I was told to go take a hike...: The North of Malawi: Nkata Bay

Karyn and I met up on a Friday morning, and after some hassle of getting the rental car (another post will talk about driving in Malawi), I went to pick her up at her hostel across town. We spent the day at the chitenge market (a chitenge is a 2 meter by 1 meter cloth that women wear over their clothes like a skirt, use to carry children on their back, use to carry things in on their head, use as a blanket, and use as a ground cover...essentially the all around useful fashion accessory), getting supplies for our journey up north, showing her about the clinic and the ABC campus, and packing our stuff for our bus ride the next day. Two other short term volunteers at the clinic joined us, and the four of us along with some other friends went out for Ethiopian food for dinner.

The next day, we went to the monthly expat farmer’s market and then hurried to the bus station after returning our car. We got to the station right as the “correct” bus was arriving, and I fought my way onto it to get us seats. I was quite pleased with myself until I learned that I was on the wrong bus. The man checking tickets didn’t notice and I didn’t look at the sign saying where the bus was going. Thankfully some other “muzungus” (literally translated as aimless wander but is more used for any foreigner in Malawi) noticed and got me off the bus. We watched that bus and others come and go and found the our bus would be three hours late because of a tire problem. We waited at the nearby KFC (which also coincidentally has Malawi’s only drive through) until the bus came. We got on and because it got to Mzuzu so late, we stayed the night at a hostel there.

On Sunday (after getting peed on by one of the hostel dogs), my sister and I took a shared taxi down to the lakeside town of Nkata Bay and to our hostel, Mayoka Village. We got there around mid-morning and ended up camping because they were so full. After getting ourselves sorted out, we walked into town see it, and buy some snacks.

The land surrounding Nkata Bay is very hilly (almost mountainous) and there are several bays along the edge of Lake Malawi. This place isn’t full of sandy beaches but of rocky outcroppings along the lake. This means you must navigate your way down to the lake if you want to swim, kayak, or SUP. We stayed here until Tuesday morning and in the short amount of time we were here, we kayaked and SUPed around the lake, did a nice walk up the hill behind town to a remote beach, people watched the Peace Corp group and Scottish school groups that stayed at Mayoka, and enjoyed being by the water.

In Africa, much of the travel revolves around going from one interesting place of lodging to another. There isn’t normally a lot to do partly because the sun goes down around 1730 and because there isn’t a great amount of tourist things to do. This means that you do about 6 hours worth of activity a day (ie walking into town, hiking, swimming, etc) and spend the rest of the time hanging out where you stay. This makes African travel a bit slow but thankfully I had some books and podcasts to fill the time.

On Tuesday, we left Mayoka and two sister we met there joined us on our minibus trip up to Livingstonia. For the next week or so we stayed near Livingstonia and did a five day trek of the Nyika plateau, but I’ll talk about that in the next post.