The ‘farm’ was a scatter of huts perched on a cliff edge towering over the escarpment, centred around a terraced bar and restaurant with a seriously impressive menu and staff who were keen to please. The view was breathtaking, sweeping across vast valleys folding below, forest, terrace and fields; a patchwork quilt tossed all the way to the softly arcing lines of beaches a dozen kilometres away.
On arrival, Sam pointed at a man of European descent reading by himself at a table near reception. ‘You are a white man.’ I introduced ourselves to him and checked in, then Sam took off towards our hut. The ‘white man’ turned out to be from Poland. We were joined by four Americans and a Dane. They were all in their twenties and all fascinated by our trip, autism and, of course, Sam. As well, there was a motorbike-riding woman from London with cropped brown hair who introduced herself as Harri. I wondered what Sam would make of that.
They had well and truly picked my brains about Sam and our situation before he rocked up to the dining table for dinner and proceeded to have one of the best reciprocal conversations I’ve seen him have. It would be hard for any fourteen-year-old boy to have a conversation with seven older strangers, especially young women, but Sam did really well. Harry Potter, school, Australia, Africa and our trip, it went on and on; I was so impressed. Were Sam’s social skills starting to thrive?
Sam even managed Harri’s moniker without any dramas. Harri was sharp and incisive. She came across as a natural leader. Her curiosity had been kindled by the concept of our adventure, and she, Sam and I had several chats around the bar, just chilling back and taking it easy, Mushroom-Farm style. It was unplanned conversations like these I was starting to value more highly, and I began to realise my own ideas about autism, Sam and the intervention were being shaped and moulded by the people we met along the way.
The next day Sam and I planned to walk to the nearby village of Livingstonia, which had been established by a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who named the settlement after his mentor, Livingstone. We took a shortcut that started at the back of the farm, and walked up a path through a forest of brachystegia and uapaca hovering over steel-grey granite covered in pale green lichen. Upon reaching the road we turned right and hiked through hills and subsistence farms—plots on which all the food grown went to feed the family who lived there—where small children would offer to be our guides for one hundred kwacha. ‘No, thanks; no, thanks.’
On the way to Livingstonia we saw the impressive Manchewe Falls. At the gate to the waterfall’s national park, five young boys descended on us and attempted to guide us, no doubt for payment afterwards. Despite my attempts to shoo them away, they kept hanging around for which I eventually became grateful—the paths in the park turned out to be a bit of a warren. Africa doesn’t believe in safety barriers, and after descending a jungle-covered pathway near the river I suddenly realised Sam, who was ahead of me, was standing on a large rock at the top of a hundred-metre high waterfall, only a metre from the edge. He was fine, of course, but I gripped his arm and pulled him back.
Our unsolicited guides escorted us down a steep path next to the falls to a cave which was used by locals as a place to hide from slave traders in the nineteenth century. It made me shiver to imagine what it must have been like to be so defenceless, unable to prevent your loved ones from being snatched away at any time. A dark cave for a dark time.
As we left, our guides demanded their fees. I negotiated hard, and they seemed disgruntled. As we left the park the five of them were following us at a distance. Glancing over my shoulder I wondered whether Sam and I were in danger and picked up the pace. Eventually I glanced back again and they were gone.
Livingstonia was a disappointment. I’d expected old stone buildings full of character, built by wide-eyed bearded missionaries. While there was a bit of that, it was mostly your standard African town, with wide dusty roads, ramshackle kiosks and a drowsy populace.
We had been walking for three hours and Sam was over it. Actually, so was I. I tried to negotiate a lift back to Mushroom, but the price was exorbitant. We stopped for a drink in the cafe of the technical college, which donated all profits to the local orphanage.
The Orphan Care Project was run by the David Gordon Memorial Hospital. The hospital had a catchment of ninety thousand people in the poorest area of one of the poorest countries on earth. In their catchment, they had 6,450 orphans; that is, seven per cent of the entire population were orphaned children.
I spoke to the kind woman behind the counter in the cafe. ‘Is this because of HIV?’
She answered without hesitation. ‘Yes.’
Walking back through the town, we passed the aforementioned hospital. One of the local four-wheel drives, which functioned as minibuses in this neck of the woods, was parked outside the gates. We climbed into the tray of the duel-cabin utility.
