11

Over the Hills and Far Away

Karonga to Lundazi

Unexpectedly, the first half-mile of the Stevenson Road was lined with parked trucks, their drivers and passengers having been tempted by the closed border to sample the flesh-pots of Karonga. The dawn light revealed a reassuring number of discarded condoms in the vicinity.

Soon the climb began: up and up, around mountain after forested mountain, the trees ancient and grand, sharing matted vines, the red-rock cliffs swathed in flowering creepers. Each jutting shoulder overlooked the wide brown Rukuru River, curling through a deep gorge and occasionally spanned by swaying footbridges cleverly constructed from tree-trunks and grass ropes. Then both river and forests were left behind and long, level saddles linked one smooth-topped scrubby mountain to the next. Sometimes the track plunged down, seeking a way through these tight-packed obstacles, then steeply rose until I was high enough to see again Lake Nyasa’s farthest shore – a silver streak at the base of the powder-blue Livingstone range.

Mr Stevenson’s road provided the toughest stage of my whole journey. This track suffers from every ill to which a road is heir: hideously rutted gradients, skiddy loose gravel, erosion channels deep as a grave, jagged slabs of rock twenty feet long, corrugations demanding clenched teeth and a camber more appropriate to a circus-ring than a public highway. On downward slopes this camber – unique in my experience – forced me to dismount at every bend; even pushing a bicycle at such an angle was difficult enough. One needs no specialist knowledge to diagnose that here the African Lakes Company employed unskilled labour; and their in-charge was either an amateur or an engineer sacked from all previous jobs.

The sixty miles to Kapoka took twelve and a half hours with only three brief stops and this challenge was mightily therapeutic, an escape from everything but the testing of one’s body. AIDS and drought and Malawi’s political crisis faded away as I relished the space, the silence and the lonely splendour of these mountains. My joy was shadowed only by the lack of animals in a region swarming with wildlife less than a century ago – a dark enough shadow.

By mid-afternoon I was on an undulating plateau – cool, green, higher than the surrounding ridge-tops. Near a few isolated shacks, malnourished children herded bony cattle. At 5.30 the track descended slightly towards wide fields of maize and sugar-cane, promising Kapoka’s nearness. Here the Stevenson Road had been attended to, after a fashion, and at last it was possible to cycle above 5 m.p.h. A strange rosy light suffused the plateau as a huge red sun perceptibly slid towards a wall of mauve mountains on the near horizon. Then the cloudless western sky became a sheet of gold – and suddenly the sun was gone. Moments later a bronze-tinged twilight gave way to darkness.

How much further to Kapoka and food? I had little hope of an evening fix; Banda disapproves of alcohol, though even he has never tried to impose teetotalism. But one can buy beer only in bottle-stores, shops licensed to sell it and not numerous.

Fifteen minutes later I dismounted at a crossroads under towering trees. Even by daylight Kapoka – small and scattered – seems less a village than a trivial mark made by man on the wilderness. A lamp glowed faintly through the open doorway of a solitary square hut, the only visible building. This was a duka and on the counter stood a transistor radio surrounded by four men struggling to hear the World Service through an aural blizzard of static. More importantly, behind the counter stood four crates of Carlsberg Special. Next morning I saw that this mud duka had ‘Bottle Store’ crudely painted on one gable-end.

The men were incredulous, they had never heard of anyone travelling with a bicycle from Karonga to Kapoka – and to do it in a day …! I shared their incredulity. Undoubtedly this was a minor feat and I allowed myself to enjoy being admired, while relaxing on a narrow wooden bench drinking beers at a rate that would have appalled Banda and eating six hard-boiled eggs from a dish on the counter. These, I was to discover, are Malawi’s ‘fast food’, on offer in many bottle-stores.

For an hour we talked of this and that: mostly domestic politics. Then the young store-keeper’s 16-year-old wife brought me a plate piled with chips, scrambled eggs and fried onions. Payment was reproachfully rejected – was I not Irish? During the next week, official hostility was more than compensated for by the gratitude and praise so illogically lavished on me by ordinary Malawians. Being a compatriot of Bishop John Roche meant travelling in reflected glory; I lost count of the beers stood to me by impoverished men in desolate dukas because I came from the same country as the hero of the year. I wondered if public opinion would have been so unanimous further south, in Chewa territory. Banda is a Chewa – Malawi’s largest tribe, comprising 45 per cent of the population.

Anxiously the men debated where Kapoka’s guest should sleep. I suggested the floor of the bottle-store but that wouldn’t do; they thought it more fitting to introduce me to the Chiefs compound. The youngest man led me through several fields, on twisting pathlets, by the light of a half-moon. A high fence of wooden stakes enclosed this large compound where a dozen tin-roofed huts accommodated a bewilderingly extended family. In the newest hut – six feet by eight and so new the mud still felt and smelt damp – a grass mat was unrolled on the floor. On that I spread my flea-bag and slept for ten hours.

From Kapoka the Stevenson Road continues for another fifteen miles to Chitipa; but at dawn I left it, without tears, and turned south towards the Nyika Plateau. Here the switchbacking track’s main defect was very deep powdery dust, often masking treacherous craters or hunks of smooth stone embedded in the surface. At noon I reached Chisenga, having advanced only forty miles through uninhabited hilliness.

