Sean and Jennie Ran A Farm, E-I-E-I-O

All you need to know about the Mushroom Farm guesthouse and campsite near Livingstonia lies in the fact that we liked it so much we ended up running the place.

How did we get to that situation? Well, dear friends, it was like this...

Way back in Lake Naivasha (that was in Kenya, for those of you not paying attention) Jen and I had run into an English couple who had been volunteering in Malawi and who, in their subsequent travels, had stayed at a place near Livingstonia called the Mushroom Farm, to which they gave a glowing recommendation for its food, accommodation, atmosphere and sustainable nature. When we later consulted our guidebook we found that it received an equally positive review in those hallowed pages we were further convinced to give the place a try. We were keen to check out the colonial mission town of Livingstonia anyway, and so the prospect of killing these two metaphorical birds with a single (also metaphorical) stone was too good to pass up.

Firstly, getting to Livingstonia is a bitch. It's perched high up in the mountains overlooking Lake Malawi and the "road" is long, windy, rocky and pretty much inaccessible to anything but a four-wheel drive. Which, as you surely know by now, we don't have. It had also just been raining rather torrentially, meaning the dirt road was now a mud road. There was of course no public transport up the mountain, so we decided to hike it.

The walk was long. It was steep. It was wet. It was muddy. And it took place during the hottest part of a very hot, humid day. I do not wish to speak of it further.

The Mushroom Farm is in fact 10km up the mountain road, on the way to the town of Livingstonia which is a further 5km or so past it. We therefore arrived at the accommodation first and took the opportunity to check in, dump our bags and, of course, have a beer. Any lingering tiredness or bitterness as a result of the walk was evaporated by two things - the welcome from our hosts, Steve and Carmel, and these absolutely ridiculous views.

Our chosen on-site accommodation, the cob house, was also lovely and very good value. And the food...bugger me, it was magnificent. They had a local woman named Efreda in charge of the kitchen and, well I don't use the word "genius" lightly, but she may be the greatest genius in the history of the world's culinary arts.

In fact, such was the overwhelmingly positive first impression of the place that we settled in for the afternoon and put off our visit to Livingstonia itself until the following day. Relaxing with further welcome beers, Jen and I chatted with Steve and Carmel until well into the evening and discovered that they were coming to the end of a six-month contract as the managers of the establishment, with the Australian owner - Mick - set to return in a matter of days. We thought nothing more of it and turned in for the night, getting to our room just before the camp was hit by an absolutely torrential evening rain storm. As it turned out, this was to become a nightly occurrence, and frequently left the paths outside our room looking like this.

The following morning before we set off to walk the remaining five clicks to Livingstonia, Steve and Carmel put forward an enticing proposition. Namely, they were due to leave the camp and fly back to the UK on the coming Monday, whereas Mick was not due back from Australia to take the reigns until at least Tuesday, perhaps later. So, with none of the local Malawian staff up for the job...how would the two of us like to run the Mushroom Farm in the interim? It was certainly food for thought for our visit to Livingstonia.

As I previously mentioned (five paragraphs ago, pay attention), Livingstonia was established as a hilltop Christian mission after previous attempts at establishing a mission on the shores of Lake Malawi had failed dismally due to the fact that the lake - or rather its attendant mosquitoes and other bugs - had a nasty habit of, well, killing everyone. The mission was established and led by Dr Robert Laws, who named it after his personal friend David Livingstone (of "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" fame). As far as I can tell, the reason for this was that there appears to have been some kind of law that pretty much everything had to be named after Livingstone at some point. The man was, and in many ways still is, ubiquitous in this part of the world. Sure, there are plenty of things and places not named after him, but that's only because for the most part he discovered them himself.

The town itself was a fascinating throwback to colonialism, retaining much of its original architecture - the streets were wide, tree-lined and dusty, the old buildings particularly quaint while the museum (at Dr Laws' old house) was an interesting glimpse into life as a missionary at the turn of last century. And to top it all, it occupies a ridge atop a mountain with simply astonishing views over the lake.

