The strong scent of fish and the incredibly weak sense of personal
space filled the air on the bus from Lusaka to Chipata (the Malawi-Zambian
border town) on our way to a worldwide music festival called Lake of Stars on
the shores of beautiful Lake Malawi.
There were five seats across with a center isle packed high enough to
feel almost like a fence dividing the right cluster of three seats from our neighbors
in the left cluster of two. The amount of bags in the aisle would make Pablo
Escobar jealous. I sat with two bags between my legs, neither of them were my
own. The only reasonable explanation
for that many bags was that every person on this bus must have been moving to
Malawi.
From what I've heard and now from what I've seen I'm sure that
at least one of the large duffel bags at the base of the aisle wall holds at
least some drugs that the driver is smuggling across border to supplement his
measly 50,000 kwacha (~10 dollars) per 11-hour trip income. That's why
our plan is to get off at the Zambian border town and walk by ourselves across
the border to a separate bus that will take us the rest of the way- because the
immigration officers at the border know just as well as I do the chances that
this bus (and most buses like it) is attempting to smuggle drugs across the
border. So buses like these will be stopped at the border for 6 hours at a time
for all the bags to be checked - often times unsuccessfully finding the
drugs because a thorough search of all the hundreds of bags in this bus would
take probably 12 hours.
A sign pasted on the window to my right reads 'CAUTION. No over
speeding / overloading on this bus. If noticed please call the following number
+260 977 794043.' I’m contemplating calling it just to see if that’s even a
real number. As much as this would suck normally, I
think since I just expect things like this, they don’t really bother me too
much.
The driver’s helper (or copilot, if you will), who up til now
has been pointing out potholes and animals crossing the road for the driver,
just switched roles to the bus attendant.
As he gets up, he grabs a huge plastic crate of drinks and snacks starts
jumping over around and under the bags like an Olympian to deliver refreshments
to the riders. As he got closer I
realized he was handing out glass bottles of soda and on his first trip handed
out the drinks only to come back on another trip to use another bottle to pop
off the tops of everyone’s drinks.
He only had to go to the front half of the bus because a guy in my row
was bossing the back half of the bus using his wedding ring to open the
bottles.
The bumpy roads have forced the overstuffed overhead bins to lose
their grip on the bags that they had been carrying for the first three hours of
the ride, surprising the person sitting in the aisle of the three seat side
just barely too late to react before it lands in their lap or on their head. Sitting near the back, I watched the
bins ahead waiting to see the next suspect for a lap cannonball. A couple times the person was within
speaking distance to successfully warn them but when the unknowing person about
to get crushed was in the front row, the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally
incite a riot by shouting from the back of the bus. When I didn’t notice early enough to successfully deliver a
telephone-style message to the front row, I just had to watch and hope it
didn’t do too much damage. One
rogue bag jumped out without warning and landed smack dab on the head of the
driver. A collective “ooooohhhhh” rose
from riders that could have been out of sympathy or because the bus was jolted
when the driver was domed by 50 pounds of clothes. Feeling like Troy Aikman after the 2000 NFL season, he parked
the bus and got out to walk it off on the side of the road. A woman sitting behind me thought it
was a good time to pass her baby up the rows of people one by one and out the window
to the driver who was still walking off his concussion. The driver, without skipping a beat,
grabbed the baby and put her down on the ground next to the whole bus as she
peed behind a 2-inch wide tree.
Only in Africa.
This type of transportation took us 19 hours total from Lusaka,
Zambia to Mangochi, Malawi, about 2 km away from the site of this year’s Lake
of Stars. With a 2 km walk with
our bags ahead of us, we decided to throw our thumbs up and see if we could get
picked up. Within 30 seconds we
were in the back of a truck laying on our bags and as comfortable as can be for
the short trip into the concert grounds.
As smoothly as the hitchhiking went for the final leg of the
journey to the concert, we decided that for the trip back home we would try to
hitchhike the entire way- thinking it was going to be cheaper, more
comfortable, and faster than taking the official transportation.
We threw our thumbs up on the side of the road and just as we
had expected from our previous experience, a truck stopped within 30 seconds to
pick us up. Happy as can be we set down our bags and laid down saying to each
other what nice people Malawians were.
Within 5 minutes we were asked to sit up
and make room for more people.
Still comfortable, no big deal.
Then 5 minutes later, more people.
Then more people and more people until it’s a standing room only ride in
the back of a regular sized bed with 15 people all holding onto each other so
that no one flies over the edge as we cruise at 40 miles an hour down the bumpy
road. I had what you could call
front row seats to this ride of a lifetime. This meant that I got to hold onto the top of the cab of the
truck, but it also meant that I was the windshield for everyone behind me and over the course of the next 2 hours my
glasses and beard turned into a bug graveyard.
Being in the front row also meant I was the one who had to
answer the questions of “what was that noise?” from the rest of the group when
we hit a guinea fowl (bowling ball shaped flightless bird about the size of a
turkey) going about 50 miles an hour.
The faces that I got in response to that answer were the sort of
surprised face you would have if you were in the bed of a truck that hit an
animal going 50 miles per hour and without slowing down even a little to assess
the situation, continued to go 50 mile per hour.
As we cruised into the black market gas station (because
Malawi’s currency is powerless in other economies, they have a very difficult
time getting foreign goods, including gasoline), we were asked for about as
much money as we would have paid to take a bus.
3 hours later, the driver said we had reached as far as he would take us
and we realized we had somehow gone at an even more painfully slow pace (probably because we kept requesting coconut stops) than we
would have if we had taken the public transportation.
With no improvement in safety or comfort and a growing bug
graveyard in my beard, we decided we should just go the rest of the way on the
public buses.
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