Chisenga was once a minuscule outpost of empire; now this district is administered from Chitipa and Chisenga feels at the end of the world – a widespread settlement of shambas, impoverished, welcoming and very beautiful. A mile or so to the west rise the Mafinga Mountains, the Zambian border – a massive blue fortress, sheer, flat-topped, radiating the mystery of the inaccessible. There are no paths across, I was told; this is a natural boundary, not a cartographer’s decision. To the south-east stretch lower mountains – cinnamon brown, arid, uninhabited, apparently endless – and there my track was visible at intervals, crossing the heights.

In mid-village it startled me to come upon a red-and-white striped pole blocking the track. Nearby stood a well-maintained police-cum-customs-post in a neat garden where the Malawian flag fluttered high. A customs officer, Mr Mayinga, sat on a bench in the hot sun wearing an air of dejection and an overcoat. Only two days before he had been transferred from Marka, on the sweltering Mozambican border. ‘You see me dying of cold! But I’m happy to be away from those refugees, 980,000 Mozambican refugees are in our country – nearly one million and we are only eight million! The aid agencies give them food – but not enough so they become thieves, making big problems. In February our government told Mozambique they must go home, by July all food reserves will be gone – but still more come!’ Mr Mayinga paused to light a cigarette, then wondered plaintively, ‘Why am I here? No one crosses this border, the road is too bad.’

When the policeman arrived I stood up to shake hands, hoping he would not arrest me for skirtlessness. He was markedly less cordial than Mr Mayinga but called me ‘Sir’, an error based on tact, I felt. He advised me to stay overnight in Chisenga; a mega-rainstorm was due during the afternoon in the mountains on my route and where could I shelter? Nowhere! This advice was not unwelcome; the previous day’s minor feat had left me with a slight muscular hangover. And besides, I had fallen in love with Chisenga.

Neither of the two dukas sold food (their shelves were seven-eighths bare) and a small boarded-up colonial rest-house has been ‘in a state of constant disuse’ – the policeman said – for twenty-five years. But there was a hoteli, a white-washed two-roomed shack, its dishevelled thatch hanging so low over the door one had to duck to enter. Inside, Mary welcomed me warmly and offered tea, though the making of it at midday was troublesome. Food could be provided at sunset: chicken and nsima (mealie-meal dumpling). Mary was a tallish, slender, good-looking 30-year-old wearing a wrap-around skirt depicting the map of Africa, a torn but clean white blouse and a white headscarf. Her 10-year-old first-born – the first of seven – had stick-like limbs, jungle sores on his ankles and a grossly worm-swollen belly. Behind the counter two shelves held half a dozen dusty bottles of soda. A shaky table and four chairs furnished this outer ‘restaurant’ room; I could sleep on the earth floor after closing time which was 6.30 p.m. The family lived in the equally small back room.

When I went exploring Lear was left unlocked in the hoteli. To fuss about his safety would have seemed impolite and in certain places – usually the remotest and poorest – one can sense honesty in the air. A narrow path sloped up from the track through dense green vegetation, lively with birds. I dawdled along it, bird-watching, then suddenly came out amidst a glory of giant magnolia trees in full flower. These semi-encircled the District Officer’s residence, one of those magnificent colonial bungalows that have a palatial air despite being single-storeyed. Now it is sadly battered and weather-worn, the windows broken, sacks of maize and salt stored in the high-ceilinged drawing-room, chickens roosting on the deep pillared veranda – facing the Mafinga Mountains – and countless underfed children everywhere.

I was thinking the obvious thoughts when two youths, Patrick and Declan, emerged from the old servants’ quarter – yes, both their fathers had been educated by Irish missionaries. Excitedly they took charge of me. I must visit their school, they were boarders, their families paid 70 kwatchas a term. I wondered why, on seeing three long sheds which Amnesty would condemn as a prison. Here the boys provide and cook their own food and five teachers (none very bright) instruct 320 pupils. Such bush schools are proliferating in Africa, encouraged by the pathetic ambitions of parents who naïvely imagine them to be an improvement on the calamitous state schools.

The rest of the day was spent with Patrick, Declan and various of their friends. When the rain came we crowded into the hoteli to continue our discussions of multi-party democracy, marriage and AIDS. Everyone was outspokenly anti-Banda and fearful of his heir presumptive, an unsavoury and by now extremely powerful character called John Tembo. All but one were devoted to the notion of multi-party democracy without even slightly comprehending it. For many young Africans it has become a fetish; given that reform, all problems can be solved overnight. No one thought women should be given the vote – ‘In our country they are not educated and can’t understand politics.’ It shocked them to learn that in the West young people choose their own marriage partners and brides come free. ‘That is very bad!’ exclaimed Patrick. ‘Then the husband does not own his wife – she may run away!’

Chisenga lacks a bottle-store. ‘Here are no kwatchas for luxuries,’ Mr Mayinga had observed gloomily. ‘They don’t even have much pombe – and none left at this season. People drink tea.’ So I too drank tea, a novel experience at sunset. None of the boys would accept my offer of a soda, nor would Mary accept payment for my lodging and supper. The tourist trail was far away.

The policeman’s advice was fortunate; I needed a rest-day before crossing those mountains between Chisenga and Nthalire on a track too closely related to the Stevenson Road. So steep were the gradients and so lamentable was the surface that a mere forty-two miles took nine hours. Yet this was among my Top Ten days; every summit, every shoulder, revealed another desolate expanse of many-hued beauty. On one high ridge I got very wet and very cold but by then I was too exhilarated to care. This unpeopled corner of Malawi (it really is a corner: see map) has a special quality of remoteness, of anonymity; one is not conscious of being in any particular ‘nation-state’, only of being in Africa.