And all the while Jen and I discussed Steve and Carmel's proposal. We loved the Mushroom Farm, we had time, we would be getting free food/booze/accommodation, and how bloody cool would it be to say that we (temporarily) ran one of the most celebrated guesthouses in Southern Africa? So it was decided - we'd take over interim management of the Mushroom Farm.

Jen and I made this decision on Friday and were to be handed the keys on Sunday, so with our final day of "freedom" on the Saturday we visited the other principal attraction in the area we wanted to see - Manchewe Falls. Actually two waterfalls, the higher of the two dropping water more than 100m, I was especially interested in the falls' history as a local hiding place from the slave traders. An obscure path led down the mountain side and into a small cave actually behind the taller of the two falls, where 100 years ago the local people hid to remain safe. Following the unmarked and unguided path to the cave was Indiana Jones-esque stuff (not the first time I've referenced everyone's favourite archaeologist over the course of this blog, I know) and crouching in the small, rocky, slippery cave behind the thundering falls hundreds of metres in the air was, depending on who you are, either scary as hell (Jen) or unbelievably cool (me).

And then, the next day, we were the managers of a guesthouse in the mountains of northern Malawi. The word random doesn't even begin to cover it.

Steve and Carmel took us through the essentials - feeding the chickens, ducks and pigs, filling the fridges, managing the petty cash box and of course looking after the guests. And speaking of guests - while we had been guests ourselves it had been very quiet, as soon as we became responsible for the place they came in their bloody droves. First there were Tom and Betty, a lovely Israeli couple, followed very quickly by a host of others - two from England, one from Poland, three from America, day trippers from Germany and the Netherlands.

We also discovered that rather than being in charge for a day or two, as first suspected, it could be nearly a week as we found out that while Mick had indeed landed on schedule in Dar, his luggage had decided it preferred Dubai and so had stayed there. He wouldn't be here for days.

And we wouldn't have had it any other way. Truth be told, we would have been gutted not to have received any guests in the time we were in charge - we'd have felt somehow fraudulent, as though we hadn't really earned the experience, or the free food and accommodation. But our stream of (hopefully satisfied) customers meant that we well and truly did.

Feeding the animals was also an experience to savour. Jen took on management of the ducks, while the chickens and pigs were my domain. The reputation of the pig maybe cliched but it is also very well-deserved. Feeding them was an adventure - they see you coming from a long way off and then rear up on their hind legs to press against the side of their pen with great enthusiasm, showering you in whatever happens to be all over them at the time. None of which is pleasant. Getting close to the pigs is hazardous, so I came upon what I considered a brilliant plan to feed the bastards. I moved to what I considered a borderline safe distance, threw their food at them, and then ran away. As I said, brilliant.

I have to admit though, that I became particularly fond of the chickens. In fact, I just loved the excitable little sods. Feeding them was always fun - they're just as enthusiastic as the pigs but have the consideration not to shower you in their own waste - and collecting their eggs was an exercise in consistency (17 eggs per day, every day). But I especially loved the propensity a few of them had to escape from their pen, only to then not have any idea whatsoever of what to do next and so just stand around outside the pen clucking adorably and waiting for me to pick them up and throw them back in with their comrades. I miss them.

Four days later Mick arrived, with his American girlfriend Dawn in tow, to relieve us of our duties - though with fantastic kindness he then graciously allowed us to stick around for another two nights free of charge. We were only too happy to take him up on this offer, and of course to keep helping out too - we'd become quite attached to the place, and viewed it a little bit as "ours" by now.

And so we wound down those final couple of nights, guests having moved on and leaving us alone with the Mushroom Farm, drinking copious amounts of beer and local fire water with Mick, who was an absolute champ, and Dawn, who was crazy fun personified.

We'd come for a day or two and ended up staying for over a week. Crazy stuff happens from time to time when you're backpacking in Africa.

Things Jennie will remember:

1) The dogs - King and Pigsy

2) The pigs - crazy mud jumping hungry beasts

3) The chickens - who laid 17 eggs every day without fail - stop escaping!

