Malawi: Ngala Lodge at Lake Malawi

Monday 29th June: Lake Malawi:

After a great sleep in a luxury king size bed, breakfast was served at about 9.30 after all our laundry was collected. I tidied up Dusty a bit, putting books and maps no longer of any use to us, in one of the storage boxes in the back. We’ll do more later, probably after lunch. We had a toasted sandwich for lunch at about 3pm, sitting in the sunshine looking out over a very still lake. Our laundry is already back, washed & ironed. Dinner will be chambo fish from the lake. We’re having a lovely relaxing and restful day. There’s still time and we’re going to have sundowners at the beach bar about 5.30.

 The dinner menu was presented to us while we were having a sundowner & it will be served to us at 7.30. I should mention that John & I have joined the non shavers club since we left Kenya, the weight saving by not carrying shaving gel has helped us enormously I’m sure!

The mosquitoes are out in force and there is a malarial problem here so we have to be careful, using sprays, long sleeves & trousers. Mary, a friend of Sandi, has returned to the UK, very unwell, as she recently caught it. Chris, the owner here has had it 3 times in less than a year and then there was Jim as well, who we’d met yesterday. That’s practically everyone we’ve met since we arrived in Malawi.

Our intention tomorrow is to head for Blantyre, at the bottom of the lake. It’s going to take us about 6 hours to get there. It’s a big lake and apparently it was nicknamed “the calendar lake” before the country went metric. It is 365 miles long and 52 miles at the widest point. We’ll spend the night in Blantyre & then on Wednesday we'll head for Mozambique and the beaches of the Indian Ocean.

We finished dinner at 8pm & adjourned to the bar for a beer, me still trying to access the internet as well. The system has gone down so the blog is updated only to Saturday last and no photos. If by a miracle it fixes itself in the morning, I will at least finish the blog and try to upload some photos.

 

At the bar after dinner, we met Natalie, a US aid worker. She was here in March when John & I passed through but we didn’t get to speak with her then. She is here for 2 years, unpaid. Tomorrow she is off to Lilongwe and was going to catch a bus at 5am to Salima, and from there she can hitch to Lilongwe.

She does this regularly & says it’s very safe. As we’re going past Salima town, about 2 hours from here on our route to Blantyre, we’ve offered her a lift which means she can meet us at 9am and still get there at the same time as the bus, which goes all over the place. We’re into early nights lately so we called it quits at 9.30pm & retired to our rooms. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll find someplace suitable to stay tomorrow night in Blantyre. I don’t think it’ll be too much of a challenge.Thanks again for all your messages, we love reading them.