Over the next half hour, the tray and cabin slowly filled, and we watched loved ones saying goodbye to patients. A very sick and wasted young woman in a hospital gown, sweating, shaking and struggling to hold up her head, sat in a wheelchair pushed by one of the nurses. She had a marked bronchitic cough and was struggling to breathe. I guessed that she had end-stage HIV, complicated by pneumocystis pneumonia, but I suppose it could have been tuberculosis or cancer. She looked like she was not long for this world. Her elderly father said goodbye to her before climbing into the tray with Sam and me. Soon we were joined by others, including three breastfeeding women. Eventually there were eighteen people in the tray, eight in the cabin, a dozen or so bags and sacks, a car radiator and a chicken.
Sam didn’t like the fact the chicken was being carried upside down by its bound feet. He pointed at the man holding the chicken. ‘Animal cruelty!’ Fortunately, the chicken holder had no idea what he was on about.
We zipped and bounced along the bumpy track through large puddles, over protruding rocks and between walls of reeds and scrubby trees, which flicked and whipped the truck and passengers. I was sitting on the rim of the tray at the passenger-side back corner, so there was a lot of ducking of branches, stems and leaves. The Africans laughed and whooped. The chicken slept through the entire trip.
Sam, wedged between a mother and infant and the old man and the radiator, seemed to be enjoying himself. So was I. It was a hoot. Albeit a bit precarious: I copped an insect in the eye, and Sam’s back felt a bit sore afterwards.
I was reluctant to leave Mushroom Farm, but we’d planned to depart the next day. I could understand why a traveller we’d previously met had called it his ‘highlight of Africa’.
On our final morning, I crept out of the room at dawn to watch the sunrise over the distant lake. It was absolutely silent. A front during the night had cleared the mist from the lake and you could see the faint outline of the Tanzanian mountains on the other side of the lake sixty kilometres away. The sunrise was mirrored on the lake’s surface and broke through the clouds like a giant spotlight. Lake flies, which breed in huge spumes rising off the water, resembled mist coming off the lake.
Below us on the precipice an augur buzzard glided in circles searching for prey; she arced into the void and disappeared effortlessly off towards the lake. However, it seemed the journey would not be so effortless for us. Cars heading down the hill were few and far between, and most of them were already full by the time they passed the farm. Our chance of catching a lift was slim.
We planned to take two minibus journeys that day—one to Mzuzu, and another on to our next destination, Nkhata Bay—and we needed to get to the bottom of the hill, ten kilometres of winding road, as early as we could. It seemed our best option would be to walk, but Sam had never walked that far in his life, let alone with a full backpack.
The American owner of Mushroom Farm told me that we could pay a porter to carry a pack for us. Even though I felt like a nineteenth-century colonial master, I agreed.
We waved goodbye to the other guests of Mushroom Farm and I drank in the view one last time as we turned and headed down the hill. Harri, who was also leaving that day, tooted and gave a wave as she vroomed past on her bike.
Oscar, our porter, was an amiable dad of a two-year-old daughter and had been trekking all his life. This was a gentle stroll for him. He carried Sam’s pack and the camera bag and Sam carried the daypack. I struggled the most. By the end of the ten kilometres my left knee cartilage, legacy of an old football injury, was playing up badly. I realised some of the mountains in southern Malawi I’d intended to climb, particularly the famed four-thousand-metre Mount Mulanje, were now off the table, which was very disappointing.
As soon as we reached the main road, a minibus appeared and we collapsed inside, sweating and tired. As we approached Mzuzu, it occurred to me that this was probably the last place I’d be able to access an ATM for a while, which meant we had to detour from the minibus station into town and then back again. But at the minibus station we found the usual hawkers but no taxi drivers. Maybe because it was the weekend? I had all the gear, but no idea. We walked up the hill to the road. No luck—only some guys with motorbikes offering lifts. I waved them away, but after ten minutes, and Sam’s complaints, I relented. With our packs strapped onto the back of two bikes, we donned helmets and doubled behind the drivers. Sam anxiously hugged his driver around his neck rather than his waist. He had doubled with a mate on a small trail bike before, but this was Africa and a whole other level.
The next minibus was run by two muscular young men who appeared to be attempting the Guinness World Record for how many people you could fit into a single vehicle. They had crammed in twenty-two people and were still refusing to leave when some of the passengers started showing rare signs of frustration. A few tense exchanges ensued between the bus guys and a businessman sitting under a big box in the back seat.
When we finally departed the driving was particularly reckless. As we hurtled into villages at one hundred kilometres per hour, pedestrians scattering, I feared if the driver made a mistake there would be a fatality, perhaps even twenty-two of them. The side panel I was jammed against bowed disconcertingly under my weight as we flew around the curves of the mountain road like the out-of-control mining cart in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
With a communal sigh of relief we hurtled into Nkhata Bay. While getting off the bus I cut my thigh on a sharp edge of a broken seat bracket and swore.
