Lake Malawi: Zulunkuni and Raware

The next morning we went and were about to get on an over pack transportation boat when our contact guy called Blessing hooked us up with a ride on a cargo boat which ended up being super wonderful.  It was pretty much a personal ride with a few boxes.  It was so nice so I plopped my big butt down right in the sun at the front of the boat and let the water spray hit my legs dangling over the edge.

 We made a few pit stops along the way to drop the boxes off at different little villages and got to swim but finally after a good 6 hours on the boat (we got there faster than normal with our sweet ride) we showed up at our lodge which was a little slice of heaven on the beach next to a waterfall.

 The people at the lodge were originally from England and had gotten sick of real life so they moved out and built a lodge next to a little village called Raware where they also started to establish an self sustainable community center.  This was amazing.  They were working on composting, self sustainable farming, had built a library, had a after school club for kids and had created jobs for at least a dozen locals in charge of maintaining different aspects of the center--> the idea is awesome though, in about 5 years the English woman that started it thinks the community will be able to keep in running without any outside help which I think is the way to do things.  We can go in and build a school or give some shots to some kids but helping the community be trained and able to do things for themselves is the best way to development.  Anyways so we offered a few spare hands for a few days and got assigned to help make a compost toilet!  Woot Woot- literally we built a toilet for people to poop in and then the poop will be used for fertilizer.  Sounds weird but that does two things: makes it so people have somewhere to go to the bathroom (which was a whole in the ground before) and gives a consistent and sustainable fertilizer option for the gardens. So we spent four days going into the town and building and getting a little interaction at the clinic and with the kiddos too.  It was exactly what I had in mind.

Besides working on our toilet we had a few hours of day light to do other things around the lodge.  There was no electricity there so we were dependent on candle light once it got dark at about 6:30 so we spent a lot of time reading, playing cards and playing bow by candle light and going to bed at like nine every night.  One afternoon we went exploring up the river and waterfall and literally found ourselves bush whacking and rock climbing and wading up white water parts of the river which I was into, except that there were nasty red ants biting us and trees that thought it would be funny to get stuck in my dreads

We also spent a good chunk of time in the water, we did our laundry in the water, found a rock to jump off and tried to snorkel a little bit but the gear was sort of broken so we didn't really see much. We tried sugar cane for the first time (it tastes good but you dont swallow anything so thats a bummer).   It was also just about a nightly ritual for it to rain and we were in a tent to that was not the most fun thing in the entire world.  One night was particularly rough- it rained so much that it soaked up through the floor of our tent and through the rain cover.  I woke up in the middle of the night to find I was in a puddle, my blanket was soaked all the way through and my sweats were wet all the way through to my underwear.  I finally forced myself to half sleep again but that was probably the lowlight of the trip.   

I think one of the reasons I like this place so much was how chill it was but how many adventures and new things there were to see and try.  Our days were very full of new adventures and our evenings were spent reading books by the fire.  I'm not sure how you get better than that.

Our last morning we spent packing up and then got on our boat ride back to Nkhata bay with most of the other people that were at our lodge with us.  We sat on the roof of the boat and got soaked in a rain storm for the first half of the ride and then the second half was beautiful and I spent it napping mmmmm :) That was a good week.  We got back to Nkhata bay that afternoon and didn't do much, even after a nap on the boat ride I was super tired so we went to bed at like 8- it was probably a good idea though because we woke up really early to catch a bus down to the tourist part of Lake Malawi called Cape Maclear.

Such a good week.