Nthalire is a town – in miniature – and on arrival I was pursued by a policeman of the bullying sort who confiscated Lear until I had tucked my skirt into the waistband of my trousers. Here too the colonial rest-house had long since fallen into disuse but there was an ‘Africa hotel’ and there I slept extra-soundly after more mealie-meal and chicken. In all these cases, ‘chicken’ is a courtesy term.

The Nyika Plateau was the place above all I had longed to see in Malawi. Although a national park, vigorously advertised to tourists, I had been assured that only a trickle visit it – and I was that trickle on 12-14 May.

All morning the plateau was visible, filling the southern sky. The country between was a wilderness of russet bush; as usual my track could be seen at intervals, redly snaking over distant hills and gradually descending towards a green plain below the plateau. At 8 a.m. I stopped to nut-munch and rashly scrutinised that apparently sheer escarpment. My binoculars revealed a discouraging pale grey squiggle on a massive wall, a track evidently engineered with monkeys or antelope in mind. From a distance it seemed quite unsuited to human traffic, an impression in due course confirmed.

At the base of the escarpment a road-block is manned by two amiable, smartly uniformed National Park officials whose abundant offspring, spilling excitedly out of their mud huts, were riveted by Lear. I should have been charged a 3-kwatcha entry fee but the officials had run out of receipt dockets so please would I pay instead at my destination, the Chelinda Lodge?

That climb was mind over matter all the way, partly because the matter had been seriously underfed for days. Towards the end I had to stop every twenty yards or so to summon the strength for the next twenty yards. Feelings of humiliating inadequacy afflicted me. Most Africans are underfed not for a few days but all the time. How do they keep going? What feeble creatures we Whites are! Then I remembered Thomson’s description of his ascent to the Mbeya Plateau: ‘The hard work of an entire day seemed concentrated in each step I took. Every few feet I had to stop, gasping for breath and blowing like a broken-winded horse, while my heart palpitated in a most alarming manner. My mind became dazed and stupid, while my poor limbs seemed made of jelly …’ This is a clear case of the knocks, aggravated in Thomson’s case by repeated attacks of malaria. He had a dangerous obsession about ‘keeping going’ and but for his youthful vigour might well have succumbed during that expedition, as Johnston did at the outset. Perhaps he wouldn’t have died at the age of 37 had he punished himself less.

That grey squiggle, seen from afar, was only stage one. It led into a green and secret place – the rest of the world invisible, all around precipitous slopes, anciently forested, with the depths of the ravine on my left hidden by dense vegetation. There was no sound: when I rested I could hear my heart thudding. Then, beyond a jutting shoulder, there was a sound: the faint magical music of a waterfall across the ravine, a whiteness streaking down through the forest from the edge of the plateau, singing sibilantly on its way – not breaking the silence but accentuating it.

An hour later I arrived, after a final brutal gradient on which I had to stop every ten yards. That was a dramatic arrival, emerging from the confinement of those dark precipices on to the immense brightness of Nyika – an apparent infinity of golden-grassed space, broken by low rocky hills. On an improved track, no longer erosiontorn, I pedalled joyously towards Chelinda Lodge, fifteen miles ahead. And then I froze. I had arrived sweat-sodden, I was at 7,000 feet or more, the sky was overcast, the wind icy and winter coming to Malawi. Dismounting, I noticed how unpleasantly diseased one looks when a dark tan is combined with purple gooseflesh. As Nyika is an uninhabited game reserve there was no one to observe me stripping by the wayside and donning all my garments – one vest, three underpants, one nightgown, two skirts, spare slacks.

A few miles from Chelinda I too got the knocks, for the first time in years. The only effective treatment is to lie flat and eat, while the palpitations slow down and protein unjellies the limbs. Reclining on grassland by the track, using my skirt as a blanket, I ate the last of my nut-supply and considered camping. But my equipment didn’t match the rapidly dropping temperature; foolishly one thinks of Central Africa as a uniformly hot place. Dying of hypothermia on the Nyika Plateau seemed a silly idea. A little later I stood up and continued, on my reserve tank, confident that a Malawian tourist lodge would provide a good meal.

Then came a thin icy rain, very wetting and – given my condition – rather dispiriting. It turned the track to skiddy mud as I slowly pedalled towards a forested ridge-top where Chelinda at last appeared, far below, most of its buildings still hidden by towering Mexican pines. Here the track deteriorated and I continued on foot through the fading light, my mouth already watering, and arrived, with numbed hands, at Reception – an architect’s enlarged imitation of a ‘native’ hut.

The place was empty. Long minutes later Ben – a lounge-suited young man, trained to be nice to tourists – strolled in and welcomed me effusively. Accepting my K3 National Park entry fee, he requested a daily vehicle charge of K7.50. Remembering that escarpment, the sheer injustice of having to pay a vehicle fee outraged me – as did the demotion of my noble Lear to mere motor status. A bicycle, I argued forcefully, is not a ‘vehicle’ but an aid to self-propulsion. Ben indicated a long list of regulations hanging on the wall; one clause deemed bicycles to be ‘vehicles’ for the purpose of fee-collecting. As I was sulkily counting out K22.50, Ben stopped being professionally nice and became genuinely so. Of course the charge was unfair; he must charge for one day, the other two he would overlook.