4) The ducks - I'm sorry we ate one of you... but you were very tasty

5) Steve and Carmel - thank you for the opportunity - we'll see you at the Ludlow Food Festival!

6) Mick and Dawn - thank you for your generous hospitality, we look forward to welcoming you to London!

7) Efreda's cooking and her veggie fry ups!

#

8) Poor guest Gosia, whose tent turned out not to be waterproof, and who we found sleeping in the dining room after her tent got washed out

9) Our first guests, Tom and Betty

10) Denise, Callie and Robin - so only Denise was friendly and nice (the other two were quite surly) but you were our highest paying guests and the staff really appreciated your tip!

11) Our quietest guests, Sophie and Pippa

12) The stunning view of Lake Malawi

13) The crazy climb on foot up the mountain (thanks Fisher for your help!) and the scary journey back down the mountain in the jeep

14) Beautiful lazy Livingstonia and Sean's 90 kwacha (35p) haircut and shave

Here are the photos:

BT62_Livingstonia 31 Mar - 8 Apr 2011

Testies Survival Kit: Water Purification Tablets

ITEM USED: Water Purification Tablets

COUNTRY USED IN: Malawi

CHALLENGE OVERCOME: Expensive Drinking Water

Whilst staying on top of a mountain as a guest at Mushroom farm we soon realised that somewhere that only sells small 500ml bottles of water for $2 is going to seriously damage our budget, so before we had the opportunity to live there for free we quickly realised that we had to find cheaper ways to live.

Enter my trusted Testies Survival Kit!

We filled our water bottle from the stream and put in the tablets. One tablet does up to two litres of water and you have to wait for 30 minutes before you can drink.

Our bottle looked like this beforehand:

And it looked like this afterwards:

You'll be pleased to know though that even though it still looked like mud, the chlorine smell reassured us that this was now drinkable.

Put it this way, it didn't kill us.

Road to Malawi

Getting used to travelling by ourselves again took a little while to do. However, Sean and I have learned many things on our travels - such as always allow a small daily budget to get 'local transport' such as taxis. And I was very grateful for this allowance when we arrived back in Dar Es-Salaam off the Zanzibar ferry - for it was flipping hot!

We managed to find a room, which compared to our Zanzibar accommodation, was bright and airy and complete with air-con all for under $30 which in Dar is unbelievable (and necessary)!

We could have stayed there lying in the air-con for days, but were keen to start the journey to Malawi.

We got our taxi driver to pick us up later to take us to the bus station to buy our tickets to Iringa, only to find that the bus company had folded (this is the only bus company the Lonely Planet recommends for having a good safety record in Tanzania, so it's interesting that this one has folded - do the Tanzanians value shorter journeys over their own lives I wonder?). So we had to just take pot luck on companies when buying our departure ticket the next morning.

The [cheap] buses here are 5 seats across (3 on the right, 2 on the left of the aisle). That's quite a squeeze for tall folks like us! The lady next to us was small though thankfully so we managed to get by without feeling too much like we were sat on each others laps. Oh, and of course the bus was overweight and we had to wait at a Police Check for an hour and then later we had to change a tire - all normal stuff!

The journey to Iringa goes through Mikumi National Park. Now, having just paid a small fortune to see animals in the Masaai Mara and the Ngorongoro Crater I was a bit peeved to suddenly be on a $10 bus journey and passing herds of elephants, giraffes, monkeys (not collectively known as a herd I know) and antelopes! On the other hand it was so brilliant to be just on this normal bus and passing plains of these animals as you would fields of cows and sheep back home. Being the only tourists on the bus, the locals took amusement in our amazement and interest in seeing the animals.

On nearing Iringa, we started to pass hillier, rockier terrain where fields of sunflowers were growing. It was so pretty and lovely to try to spot the mud huts of the villagers amongst the towering sunflowers.

We stayed in Iringa for two nights to give ourselves a breather and also to make a few onward plans and get ourselves in order. It's a lovely little spot really - with lovely views of mountains around it. There is also a lovely little cafe that served the most amazing quiche (and food standards in Africa demands that food like this be consumed in great quantities when found).

