We went to the birthplace of the Lilongwe river last Saturday,
Dzalanyama Forest Preserve, recently featured in a New York Times article on
the water crisis in Malawi. You can read that story here.
According to Google
maps, it’s about 30 miles from Lilongwe and should take a little over an hour
to reach. We took the road suggested by the app as the fastest (difference from
the next fastest one: 9 minutes). A small digression about driving in Malawi:
most roads don’t have names, and if they do, no one uses them. Google Maps is
accurate about 90% of time in town; out of town, usually even better, and
Airtel has service over what seems like 99%+ of the country, with 3G speeds for
data. Still, the way you give directions is something like this: go to the
Chipiku roundabout (not the new Chipiku, the old one, you know); take the third
exit. Go past two turns to the right where you’ll see some goats on the side of
the road; turn left. Go to the third blue gate on the left and we live across
there, in the house with the purple tree in front of it. You get the picture.
We packed sandwiches, snacks, water, camera, sunscreen, and
wanderlust, and were on the road by 8:30am. First clue that this trip wouldn’t
go as we planned was how fast the tarmack ended and the road became dirt. Now,
this isn’t by itself an unusual occurrence, since many roads in Lilongwe are
dirt roads, including the one we live on; but usually the tarmack—or cement or
whatever—lasts a little farther outside of the city than this one did.
But no matter; we’re such seasoned travelers now, having
been here for over 2 months, that this did not deter us. We rumbled on the
road, past the Kamuzu Dam, which provides water and power to Lilongwe
(recently, not so much, as you can read about in the above article) and arrived
at the border of the forest reserve (according to Google: about 5 miles from
our destination of the Dzalanyama Forest Lodge). Here, a very nice man with a
dazzling smile informed us that this was, indeed, the road to the lodge;
however, “the bridge is broken” and therefore we had to turn around and seek
another road. When asked for directions, he was very solicitous, pointing continuously
to the left while saying “turn right here, then go straight, and turn right
again,” so we decided to rely again on Google maps and found an alternative
route.
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| This map doesn't show the thin white roads, or even the thick white roads. |
If you’ve ever used Google maps on non-highways, you know
that there are yellow roads and white roads. We now found out that the white
roads further divide into thick white roads and thin white roads, the latter,
in Malawi at least, being essentially bike paths with grass worn on either side
to barely the width of our Subaru Forester. Bikes and foot traffic are the
dominant modes of transportation outside of the cities, and it was painfully
clear that the last car had travelled here maybe at the end of the last rainy
season, judging by how tall the grass had grown. We pressed on—we had a
destination, after all, and damn it all to hell and back we were going to go
hiking today—and then we came to a point where the rains or a
creek had washed a part of the embankment away, and the “road” dove into a
ditch. We would have to go down this ditch and back out of it if we wanted to
proceed. We looked at each other; I said “no” but Micah said “Well, it looks
like the road gets back to a more road-type thing once we get past this” and he
was driving, so we went on. On this sandy bank with many trails from intrepid
bicycles and no identifiable car tire tracks, we made our own. The Subaru
bravely descended down the sand and then rumbled on up again, and took us
safely if tensely to the other side.
After 3+ hours, we arrived. The setting is idyllic, full of
bird song, the babble of the tiny Lilongwe river, fluttering of butterfly wings,
and the hum of brachystegia leaves (acacia species). There is even the
occasional whiff of eucalyptus, which were introduced here in the early 1900s.
We hiked to our heart’s content and had our packed lunch by the water hole,
where the kids dipped their toes (or, in the case of Stas, whole pant-encased
legs). We saw lots of lizards and a stick insect. We had a blast. I was
thinking we should come back here at some point again, maybe with a chauffeur
who knows which paths to take.
The Google map app told us there was a slower road back, but
this one was yellow all the way, so we were optimistic that we could make it
back to Lilongwe and avoid our friend the thin white line. So we approached the
return trip with some trepidation but overall optimism. We followed that yellow
road over hills and through villages, where the children yell “AZUNGU!!!” and
ring cowbells or bang tin pots whenever a white person appears, and then the
road on the map disappeared. For a while we were off the map completely, our
little blue arrow on the google map wandering aimlessly through a green
nothingness; then the road reappeared as we drove through a village, glorious in
its reassuring yellowness. I was driving and feeling optimistic; that is, until
a deep, steep, completely impassable ditch appeared in the middle of my road,
bisecting the path and making it impossible to drive any farther. So we turned
around again.
By this point, our phone was running on fumes and we were
also. The kids behaved relatively well, only earning two separate 10-minute
long periods of enforced silence when the driving got really interesting. Micah
found another road, which would lead us back to that original one (the one with
the broken bridge), and theoretically safely back to Lilongwe. After driving
back through the same village for the third time, to the enjoyment of all its
inhabitants, we finally struck the right path and, after another 2+ hours, made
it back to Lilongwe. Somewhere around hour 2, Agnieszka said “Wow, this is a
great shortcut! Because we took it I’m not even tired!” At which point we just
had to laugh.