Chelinda offers two grades of accommodation: several expensive self-catering bungalows on the lake-shore below Reception and four less expensive (£5 a night) self-catering tents a mile away high in the forest.

‘Self-catering?’ I queried, with a sinking heart and rumbling stomach. ‘Is there no restaurant?’

‘It’s closed, but in our shop you can buy food. And beside the tents lives Francis, who for a small fee will cook it.’ Ben then guided me through the pines, in Stygian darkness, to the duka. Its stocks had run low; I could buy only one small tin of repulsive corned beef and half a kilo of rice. Happily it was also a bottle-store and I drowned my hunger before setting off to find the tents – hidden in dense jungle and not easy to find. Each was hut-sized (ex-army) and erected permanently on a raised wooden base under a thatched roof. The 20-year-old Francis and his 16-year-old bride and her 9-year-old sister shared a miserable nearby shack of brushwood and grass. Their kitchen was a three-stone fireplace under a rough thatch upheld by six stakes. My arrival disconcerted Francis; he had no saucepan in which to cook my rice, I must wait until the morrow when he could borrow one. I shone my torch into the kitchen and said firmly that he could use his own saucepan. He objected that it was dirty and there was no water left to clean it. I retorted that I didn’t care how dirty it was; I needed my rice cooked now. When the fire had been lit the 9-year-old squatted beside it, attempting to do her homework by that faint erratic light and screwing up her eyes as the smoke gusted. Her English reader was filthy and tattered. Boys can get their homework done by daylight while the girls are about their various chores: mainly fetching wood and water. When I visited the little school next day (it caters for the children of the National Park labour-force, who all live in Chelinda) I realised that that girl was lucky to have a book; it had been given her, Francis said, by a kind tourist.

The howling of hyenas often woke me, perhaps because the cold was so extreme; next morning the little water left in my container on Lear’s carrier was frozen solid.

Few places in the world can rival the beauty of the Nyika Plateau and I would have liked to spend a week on those heights. But after a day’s wandering around Chelinda, on foot, I had to hasten away. Leaving the tent site just before dawn I met a leopard; he crossed the path scarcely ten yards ahead – my one and only sighting of a big cat. However, several sets of leopard pad-marks (among many others) appeared in the deep dust of the track during the day. When I had desperately sought a chicken, or some eggs, in Chelinda, the duka-keeper explained that poultry would attract leopards to the settlement and are therefore forbidden.

Eleven hours and seventy miles later I was back in the populated world, approaching Bolero, where this journey’s most bizarre lodging awaited me. Rumphi had been my goal: the first town since Karonga, where there was sure to be a supermarket and restaurant. But after an exceptionally gruelling descent, on a Stevenson-type surface, I shirked the final ten deeply corrugated miles. Of the wide range of surface defects available in Africa, corrugations are, for the cyclist, the most uncomfortable though not the most tiring.

Bolero, a big village, has attracted lavish German aid – according to an enormous sign, in German and English, on the outskirts. All the dukas were closed because this was Kamazu Day, Banda’s birthday and a national holiday. The bottle-store was also closed but a garrulous old man, full of yarns about his days in the British army, led me through a German-inspired housing estate to a hidden source of Carlsberg. In an incongruously vast pre-fab secondary school, built of imported German materials, what the donors had designed as a small kitchen is now a bar (or was on 14 May 1992). Three middle-aged men, sitting on plastic beer crates, welcomed me wonderingly. Two spoke fluent English and all had their quota of the Malawians’ distinctive charm – in the best sense of that ambiguous word. One was a local Chief, therefore a Banda protege. Another introduced himself simply as ‘a government inspector’. The third and least fluent was, significantly, a teacher. The teaching profession lacks prestige in most African countries – strangely, it might seem, given the universal craving for education. But teachers are so badly paid that talented youngsters usually choose a more lucrative career.

Outside, schoolboys came crowding around the window above the sink, the smallest being lifted up to observe me sitting on the draining-board – the only space available.

‘They are amazed’, said the Chief, ‘because we talk together socially. Our tradition condemns this mixed-sex talking, we say it leads only to misbehaviour. Men and women have nothing in common to discuss, they live in different worlds. But we know you have another tradition.’

Predictably, all three opposed the notion of multi-party democracy and praised Banda who has given Malawi ‘peace, stability and a respectable place in the world’. An interesting ambivalence tinged everyone’s reaction when I asked, innocently, about John Tembo’s role. No one denigrated him, nor did they praise him.

The Chief recalled his youth, when the people of this area only had to go hunting to secure an adequate meat supply for their families. He was not enough of a Banda-man to eschew the World Service and had recently heard a WHO spokesman mentioning the victory of medical science over many African diseases. He mused, ‘Was it good to check those diseases that kept the population down, when the West couldn’t give good health to the extra millions? Isn’t there more happiness in the world if an area has five million well-fed people, with enough wildlife to give them protein, instead of ten million always hungry, never rightly developing their minds or bodies?’

When the teacher deplored there being only 4 teachers to this school’s 575 pupils I asked him to repeat those numbers, fancying I must have misheard. Everyone agreed that a bigger staff in a less grand building would make more sense. But of course donor countries decide what to donate and who in Bolero was going to say ‘No’ to such an imposing edifice?

