Mafia Island and a Detour Around Lake Malawi: Christmas as Usual

Oyv arrived in Dar es Salaam in the middle of the night. I was already there. I’d got off a bus in Tanzania’s de facto capital earlier that afternoon, slightly bewildered as I tried to get my bearings in the middle of Kariakoo. That’s the African part of town (there are Asian and European districts too), and it’s a muddled web of broken pavements, sandy streets, and vendors set up haphazardly wherever traffic – vehicle or pedestrian – should logically go.

I was excited to see Oyv. It’s fun to meet your dearest most familiar person in an unfamiliar place. Plus, it would be Christmas in another week or so and while we weren’t exactly going to decorate a tree and roast a turkey, it’s nice to at least be together, somewhere in the whole wide world. While I waited for him, I thought about Aisha, a local woman I’d met on a bus recently. We’d got to talking and as we ate corn on the cob we’d bought out the bus window, she told me about her husband and kids. In between bites Aisha said she wanted a divorce. ‘Husbands in Africa are no good’ she explained, as we rattled along towards her small village where, admittedly, an awful lot of husbands seemed to be doing nothing much at all, while women like Aisha hauled water and carried entire stalks of bananas around on their heads.

I was looking forward to seeing my husband though, partly because I missed him, and also because his arrival meant that I might be able to extend my bedtime past ‘dark’. ‘I wouldn’t walk 500 metres after dark’ said the owner at one of the guesthouses I’d stayed at. And, ‘It’s not safe for you to walk’, the receptionist downstairs at this very hotel in Dar informed me when I checked in. ‘How about now, though?’ I prodded – it was only five pm. She frowned. ‘For one hour, and don’t talk to anyone. There are too many thieves right now.’ She meant Christmas – the holidays are prime-time for robberies. Oyv’s presence doesn’t mean we can hang out in dark alleys all night, but at least we can be locked inside the guesthouse compound together.

Dar is an easy place to spend a couple of days (if you don’t focus too much on the hotel receptionist’s dim view) and we made the most of the cafes and Indian restaurants it abounds in.

But our first real destination was Mafia Island. I’d never even heard of this island, eclipsed by its famous neighbour Zanzibar, until one Sunday afternoon before either of us left home, when Oyv randomly mentioned it:

Oyv: (looks up from phone and glances out window at snowstorm). Have you heard of Mafia Island?
Sar: No. Is it sunny?
Oyv: It’s near Dar. Apparently the boat from the mainland sinks from time to time.
Sar: But there’s sun. (Throws a waterproof bag into packing pile). Let’s go.

Mafia is smaller than Zanzibar and if you want a little hut in a pretty garden, it is spot-on. Especially if you wanted that little hut in a pretty garden to be set inside of a pristine marine park.

There is some amazing snorkelling here and we spent a day out in a dhow (a traditional wooden sailboat…in this case with an outboard motor attached), trawling around from reef to reef, jumping in and drifting over wavering coral gardens thick with vibrant fish.

Mafia is small but some of the marine park’s inhabitants are not: whale sharks, the largest fish in our waters and one of the biggest animals on earth. On average an adult whale shark will reach 9 m/30 ft in length. The scary name comes from their size – they are as big as some species of whales. Basically, a whale shark combines all the characteristics of something you ordinarily don’t want to be in the water with: a shark’s hundreds of teeth in a mouth up to 1.5 m/5 ft wide, and a whale’s mammoth size. Even so, they are totally harmless and leaping all alone into their habitat to join them in a swim is popular pass-time on Mafia that I’d highly recommend to anyone.

Unlike you, now, (you’re welcome) I didn’t know anything about whale sharks until after I agreed to go snorkelling with them. Let me tell you, it’s hard to appreciate the size of these creatures until you are teetering on the side of a wooden dhow in a mask and fins, looking down at a monstrous, spotted, shadowy outline nearly as long as your boat. Close by, you can see the dorsal fins of the shark’s friends slicing through the water. Your guide (who very likely can’t swim himself) shouts ‘Drop! Gogogogogo! Look down! Swim!’ and you pitch yourself overboard. Then you’re kicking frantically, trying to keep up with this majestic animal as he glides by so close you can count his razor-edged gill slits and the small fish clinging to his side. Underwater, you turn round and come face to face with a gaping mouth as another whale shark swims straight towards you – but he doesn’t care about you, he’s just slurping up plankton. As he whips past you feel the wake of his tail fin slashing behind. Eventually, the shark dives down and you resurface, sputtering in amazement. It is incredible.

After a few days of snorkelling and swimming desperately away from with giant sharks, we headed back to the mainland, planning to travel straight down the coast and over the border into Mozambique. But at the very last minute – the night before we planned to leave Tanzania, actually – we discovered that crossing the border into northern Mozambique was a bad idea (hint: the term ‘war zone’ was bandied about). So that’s how we ended up in Malawi, a country that wasn’t even on our radar in the first place.

Stranded in Mtwara, a town we’d never heard of before, we scrambled around trying to come up with a new plan, tossing out one option after another. We thought about heading back to Dar. But Christmas really brings out the best in Tanzania: besides a surplus of festive robbers out spreading holiday cheer, all the buses and flights were sold out for days.

We were determined to go to Mozambique though. Hemmed into Tanzania by the Indian ocean on one side, a potential ‘war zone’ below us, and Lake Nyasa on our other side, it still seemed straightforward enough: we’d catch a ferry across the lake, disembark in Malawi, and then cross on land into Mozambique from there (are you with me? It doesn’t matter. We looked at a lot of maps, so you don’t have to). But when I called a shipping line all I learned was that ownership of the lake is hotly contested by all three countries on its shores. ‘You mean Lake Malawi’ the woman on the other end said disapprovingly when I asked about a schedule, and then went on to inform me that no passenger ships crossed the lake internationally at the moment.

On to option 347 (more or less): we’d go around the damn lake.

This may come as a surprise, but travelling around one of Africa’s great lakes isn’t as easy as it sounds. It took three long days of solid travel on five buses (not to mention the string of share-taxis and motorbikes we needed to patch rides together), short uncomfortable nights in damp obscure hotels, and two consecutive breakdowns resulting in hours waiting by the side of the road for another bus.

The second breakdown was kind of nice – we got out and stretched, and one of the passengers opened up a hand-washing business in conjunction with a local kid’s mango-selling business (the first breakdown just involved a lot of angry yelling among the passengers, maybe another Tanzanian Christmas-thing).

Finally, on the fourth day we stuffed ourselves into the last share-taxi of the trip and got out in Nkhata Bay on the shores of Lake Malawi (…or Nyasa, depending who you ask). It was Christmas Day. Mozambique could wait, we decided, and settled into a cabin overlooking the lake.

This sort of thing happens. It wasn’t all bad – along the way we stopped in nice places too, places we’d never have found otherwise, where there are beautiful beaches and Swahili ruins.

Yes, we also found some other less salubrious towns I wouldn’t recommend, but hey – like I said, it happens.

And as it turns out, the place we gratefully moved into on the lake was roasting turkeys in a pizza oven.

So in a way it was the most traditional Christmas we’ve had in years.

Read More

Check out the rest of my stories from the road, for more of my adventures (and misadventures) in Tanzania and Malawi.