From Nkhata Bay

I head east from Lilongwe, riding quickly into the surrounding countryside and on towards the lake. The road winds over shallow green hills, past clusters of small red brick huts, popping out of the hillsides amongst the wilting maize and broad leaved banana plants. Each time I stop, searching for the lake in the distance, small crowds of villagers emerge from the fields onto the roadside and stare and laugh and shout ‘where you go, muzungu?’ There is a cool breeze and fine puffs of white cloud grow and fade as they drift across the path of the morning sun. I freewheel for long stretches, my eyes glued to the eastern horizon, my bike rattling unsteadily past grubby pick-us carting huge crowds of Malawians, all on top of each other, to Salima, a big lakeside town.
I reach Salima, 110 km from Lilongwe, by lunchtime and wheel my bike through the little market to a bar playing loud music. An old man wearing a bright red truckers cap with ‘I Love Jesus’ on the front is tapping his cane to Peter Andre’s ‘Mysterious Girl’. I ask him the way to the shore and he points east: Straight, Straight, Straight to the lake my friend. The next morning I set off up the lake. As I push my bike through the deep sand to the road a little girl runs up to me clasping a cold bottle of water. She hands it to me and runs shyly away. I take a long drink and head north along the highway.

The road runs through the fertile lowlands that lie between the lake and the high Nyika escarpment that looms to the west. I cross single track bridges that ford the little rivers running from the western highlands. Women and young kids are standing in the reeds washing clothes and men are fishing in dug-out canoes where the streams widen as they meet the lake. There are people everywhere. Fishermen dangling fresh chambo in my face, women drying out cassava fruit in the sun, young guys on bikes trying to race with me, old men sitting in the shade watching it all pan out.

From the road the lake comes in and out of view, over the lips of gentle hills and through the gaps between honey blossomed trees. I ride while the morning sun is still low above the faint outline of Mozambique across the calm water. I camp at inlets along the water: at a pottery in Nkhotakota, a little resort at Ngala Bay, a sprawling water-front campsite at Kande Beach. At Kande I chat with the English owner about life in Malawi. He tells me how people are content growing what they need to eat on their little plots. He says people are very poor here. He says the schools, the prisons, the hospitals are full to the brim and falling down. He tells me about a time he was admitted to the local hospital at Chinteche for malaria: ‘The place is chaos. There are turkeys in the wards. Turkeys. Where they come from I’ll never know. You could walk 500km to Blantyre and not see a turkey. Go to Chinteche hospital and they’re clucking about between the beds. Mind you its not as bad as Nkhata Bay. They’ve got a resident baboon there, pinching food from unconscious patients and medicines from the nurses’ pockets.’ I tell him a story a German doctor told me about Lilongwe District Hospital: there was a power cut in the night and the duty nurse forgot to turn the generator on. The respirators had no power. The following morning she came into work and found her whole ward dead.

I leave Kande the next day with only 70 km to reach Nkhata Bay, where I will spend a few days not riding. The road leaves the shore and passes beneath the shadows of the tall Visara Forest. The Laba trees give way abruptly to a sprawling tea plantation. Workers in baggy sun hats wander through the neat rows of green plants with machetes. I ride past and take a long winding downhill to the deep blue bay. I have ridden 4600km to get here, across deserts and dusty plains, early mornings in the driving rain, whole skies of tumbling black clouds, mile after mile of dark tar creeping over great forested hillsides. I get off the bike under the high sun and walk across the hot flat rocks, over the frail pink petals of a little flower overhanging the water’s edge, down collapsing wooden steps, across a gently rocking dug-out canoe, and into the cool lake water.