After dark I tentatively enquired about a restaurant. My companions looked faintly embarrassed, then said I could eat well in Rumphi’s restaurant on the morrow. Remembering Francis’s equally unimaginative reference to the morrow, I began to suspect that Africans see no need to eat regularly, even if one has just cycled a long distance over testing terrain. But it wouldn’t have done to complain about acute hunger pangs; someone might then have felt bound to feed me.

As the trio were leaving they decided I should sleep in the schoolroom. ‘It is eighty metres by forty,’ smiled the inspector. ‘You’ll have space enough!’ True, but there was a snag. Next day the senior pupils faced their important final examination and thirty of them sat revising in my bedroom, sharing books by the dim light of three Aladdin lamps suspended from the ceiling’s metal struts. The luxurious German desks were so jam-packed that I had to walk across them to mount the high teachers’ ‘stage’, extending the width of the room. Yet this was also the examination hall. ‘So little space!’ lamented the teacher. ‘It makes cribbing too easy!’

My entry did revision no good. Feeling like a solo act, I performed on the empty stage, emptying my pockets and removing my boots before wriggling into my flea-bag – the cynosure of thirty pairs of incredulous eyes. Everyone stood up to watch me arranging my boots as a pillow, then they settled down again and studied diligently though noisily until past midnight. I wondered how far this diligence would get them, given their academy’s limitations. Education has long since acquired the status of magic in Africa, the only magic that can lead to an improved (that is, urban) lifestyle. All the secondary-school pupils I met, without exception, were aiming for university and puzzled to hear that only a minority of secondary-school pupils in the West do likewise. Without a degree, they argued, nobody can find a job worth taking.

From three-ish, as though to make up for Chelinda’s lack of poultry, I was kept awake by the loudest cacophony of non-stop cock-crowing I have ever heard – all happening within a hundred yards or so. I was up before dawn, mixing the last of my dried milk by candlelight to get me to Rumphi’s restaurant.

From Rumphi a tarred road, only mildly hilly and mildly traffic-busy, accompanies the – usually invisible – Kasitu River through a long cultivated valley (its drought-stricken fields were grey-brown) between two ranges of the Viphya Mountains. While lodging that night in the dull little town of Ekwendeni, I heard Malawi State Radio announcing the Minister of Finance’s return from Paris ‘where donor countries had sympathetically considered Malawi’s future needs and remarkable economic progress’, a good example of misreporting. In fact Malawi’s funding had been cut at that Paris meeting, in an attempt to curb the regime’s ill-treatment of dissidents. Luckily, in almost every village someone listens to the World Service and spreads the truth.

Early next morning, as I sped through the outskirts of Mzuzu, hundreds of workers were converging on handsome red-brick factories set in landscaped flower-filled grounds. Bright little gardens surrounded the attractive workers’ bungalows, their tin roofs painted green. Mzuzu, only thirty miles from the lakeside tourist centre of Nkhata Bay, is one of Banda’s showpieces.

My brief traverse of northern Malawi contributed a disproportionate number of my Top Ten days and this was to be another, though I didn’t yet realise it. The levelish Mzuzu-Mzimba highway seemed brand-new and was furnished, every few miles, with speed-limit signs and giant Pepsodent and Surf advertisements, the first hoardings seen since leaving Nairobi. Gloom was looming when a foresters’ track appeared on my left, a legacy of the British development of a vast forest reserve. The map told me that this track is spatially though not temporally a short-cut; it climbs high to cross the 6,000-foot Viphya Plateau, then rejoins the road which curves around the plateau’s base.

During the next nine hours my solitude was undisturbed, though the Viphya Reserve employs 8,000 men and I passed two of their isolated settlements. At first the track rose and fell through a plantation of 55,000 blue gums. This sounds boring, but in such mature reserves Nature has had time to adopt intruders and one is hardly conscious of human meddling. Higher up, many inaccessible mountains support only indigenous forest, moss- and creeper-festooned and full of interesting little noises. Twice an unidentifiable animal, about the size of a badger, crossed the track. The climb was tough but enjoyably so. I was now well-fed, with ample supplies in my panniers, and on a track engineered to accommodate heavy vehicles the gradient was rarely extreme.

Truly the Viphya Plateau is a Paradise, a dazzlingly lovely world containing a multitude of brilliant birds, butterflies, shrubs, flowers – the delicate scent of wayside blossoms mingling with the heavy pungency of forest decay. Even in drought years these mountains attract heavy rain and many sparkling streamlets raced down the slopes or beside the track. Ecstatically I pedalled or pushed (mainly pushed) Lear around mountain after mountain, never able to guess at the configuration of the terrain around the next shoulder. This was a gloriously unpredictable range, in contrast to some African landscapes where it can seem as if the Creator ran out of ideas on whichever day they were created. Finally came miles of green windswept grasslands directly below sheer, rounded rock-peaks – and here it was very cold, as the afternoon clouds gathered.

Eventually we rejoined the main road and two more miles revealed Chikangawa in its deep hollow between wooded ridges – a small town where hope of a visa extension was to be revived.