Our next stop was Mbeya. Basically a not-much-to-say-about-it town near the border to Malawi. We stayed in a place near the bus station for convenience sake. It served the best fried chicken and chips that we've eaten yet but the door of the room housed as many cockroaches as we've eaten this dish on previous occasions. Nice. Needless to say the mosquito net was firmly tucked under the mattress and we slept with the light on after stomping as many as we saw. Oh yes, and the water in the taps was brown. So we skipped showers that day too. But the food was good at least. Oh and Sean bought 5 new pairs of undies for 75p each which was also good.

So an early start the next day and we made our way on a cramped mini-bus (dala-dala in Tanzania) to the border town. They fill mini-buses to the max over here, a normal 8 seater vehicle in the UK will seat at least 20 over here - how wasteful we British are! One vehicle change later and we arrived at the border town, and began the 2k walk to immigration. Nothing eventful really about this border except that we got the best rates ever on our money exchanges (almost the rate xe.com stated) which we were surprised about.

We had to take a 'shared taxi' to Karonga (the nearest Malawian town past the border). Again, a standard 7 seater car demanded to fit 9. We even had to drop off one lady before a police check-point, the driver paid some boy on a bike to peddle her across the check-point so we could pick her up on the other side and continue our journey. Nice.

Karonga is famous only for having discovered the 'Malawisaurus' which we didn't bother seeing (because the museum no longer holds any original bones only replicas). We stayed in a place which could have been beautiful right on the lake, but was just a bit run down and shabby.

We got a mini-bus the next day to Chitimba - again sardined into the seats. This mini-bus picked us up from the bank before going to the bus station. It then did 5 circles of the bus station touting for custom (if the customers think you're about to leave they're more likely to take your minibus over the others present). We then stopped at the post office for one lady, the rice sellers for another passenger and then finally began our journey (stopping to buy sleeping mats for others on the way of course).

Our first main Malawi destination is Livingstonia (which is high up a mountain about 15k from Chitimba. The bus dropped us off at the bottom and we began to think how to accomplish the climb up. In the drizzle. After substantial evening rains...

Here are the photos:

BT60_Road to Malawi 27 -30 March 2011

Zanzibarian Rhapsody

As those of you who know me well are aware, I am a rather big fan of Queen. The band that is, not the pleasant old lady who lives in Windsor Castle and whose primary function falls under the banner of revenue raising for the British Tourist Board. As some of you may also know, the lead singer of Queen - Freddie Mercury - was born Farokh Bulsara on September 5th 1946 on the island of Zanzibar. That, if nothing else, was a good enough reason for me to make the trip on one of the world's most insanely over-priced ferries from Dar over to Zanzibar.

Well that, and the fact that Zanzibar is supposed to be rather cool.

We'd finished our truck tour in Dar, but with Zanzibar being an optional side-trip for our companions who were continuing on with the truck, all five of us made the trip over to the legendary spice island with visions of the exotic in our minds. Overpriced though the ferry may have been ($30 for an hour and a half), it got us to the island in good time and we pulled into the port for our first look at the heart of Zanzibar - Stone Town.

It was about 50 feet from the port itself that we saw the first sign of the great man's legacy, a bar called Mercury's and I vowed to return as soon as possible.

Rita and Andre were keen to go off and do their own thing for a while, so that left the terrible trio of Jen, Krissie and I to make our way around and explore the heady colonial/swahili mix of culture and architecture that was Stone Town. That first afternoon was fairly quiet, settling into our hostel and wandering around the centre of town. The real highlight of that first day (along with most other days in Stone Town) was dinner at the night market. A fantastic open-air market of stalls selling kebabs of fish and seafood caught freshly that day, breads, meats, sugar cane juice and wonderful creations called Zanzibar pizzas - like a pancake fried, folded and filled with meat or fish mixed with egg. I ate a lot of them.

