other to get customers to take their bus. A few fight broke out and they were getting violent fighting for customers. There are people selling food and drinks to passengers and they don’t have much to offer (and it would be better if you bought your food and drinks at the store to half way be sure that your food and drinks have somewhat been prepared hygienically). There are crippled people crawling all over the muddy streets begging for money or food and it really made me sad that I couldn’t help them. On a different note, we saw these modes of transportation, that I thought only existed in Asia….

So we were finally off on our way to Mzuzu. The trip there should’ve taken about 5 hours, but it took us much longer than that because the bus was super old and we had to stop every 2 hours to let the engine cool and to fill it with water. We sat up front and the engine was at our feet, right next to the driver. There was a little trap door and the driver would open it and put water in it and it would start to smoke and hiss.
The country side though….green, luscious, and just beautiful! Unfortunately, littered! People just throw away their trash out of the windows!! Even while the vehicle is moving. It’s so normal there and no one thinks twice about it, while we get fined for littering out of our moving vehicles. Crazy, world.

During one of our “breaks”, we met a guy from Nkhata Bay and he agreed to take us with him to Nkatha Bay (you have to take a taxi from Mzuzu to Nkhata Bay). It turns out that he lives in England and goes back home once a year. Once we got to Mzuzu, he arranged a taxi and we were off to Nkhata. During the ride, our new friend, Gabriel kept mentioning that, “Hopefully no one will see mr because then we would have to stop and chat with everyone. And I am really tired, so I just want to go home.” We just thought, “Ok, whatever, dude”. Apparently he is the local hero and everyone did see him, and even though we were in the taxi, we had to stop every two minutes because everyone DID recognize him and wanted to chat with him. It was a little absurd….but kind of cool to know that we somehow ended up in the car with him 😉 .
We finally get to the hostel, Butterfly Space, and Gabriele proceeds to tell us that he and his family actually built this place! They sold it a few years ago to a British lady. And he knew everyone there. We checked in and then went to the restaurant for some dinner. The electricity was out so we had dinner under the moonlight and we met a dude from Colombia, Esteban. Everyone else at the hostel were volunteers (btw, Malawi is basically run by volunteers. We barely met travelers, everyone who was not from Malawi were volunteers, with a few exceptions). We finally settled in for the evening and were looking forward to the next day: a new adventure! 🙂 Here’s a little sneak peak for what’s waiting for us tomorrow….