Chikangawa is the headquarters of the Viphya Forest Reserve where foresters live in many rows of identical dwellings – more than shacks but less than bungalows, with one ‘sentry-box’ earth-closet for each four families. In the cramped bottle-store taped reggae, amplified to the point of aural crucifixion, made conversation impossible. On the counter sat Lovegod, a short muscular young man wearing ragged jeans and a ‘MAKE MALAWI GREENER’ Carlsberg T-shirt. He insisted on standing me a beer, then beckoned me outside to talk. He was called Lovegod because his parents loved God and he worked as a forestry transport officer. At school he heard a call to the Catholic priesthood and then spent three years in a seminary, his fees paid by an Irish sponsor, before ‘the devil got into me and I left. Now I regret that but with a wife and son I can’t change again.’ He invited me to stay for a few days and made light of my visa trap; his father was a senior police officer with the Immigration Department in Lilongwe and could surely ‘fix it’.

Two hours were spent getting through to Lilongwe on the telephone. The off-duty operator had to be found and then bribed, with beer, by Lovegod. We walked to the telephone exchange by moonlight, between groves of magnificent Mexican pines, and when various technological complications had been overcome I was appalled to hear Lovegod describing me as the Irish sponsor who had paid his seminary fees and was now in Malawi seeking help. He spoke with pathos but Daddy said ‘No!’ Crestfallen, Lovegod reproached himself – ‘I am a crazy man! I made a big mistake, I should have said you were British. Here we love the British and not the Irish any more. Daddy said those priests and nuns make too much trouble about human rights and maybe you’re helping them … This is sad but come to my home and sleep well after meeting my family and we will talk about politics because I have views not like my father’s …’

I did sleep well, on a camp-bed in a tiny living-room lavishly decorated with pious pictures. Lovegod rose at 5 a.m. to cook me a mega-omelette on the wood-range and make a quart jug of tea. ‘Forgive my wife doesn’t come, our boy is getting teeth and disturbed her, now she must rest. She works too hard, teaching 160 children!’

On the tough pre-dawn climb out of Chikangawa’s hollow a gale was blowing and the full moon seemed to race between low speeding clouds. Then sheets of cold rain drenched me but were soon left behind. During that long fast descent through the Viphya foothills – twenty miles on velvet tarmac – the road crossed many high narrow saddles affording limitless views of an apparently uninhabited landscape, all golden and blue in the early sunshine. On the most exposed saddles the powerful crosswind made it advisable to walk.

Soon after 8.30 a small battered signpost, pointing west, faintly said, ‘Lundazi: 45 miles’ and now I had the wind behind me. Moocha is not a popular crossing; between junction and border-post the traffic consisted of one cyclist, coming from Zambia. He was so amazed to meet me that he fell off his bicycle. The track across the final low jungly foothills – innocuous-looking from a distance but very steep – was strewn with pretty, pale pink stones, sharp-edged and hell to walk on. Then, down on a sparsely populated, level plain extending far beyond Moocha, the gale took charge and pedalling was hardly necessary. Here the track consisted of two deep smooth sandy ruts separated by tall vegetation. In this region the Malawian-Zambian border is an abstraction, in no way reflecting those years of Banda-Kaunda hostility. Approaching Moocha, and again over stretches of the Great East Road from Lundazi to Lusaka, the highway itself forms the frontier and one can picnic freely in either country. The same tribe (its name forgotten: I neglected to make a note) lives on both sides – cheerful friendly folk, very black and very poor, who view the border as a ridiculous politicians’ irrelevance.

The tailgale relieved me of any anxiety about getting to Lundazi before dark – until Lear’s back tyre slowly softened, on the only day of our journey when destination-reaching was important. Over the last ten uninhabited miles I had to stop repeatedly to pump, then pumping worked no more – another defective seam, or a real puncture? Walking on, I felt pessimistic about Moocha as a repair depot.

In the attractive Malawian Customs and Immigration hut, set in a neat garden, both officers were relaxed and chummy, unlike their main-road colleagues; Moocha provides little to be unrelaxed about. My trousers were commented on between themselves, in whispers, but there was no hassle. That came at the nearby Zambian post, a concrete shed manned by a tall lean immigration officer and a short plump customs officer. Both greeted me with some astonishment and at once it was plain that the former saw this madwoman as An Opportunity. When I had patiently filled in the ludicrously long visa application form, requesting a thirty-day visa and leaving the ‘Address in Zambia’ space blank, we disputed as follows:

IO :	This is not good, please give your Zambia address.
DM :	I’ve no Zambia address, I’m touring.
IO :	Then I can give only a seven-day transit visa, for longer we need an address to get in touch with you.
DM :	About what?
IO :	It is necessary, it is the rule.
DM :	OK, please give me the address of a Lusaka hotel and I’ll write that in.
IO :	There are very many hotels in Lusaka, we have no addresses. Who do you know in Zambia, who are your friends?
DM :	I know nobody.
IO :	Then why do you come here? You have a map? Show it, show me why you need thirty days.
DM :	I’ve already explained, I’m on a cycle tour and I’ve had no problems like this on other borders.
IO :	(frowning at map) Zambia is different, we have our own rules. You cannot cycle from here to Zimbabwe in seven days, it is impossible!
DM :	That’s why I’ve asked for a thirty-day visa.
IO :	Without an address you cannot have.
DM :	(picking up pen) Then I’ll give the Irish Embassy as my address.
IO :	(rolling his eyes) This is very bad, you have lied! You know people in this place!
DM :	I don’t, but I’m an Irish citizen entitled to use this address.
IO :	No! When you know nobody you cannot use it, that is false information and not good. There is no solution for your problem.