The plan was to head north to Zanzibar's fabled beaches, but before that - with a nod to Zanzibar's history as a spice island and major slave trading centre - we went on a Spice Tour, taking in first the primary sights of Stone Town (including the bustling - and quite graphic - local market and the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral, built deliberately over the disturbingly dark and small old slave holding cells) and then following that with a trip out to one of the island's spice plantations.

This was followed, of course, by an obligatory stop at the house it is claimed Freddie Mercury was actually born in. Helpfully, it's even called Mercury House. There's a sign and a plaque, but it's not nearly the shrine that I expected - I think the Freddie Mercury Trust PR department is really missing a trick with this one.

After that fascinating day out, and another fantastic meal at the night market, we returned to Mercury's bar only to be disappointed - despite some Freddie/Queen memorabilia on the walls, it wasn't pumping out Another One Bites The Dust or Don't Stop Me Now, or in fact any Queen whatsoever. It was steaming hot, the beers were expensive, and it was playing chill-out lounge music. Freddie would have been spinning in his grave, if he wasn't already getting so down and debaucherous in the afterlife that he probably hasn't even noticed.

As enjoyable as Stone Town had been, it was the beaches that we were really excited about and so when the five of us arrived at Nungwe beach the next day expectations were high. Then we saw this.

Suffice it to say, we were reasonably satisfied.

And so began several days of heaven on Nungwe beach, where we swam, drank beer, snorkeled, drank beer, lazed on the beach and drank beer. The stretch of sand itself was nice enough, but the real highlight was the water - gloriously warm all day, and as clear as any I've ever seen.

Our time up at Nungwe also coincided with Rita's birthday, which brought with it another highlight. We'd found our way to a local establishment called the Highlands Bar where we'd found good food and cheap beer, not to mention a friendly manager who - once he had found out that the following night was Rita's big day - insisted that we come back for a birthday bash. And what a night it was ordered - he ordered in red snapper especially, which was sublime, organised a birthday cake for Rita and then, to top it all off, got the whole staff involved in a medley of seemingly every single known recorded variation of Happy Birthday which lasted about half an hour.

Sadly, that was also the last night that Rita, Andre and Krissie were to spend with us as they were rejoining the truck in Dar the next day while Jen and I, bewitched by the island's charm, decided to stay on. It was sad to say goodbye to them - particularly to Krissie, who had become our treasured companion and drinking partner. But she will be staying in South Africa for a time after her tour ends, and so I dearly hope our paths will cross again down there.

So Jen and I spent several more days doing just what we'd done for the previous several (hint: it involved drinking beer, among other things). Our beach side bar also provided a nice moment on one night when out of the blue, in the midst of a long run of reggae music, it played Radio Ga Ga.

I remember this well, as it's the only sodding Queen song I heard for a whole week on Zanzibar.

And that was that - in a perfect world we never would have left, but we have to move on from even the most beautiful places, and so after one more night in Stone Town (and two more Zanzibar pizzas), we boarded The World's Most Expensive Ferry back to Dar where we now sit in preparation for our jaunt into western Tanzania and toward Malawi.

Freddie's little island, however, will stay with us for a long time.

Things Jennie will remember:

1) Mr Happy at the night market who wasn't so happy on our second night there. I hope that you get to visit your son soon!

2) Discovering Passion Fruit Fanta.

3) Sunset whilst swimming in the crystal clear blue warm sea.

4) Loving my first snorkeling experience!

5) Our gifts at the spice farm and the coconut tree climbing man who would sing the song that haunts Zanzibar "Jambo, jambo bwana..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRSCiIxZtEQ (hope this is a good clip!)

5) Celebrating Rita's birthday with the manager at Highlands Bar - he went to so much effort for her with fresh flowers on the table, a massive Happy Birthday medley mix, dancing and singing waitresses, cake and Masai bracelet gifts! What a guy!

6) The butchers in the Zanzibar market and them chopping up (sorry, hacking) bull heads:

7) Krissie - what a top bird! How sad to leave, but we hope to catch up in Cape Town. I have to find out if your fella's accent is really anything like your impressions of him!

Here are the photos:

BT59_Zanzibar 20 - 26 Mar 2011