From Tukuyu

From Nkhata Bay it is a steep climb from the flats along the lake up to Mzuzu at the top of the Nyika Plateau to the west. The climb is slow and I keep stopping to catch my breath and end up talking to farmers on the roadside about their harvests and my bicycle. After 3 hours I reach the top of the escarpment and look back at the hillsides rippling across the surrounding valleys in great flowing patchworks of thick green forest and loose red earth. I spend the night at a hostel and get drunk with Gerard, the Swiss owner. He sits behind the wooden bar tapping his fingers to Duke Ellington, peering out between his Panama hat and Hunter S. Thompson glasses. We talk about Paris, and his life before in Lausanne, and I wonder how he ended up here but never think to ask.

The next morning I set off late and ride 90 km north across the forested plateau before the road rises abruptly and clambers up over the eastern lip of the escarpment for 6 km. The pedals barely respond to my weight and I crawl up past broken-down-lorry after broken-down-lorry for what seems like hours. At the highest point the weariness in my legs melts away as I stare down at the tumbling slope before me. The road winds steeply back down to the lake and I can see miles and miles of blue shoreline and thousands of tiny thatch huts, hundreds of metres below, scattered like straw thimbles on an endless green carpet. The descent is breathtaking and I glide, teeth bared like a madman, through the rush of oncoming air. People wave and point and I'm too scarred to take my hands off the bars and hurtle towards the lake at 60 km an hour. I camp at Chitimba, on the lakeside, where I meet up with Christian, an Austrian guy, and we make a plan to hike the 15 km up to the old Scottish mission at Livingstonia, the following morning.

We set off while the sun is hidden behind the low Tanzanian cliffs across the lake and soon leave the rocky road that snakes up the hillside and follow little tracks up the forested slope. We scramble over loose rock and bare tree roots, brushing against the flat overhanging leaves. Christian is dressed like a mountaineer and tells me grand stories about ascents in Kyrgyzstan and the Andes, while I stumble behind in shoes full of holes and torn swimming trunks. As the escarpment flattens out we take muddy paths through fields of tea and tall silver birch trees and get lost and ask the way and eventually arrive at the cool hilltop town.

A wide dusty avenue runs through the centre of Livingstonia, leading past shady verandas draped with hanging gardens overflowing from rusty corrugated roofs and broad whitewashed buildings housing hospitals, schools, technical colleges, and a university. Enormous grey barked bluegum trees shade the road and we amble slowly to the house of the mission founder, Dr Robert Laws. The pale stone house is now a little museum, full of old photos, and trays of ancient butterflies, and other odds and ends. In one of the cabinets there is a tatty sheet of paper telling a story about the mission fifty years ago. It tells how in 1959, during Malawi’s struggle for independence, violence broke out across the country. The government, worried about the safety of the white missionaries, sent a message telling the missionaries to write a ‘V’ on the lawn outside the house if they wished to be evacuated, or an ‘I’ if they wished to remain where they were. The missionaries wanted to show that in Livingstonia whites and blacks were living happily together, even when all around things were falling apart. The government plane flew over the following morning to find these words whitewashed on the lawn: “For Christ is our peace who hath made both one and hath broken down the middle wall of partition around us” (Ephesians 2 v 4). I am standing in front of the drab wooden cabinet staring at the faded black and white text, thinking it is a beautiful story.

We camp near Livingstonia and walk down to Chitimba the next morning, trudging into the rising sun. I take two days to ride from Chitimba to the Tukuyu, a town 50 km north of the Tanzanian border, spending a night at Karonga on the way. Leaving Malawi the road is flat and the surrounding land overgrown and wet. Little streams run through the thick grass, trickling towards the road and forming a layer bog on the verge. There are naked kids playing in the muddy water and I hear the incessant gurgling of frogs as I ride past.

Crossing the border the road climbs into the Rungwe hills. Rows of tea and cocoa and coffee are etched delicately into the steep slopes and the valley floors are crammed full of tall green banana plants. I continue climbing into the misty hills until I reach Tukuyu, where I camp at a little place run by local musicians. In the night I wake up shivering and run through the field to a hole in the ground and stoop, my teeth chattering and my whole body convulsing. In the morning I rise drowsily from my tent and stumble through the grey dawn looking around at kids walking to school through the misty groves of avocado trees. I ask Luka, who works here, about a doctor and he takes me to the local hospital.

The doctor tells me I must stay here and I lie down in a white room and stare at the buzzing tube of fluorescent light on the pale ceiling. There is a drip in my arm and I can hear women singing gospel music, carrying in the wind from across the hills. Through the day doctors come and go. The first tells me I have malaria and giardia, another that he is not sure: probably something from the water. Luka brings me tea and porridge and oranges and washes my soiled clothes and sits with me for hours as I lie dazed, retching. When he leaves, nurses bustle around the bed and chatter in Swahili and smile kindly and ask about my condition, while I lie, curled up under layers of blankets, feverish, and weeping like a lost boy in a strange dream. Luka keeps coming with food and gradually my stomach calms down and the fever cools. After a couple of days I go back to the camp, anxious to get back on the road.