A long silence followed. The two officers stared at me while I stared at a large AIDS poster above the counter – ‘Your next partner could be that SPECIAL PERSON who gives you AIDS. The only safe sex is with one partner only.’ This anserine bribe-hunt had so infuriated me that I needed time to simmer down before seeing the obvious solution.

Folding the map I said, ‘Fine, that transit visa will do. I’ll get a bus to Lusaka and tell the Irish Embassy I was refused a tourist visa at this border-post.’

My problem evaporated. The customs officer gave a comical yelp of alarm and his friend exclaimed, ‘No, no! To get to Lusaka you must have twenty-one day visa, then you get extensions for one month, two months – in Zambia we like Irish people very much! My teachers were Irish priests, holy clever men!’

Then it was the customs officer’s turn to assert himself, legitimately but maddeningly. Ignoring my luggage he asked, ‘You have enough money to live in Zambia?’ I assured him that I had and showed my Visa card. Its details were carefully inscribed on a docket, I was given a carbon copy (why?) and then my cash had to be shown – a demand never made elsewhere, and one which induced slight unease. Public entertainments are scarce in Moocha and fascinated locals – the majority young men – had long since gathered around the doorways to enjoy my pilgrimage through this bureaucratic Lough Derg. They watched, awe-struck, as £820, in ten- and five-pound notes, were carefully checked through on the countertop, then replaced in their sweat-proof bags and stowed away in my money-belt. The sun was near setting, Lundazi lay thirteen miles further on through unpeopled country and Lear was punctured. I would however have felt much more uneasy at a busy main-road border-post; Moocha’s atmosphere was reassuringly innocent.

This tiresome episode had a happy and typically African ending. My seeking someone to mend the puncture stimulated the officers’ milk of human kindness and they magnanimously offered to do the job themselves; again it was a leaking seam. I then considered staying the night in Moocha but was advised, ‘Here is little food and no lodging, better continue to Lundazi.’

At 5.35 I rode into the sunset, towards a glory of rose and lemon cloudlets imposed on paling blue. Half an hour later I dismounted; this vile track took corrugations to such an extreme that cycling by lamplight was unsafe. But I hadn’t walked far when a pick-up – it had been parked near the border-post – overtook me, stopped, backed, offered a lift to Lundazi. The two young men – Newstead and Chibeza – were Barclays Bank agricultural credit advisers and one question from me triggered an avalanche of information.

Zambia has some 350,000 subsistence farms, 170,000 small to medium-sized commercial farms and fewer than 1,000 large farms using modern technology. Little more than half the land is cultivable, everywhere the soil is poor, in many areas tsetse-control has been abandoned and rainfall is variable at the best of times. Maize has proved an unsuitable successor to the traditional crops – bulrush and finger millet, sorghum, cassava, beans and groundnuts. The encouragement of hybrid maize, with its need for imported artificial fertiliser, has been a disaster. Yet the tsetse-free areas support nearly three million cattle, 80 per cent in bush herds, and since the territory fed its population in pre-colonial times it could surely do so again, ‘with modern assistance like we give’, were enough emphasis put on farming. Newstead quoted ex-President Kaunda who once rightly described rural development as ‘a matter of life and death’. Chibeza pointed out that in practice Kaunda’s regime had neglected to invest in agriculture, the obvious (and only) realistic alternative to copper mining. Instead of investment there was too much state interference by corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats ignorant of the nature of the problems they were supposed to solve.

‘Governments only make problems,’ said Newstead, ‘they can’t ever solve them. Now our quarrelsome politicians are making worse the effects of this drought. They say our ’92 maize harvest will be 60 per cent down on ’91 and last month our stocks ran out and we need to import a million tons of maize and 100,000 tons of other grains. This isn’t only because of drought. Last year our maize-farmers were promised higher prices but never delivered the expected yields – they couldn’t get the essential inputs, Zambia couldn’t afford to import enough. And where they did deliver, the government had no money to buy the maize or no transport to collect it. The politicians of all these drought countries are partly to blame. Now in our southern province people are eating roots and wild pods, not just because of drought – there’s bad distribution of what’s available. South Africa is sending 86,000 tons of maize – will it ever get to the hungry?’

Newstead drove very slowly – ‘otherwise this road will injure us’ – and we arrived in Lundazi at 7.30. Without consultation my rescuers delivered me to the British-built tourist hotel. ‘Here you must stay,’ said Chibeza firmly. ‘Zambia is a dangerous country, you will be robbed if you walk in the dark. And Lundazi’s lodgings are dirty.’

So was the Castle Hotel; a gang of bedbugs lurked under my pillow, awaiting their prey, and several colleagues – upset by the light – stampeded across the bedside table. The sheets were damp, the towel was blood-stained, the wash-basin had neither water nor soap. The communal lavatories stank, there was no shower and the British bath was coated with scum and pubic hairs. The bar had closed at seven, there was no food left in the restaurant and when the electricity failed at 7.50 no one thought of providing the guests with alternative lighting. In Zambia the tourist trade is not big – and won’t be, at this rate.