‘Don’t say that word, Dad,’ Sam said. An old woman smiled approvingly at Sam’s disapproval. To my embarrassment I then noticed a can of lemonade had burst and leaked through my daypack on my lap, wetting my jeans. ‘Have you wet your pants?’ he asked, as he spied the wet patch. He pointed at my crutch. ‘You wee’d!’
It would have been understandable given the hair-raising journey we’d just endured. I was not a happy camper.
Looking like it belongs in the Caribbean, the village of Nkhata Bay is nestled around small bays punctuated with rocky outcrops and islets where figs and frangipanis spring out of the sand. The rhythm of the small surf, blown in across the vast lake, evokes a calm ambience familiar to coastal villages. Only the absence of salt in the air reminds you that this is freshwater, not the ocean.
The shopping strip was busy, bustling and bursting with colour, claptrap and customers. Women sat behind pyramids of tomatoes, trays filled with maize or peanuts, and mats containing lines of cut sweet potato, sugar cane or bananas. Trestle tables held a wide array of fish, from the large pale butterfish, a favoured delicacy from the lake, to piles of tiny silver mbuna, salted and dried. The locals chatted on corners, dodged the traffic and pushed their way through shops, sidewalks and alleys.
Sam and I did nothing. With my aching leg muscles, sore knee and cut thigh I could barely walk up the stairs to the room. My tennis elbow was still a problem too. If I’d been home in Australia, I would have seen a sports physician and had an MRI scan by now.
Lazing on the verandah, looking out across the anchored boats on the bay, lit orange by the sunset, Sam played on his DS and I read my book. We were in a pretty nice little corner of the world.
The next morning at breakfast, we gazed across the hazy lake to Tanzania. Or was it Mozambique? I was unsure at this latitude. Our objectives for the day were to book a boat trip to an island on the lake, complete some schoolwork and neuroplasticity exercises and try to find some wi-fi. The latter would prove to be impossible, which was immensely frustrating. But we played chess and worked on some math exercises under a frangipani near the beach in front of our hostel. This spot would be Sam’s classroom during our stay.
I was feeling overwhelmed, and over it. My sister Mary-Anne had presciently warned me before we left that the greatest burden of travelling was, well, travelling. My physical ailments weren’t helping. I yearned for Benison. I’d snapped unfairly at Sam, who’d actually been going well the last few days, and coping with the heavy travel schedule admirably, considering. Better than me, I thought.
I needed to remind myself of the positives. Overall, Sam was coping marvellously. I was convinced he was making progress he wouldn’t have made at home. Certainly his resilience was improving; here he was doing ten-kilometre mountain hikes, riding on motorbikes and eating all kinds of stuff. This was the main game.
He was still saying he wanted to go back to Sydney, but not nearly as frequently or as passionately. Negotiation about the number of eight-out-of-tens in a row required to get home had stopped. His daily score now seemed more a matter of pride, or perhaps obsession, than the means to a premature return.
We had also been lucky. Apart from my twenty-four-hour gastro and scrapes and strains, we’d avoided serious illness and injury. I’d lost a lot of stuff but we hadn’t been robbed. The weather had been brilliant and we’d met some amazing people, visited some amazing places and had many amazing experiences. Yes, think positive.
However, upon returning to our room we found an unpleasant surprise waiting for us. Ants. All over the room: in our backpacks, over our toiletries, on the computer, the phone, everywhere. Sam had spilt a Sprite on the floor the night before, which I presumed had attracted them.
My skin crawled as I discovered more and more. They crawled over our shoes and socks and up our legs. Sam shrieked and I groaned as we flicked and stomped and slapped, whopped and whacked. Eventually I screamed in exasperation and Sam laughed hysterically at me. It was the icebreaker we needed. After finishing the massacre we both flopped onto the bed and smiled at each other.
Then I found a mosquito inside the mosquito net over my bed and added it to the casualty list. It had blood inside it; probably mine. I remembered with some anxiety the man we’d met in Mzuzu who’d looked so ill with malaria.
That afternoon, while drawing and playing cards in our room—now littered with several thousand dead ants and one dead mosquito—Sam complained about his legs. ‘They feel bendy.’
‘Do you mean they’re sore from the walk?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Yes, mine are too.’
Sam looked at me. ‘I am not weak.’
‘No, Sam, you’re not weak.’