michnus

29th January 2011

Malawi and the spirits of Ewan and Charley

The parts for the bike took longer than expected and I still had to get the bolt that broke off in the water pump casing fixed. That in itself is a problem sitting at Monkey Bay. It is not the kind of town that offers engineering services or anything more than what you would get in Pofadder.  The only other town capable of drilling and tapping a screw is Lilongwe and that is a full day’s excursion getting there and back. It is slow going in Malawi the roads are narrow and there’s always people on the road, the average speed is less than 70km/h.

There is however a port at Monkey Bay that also repairs ferries and cargo ships that cruise Lake Nyasa. With nothing to lose I took Elsebie’s bike and head off for the works hoping that they would be able to repair the casing for me.

When talking to people and they seem confident enough making a repair but the first thing they want to do is weld, I get a bit worried and I had to explain to these artist that if they fuck-up this casing I will have to get a new one from SA and that is another week and R4000 down the drain. Yes, yes we understand came the answer with a broad smile on the face, and no, it still does bugger all to my confidence meter.  They then proceed to weld an extra piece on the stud with a welder that draw enough power to dim Koeberg’s nuclear facility’s lights for a few seconds.  The works was taken over by a new company and the equipment is not in the best shape.

When that did not work they clamped the casing on to the biggest and oldest drill press they had and with old drill bits the one technician had to fetch at his home, started drilling into the casing. The drill bit was also bent but that did not deter them on their quest to show this pale face that they can fix this small problem.  Well two hours later and R80 poorer I set off with a skew drilled casing that I was hope would work.

Jenson Button, aka the Neill helped me fit everything together and I must say I felt a bit red faced that a man travelling on a bike the same age as Jan van Riebeeck’s boat, 6V Yamaha is helping me to fix the supposed to be best bike for this kind of trip. All in good spirit and teasing from Neill while fixing the bike we set off North to Nkhata Bay and Mayoka Village.

Malawi really crept deep into our hearts, it’s a wonderful country with equal measures of friendly faces and colourful people, Malawi people are a laid back bunch there’s not much that upset them.  It is different to a sea vacation the water is clean and makes for easy swimming compared to sea swimming, no tides or currents when snorkelling and we spend more time swimming than normally when having a holiday at the coast.

For the first time we also saw the lake flies of Lake Malawi. Apparently they are so small they can fly through a mosquito net, the larvae at the same time shed their eggs and then get blown up by the wind in their billions to live for a day. We heard some say they do not even have stomachs. It’s mind blowing to see these clouds of flies sweeping across the lake. We also wanted to try them as the locals make small cakes from them, but in the end we could not find any. People told us the flies stink of fish for some reason.