My unsavoury room had a quasi-medieval fireplace and was circular because in a turret. As an outpost of Scottish Baronial, in a Central African trading centre, the Castle Hotel’s idiosyncracy makes up for a lot. It was built in 1953, perhaps to celebrate the birth of the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and is a corny red-brick joke complete with battlements, turrets, parapets, Gothic windows and arches, spiral stone stairways, purposeless vaulted embrasures here and there along dark passageways, and low nail-studded doors leading into enormous circular rooms furnished only with a bed in the centre of the floor and a worm- (or ant-)eaten colonial wardrobe.

From the open central courtyard a steep flight of steps leads down to a small pseudo-dungeon dining-room where at breakfast-time the only sign of life was cockroaches – hopping, crawling and flying. Eventually three waiters appeared to serve five guests; overmanning is one of Zambia’s many problems. There was no menu to study; we were each served with a bowl of mealie-meal dumpling and a plate of fried fish. This tasted as though bred in a sewer and was most curiously constructed: tough skin contained 10 per cent meat and 90 per cent long, hard, sharp bones. Each had been cooked whole – innards and all – yet the three men at the next table left not a scale on their plates, folding the fish in wads of dumpling, then gulping them down not daring to chew. I watched apprehensively, wondering about perforated guts … Although not a pernickety eater, I drew the line here.

It was time to go shopping. Lundazi might most aptly be described as a rural slum, scattered in an unplanned way over a square mile of ominously dry hillocky country. The trading centre recalled Bukoba; it had the same abandoned or half-empty large shops and forlorn-looking Asian traders, the same air of past prosperity and present hardship. Zambia has the highest per capita foreign debt in the world and 42 per cent of the urban population are said to live below the poverty line – a credible figure, when one looks at them. I could find only a half-kilo tin of dried milk (made in Mallow, Ireland) and two tins of nauseating fish which I ate in my room for elevenses.

At lunch-time the Castle Hotel’s soiled tablecloths remained in situ but there were fewer cockroaches. A waiter offered us (there were two other would-be lunchers) rice with beef or chicken. Some time later we were told that there was after all neither beef nor chicken, only fish. I shuddered and opted for rice unadorned. More time elapsed and we were told that there was no rice left, only sembe (that dumpling again). Meanwhile teetotalism prevailed; the bar-girl had absent-mindedly gone home with the key and wouldn’t be back until 3 p.m. My companions, two health inspectors from Chipata, took this shambolic scene for granted, including (despite their profession) the tablecloths and cockroaches. One was suffering from AIDS; by then I knew, too well, the significance of the rash on his face and hands. They told me about Lundazi’s Irish colony: four nuns, to be found in a compound near the Catholic church.

I spent most of the afternoon with that remarkable quartet – and not only because they fed me, non-stop, with homemade shortbread tasting like the food of the gods. These Sisters of Mercy taught at a local school and were the sort of adaptable modern missionaries who do a lot to make up for the sins of their foremothers. Their affection – and respect – for the Zambians, and the extent to which they had been accepted by Lundazi, gave them some unusual insights into Zambia’s difficulties. They saw AIDS as having overtaken all other problems since the first case was diagnosed in 1985. Out of a population of approximately eight million, some 250,000 were HIV + by March 1992. The reduction of the professional class was already having serious social consequences. Within the previous six months Lundazi had lost two doctors (‘highly trained and dedicated’) who had been achieving much-needed reforms in the local hospital. These were a married couple, aged 28 and 30; the husband’s widowed mother was left with their two orphans and her other sons, long settled in Lusaka, gave her no support. Both emotionally and financially, the lost son had been her mainstay. ‘But at least those two tinies will get regular meals,’ said Sister Brigid. ‘According to UNICEF, Lusaka has about 12,000 AIDS orphans more or less destitute – many homeless, wandering the streets. Watch your possessions there!’

‘Since ’89,’ said Sister Catherine, ‘one of our commercial banks has lost fifty-five of its top staff – it’s had to close some branches, it couldn’t find enough skilled replacements. Now people are dying faster than replacements can be trained.’

‘Compared to other epidemics,’ said Sister Teresa, ‘the economic threat comes from the age-group affected. Epidemics used to wipe out whole familes and villages but AIDS leaves the most dependent, the young and the old. And this in countries that couldn’t begin to cope, before AIDS, with their health care and social welfare needs!’

We switched then to education, a subject not much less depressing. As compared to other British possessions, Zambia was underprivileged during the colonial era. In the late 1930s, when its copper mines were yielding a profit of over £4 million annually, not one secondary school was available for Black children; the authorities claimed the country couldn’t afford such a luxury. After Independence English became the language of education from primary school upwards and school enrolment rose by more than 200 per cent between 1964 and 1979. Since then there has been a grievous deterioration, especially since the mid-1980s. Primary education is not now compulsory, there being inadequate facilities; 200,000 children failed to find a school place in 1991 and less than one-third of the new generation can hope to receive seven years’ education. Although ex-President Kaunda was genuinely keen to harness women’s talents, his ideal of ‘equal educational opportunities’ couldn’t be realised even before Zambia’s economic collapse. At second and third levels fewer girls enrol (respectively one-third and one-quarter) and their examination results consistently fall far short of the boys’. Having left school, they find it correspondingly harder to get jobs – and inevitably that brought us back to AIDS.

Standing to take my leave, I asked, ‘So what’s the good news?’

The quartet beamed and exclaimed in unison, ‘The Zambian people – you won’t meet better!’