My Travel Adventures

I woke up a little before four o’clock in the morning to the sound of male voices outside the hotel. I thought it might be the driver who was supposed to pick me up at 4:30 and even though it wasn’t, it still felt better than waking up to an alarm clock. We left Kigali as grey streaks began to cross the dark sky, but the uniformly white streetlights still shone on all the surrounding hills. These hills soon became obstacles to us as we began to drive up and down them, cleaving closely to each well-paved bend above precipitous slopes.

I arrived in Kigali on the evening of May 29 th . It was a Thursday and very clearly not a holiday: I did not have to queue outside of the airport in Nairobi, and all the occupied counters were engaged in processing one flight at a time. It seemed our small two-by-two plane was the only flight due in Kigali between nine and ten o’clock; at any rate, its passengers were the only people in the arrivals hall, which made the process of obtaining an on-arrival visa go by very quickly. There was also no need to queue to exchange my one-hundred-dollar US bank note for Rwandan Francs.

I had arranged to leave for the airport at ten o’clock in the morning, which I figured would get me there with time to spare. The road was bumpier than I remembered it being on the way to Cape Maclear, possibly because on the way back we took a different route, but probably because this time I was trying to read a book. We made four stops altogether: two for the driver to pee behind the car, one for us to buy lunch, and one for the driver to buy two giant sacks of rice. He explained that since it was a Sunday, most stores were closed, and the price he had seen from the road was a real bargain.

I arranged for a boat ride yesterday, and the boat was ready at nine o’clock as we had agreed. The guide, John, quickly introduced the crew with whom I would spend the morning: besides himself, there was the captain (John had to repeat the captain’s name twice before I accepted that the man was named “Comment”) and Moses, a tourism student from another town. John did most of the talking, making many oblique references to his appreciation of a potential tip. The profits of his tours, he said, do not go directly to him but are divided among several dozen official tour guides in the area. Furthermore, the people who own hotels in the area are foreigners and keep their earnings to themselves; John complained that the Afrikaners were especially tough.

Today was a workday, so I very dutifully checked my emails and wrote up my research findings from the hotel bar overlooking Lake Malawi. The sky and the water were both perfectly blue. My lunch break took longer than I expected, as the restaurant I visited across the road made all my food entirely from scratch. Still, it was interesting to taste some of the local vegetables whose names I no longer recall. I also had some time to chat with a boatman repairing a catamaran on the beach by my lodge. He offered me one of his tour packages for an acceptable price.

Direct flights from Nairobi to Lilongwe are not scheduled for every day, so I was lucky that Ethiopian (which owns a large stake in Malawi’s national carrier) just so happened to have an itinerary perfectly suited to my needs. My plan for Malawi was the following: On the first day, I would see the Chongoni Rock-Art Area en route to Lake Malawi; on the second day, I would telework from the shores of Lake Malawi; on the third day, I would explore Lake Malawi; and on the fourth day, I would return to Lilongwe and then Nairobi. I would need to take no time off for this, as I had planned my itinerary to begin with the Labour Day holiday, which falls on a Thursday this year.