Road to Malawi Pt. VI - The Journey Home

The next morning we woke up at 4:30 and got a taxi to the bus station at 5:00. Little did we know that today was going to be a hell of day. On this fateful day we had to pay a “fine” to a border official, suffer through a six hour bus breakdown, sleep in a bus station, and barely have anything to eat or drink.

 

These pictures are going to have nothing to do with the story but they're cool

We get on the bus in Lilongwe and drive for about three hours until the border. Once we reach the border I walk up to one of the border officials to ask a question. He looks through my passport then tells me that I need to come with him. So I walk with him to his office and he tells me that my visa is expired by four days. I look at him and just think, you have got to be kidding me. He then tells me that we need to go back to Lilongwe, pay a fine, and then I would be able to pass through the border. At this point we were beginning to run low on money and we had to be back in school in a few days so going back to Lilongwe was not an option for us. In addition, we didn’t have a way to get back to Lilongwe as the bus was going to continue. I find Tim and Lindsey and tell them that we are in trouble as they also have the same visa. The three of us walk back into the office and the border official sits us down. They ask us why we overstayed our visa. We tell them that Tim got sick (true) so we had to stay a few extra days. The border post commander comes by and starts being a hard ass with us. “Why didn’t you just go to the office in Nkhata Bay to extend you visa?” “We had no idea there was an office there, it’s a tiny town.” Then he says, “I do not understand how you can just forget the day that you are supposed to leave the country, what were you thinking?” My dad has taught me that in these situations, even though your pride is getting pricked at, the best option is to just stay as cool, calm, and polite as possible. So I tried that and told him “We are very sorry sir, this is completely our mistake, we messed up, but we are teachers in Namibia and we really need to get back to school, we also do not have transport to get back to Lilongwe” After this he just huffs and walks away. The other officer who I had talked to before starts talking to us. He tells us that if we are unable to return to Lilongwe we can resolve the situation here. I ask him how much was the “fine” was. He decided on 450 Zambian kwacha which is about 30 dollars each. Tim starts to grumble a bit and the officer asks, “Are you complaining? It seems as if your friend is complaining, if this fine is too high you can go back to Lilongwe to settle the fine there” I jump in and apologize for Tim and tell him that we are perfectly happy to pay the fine here and that the amount is more than appropriate. When we start to dig into our wallets Tim realizes that he can’t find his. It hits us that his wallet was stolen on the bus. Tim starts getting mad, Lindsey is super stressed, and I’m thinking that now we are going to need to go back to Lilongwe. I fish out the 300 kwacha that was in my wallet (which I was going to use to buy my visa to get back into Zambia) and tell the officer that this is all we had. We explained that Tim’s wallet was stolen. The guy could see that we weren’t lying, we were very visibly stressed. I also explain that I needed money to pay for the Zambian visa. At this point the border official calls on another guy and they discuss a bit. I think they realized that we really where out of money and that if they forced us to go back to Lilongwe the “fine” wouldn’t be paid at the border. So they accepted the 300 dollars. But before I gave it to them I told them that I couldn’t pay them because that would mean that I couldn’t get my visa for Zambia. Hungry for the money, they take me outside to where the bus driver is. They tell him that I need to borrow 300 kwacha from him and that in the next town I can stop at an ATM and pay him back. He accepts, I get the visa, pay the fine to the border official, it goes straight into his pocket, and off we go into Zambia, feeling a weird mix of relieved and pissed off. The strange part was that there are two Malawian visas, both free. There is the 14 day one and a 30 day one. I don’t understand why they were making such a fuss when there is a free 30 day visa available or why they didn’t give that one to us from the beginning. Anyway, we got through, made it into Zambia but now we were pretty much broke, Tim didn’t have any of his ATM cards, Lindsey had no cash, and there were no ATM’s after the first one where I paid the bus driver back. 

One of the villages that we stayed at during the kayaking trip

To make the trip worse we had no had breakfast. It was around three in the afternoon when the bus broke down and we still hadn’t had anything to eat.

Our bus broke down about 300 km from Lusaka. We had two potential buses that we could catch from Lusaka to Livingstone, one leaving at 7:30 and one at 10. When the bus broke down we figured there was no doubt that we would make it on the 10 o’clock. An hour and a half into the break down I made the perverse joke that Tim and Lindsey were also thinking, guys what if they aren’t able to fix the bus and we are stuck in this town in the middle of Zambia? We immediately brushed it off but we all had it in the back of our minds. I had been able to scrounge up some change that was in my bag so I bought us some food at the local store. After we bought the food the owner of the shop came to talk to us. The three of us knew what to do, play the pity card. We told him how we had been traveling for two days already and still had two days to go. We told him how we had to pay a fine to get out of Malawi and how we needed to make it back to school. In a testament to how generous Africans have been to us already we were getting the impression that the owner might hook us up with something from his shop. Lo and behold he did! He bought each of us a Coke. I then shared my peanuts and bananas with him and we started talking. Real cool guy, he ended up telling us that we could stay at his place if the bus wasn’t fixed. I’ll admit, I was angling for this to happen and it was a relief to know that if the bus didn’t happen we would have a place to stay that night. 

Cooking some food

After three hours of waiting we decided that we were going to try to hitch hike the rest of the way to Lusaka. So we took turns. No cars stopped for us. We were hitch hiking for about an hour and a half when I see a young Latina lady ride by on a bike with a helmet. She looked at me and said hey, I greeted her back and thought immediately, she has to be Peace Corps! PC volunteers have an ability to spot each other and I knew she had to be. But before I could call out after her she had ridden off. Five minutes later she comes back and I tell her “I’m so glad you came back I was going to call out after you! You are Peace Corps right?” She replied yes, she was a Peace Corps response (6 month service after having done two years in El Salvador). Tim and Lindsey came over and we explained our situation. We all hung out together for an hour, told stories and compared Namibia and Zambia. She ended up giving us some contact information of people that she knew in Lusaka that could houses us that night because it was already seven and we knew we weren’t going to make it on time for the bus. While we were waiting the bus company decided that the bus was beyond repair and had dispatched another one. Six hours after the breakdown the bus arrives and we hop on. We say bye to our friend and get on the road. The driver went really fast through all the windy roads and he played Taken once more as well as the horrible music videos. We were pretty annoyed when we arrived in Lusaka at midnight. We talked to people and found out that the next bus to Livingstone was at five in the morning. At that point it was too late to call our new Livingstone contacts to ask if we could stay with them so we just asked the driver if we would rest in the bus for a few hours. We do so, wake up at four in the morning, buy our tickets, climb on the next bus and thankfully escape the Lusaka bus station. 

This spot was the best snorkeling I've ever done

The next morning we arrive in Livingstone around midday. We were a wreck. Shells of our former selves. At this point my foot had also developed an infection and was swollen up to the point that I couldn’t walk properly. We were hungry (peanuts and bananas for lunch the day before, no dinner, no breakfast, and only a small snack around eleven), thirsty, and grouchy. We walked to our hostel in silence, get there, drop our stuff off, rest for about fifteen minutes then go to get food. I ate a full cheeseburger and fries and some shwarma. At the end of the meal we were all smiles. We head back, sit down by the pool and relax the rest of the day. At seven I turned on the T.V and there was a playoff basketball game going on. I was SO happy. I was sitting down in the dark watching the game and giggling to myself, super creepy but I was beyond caring. After the game we pass out, wake up at 6, get a ride to Shesheke (the border to Namibia). We pass through the border, buy some food for a week at the village, go to the outskirts of town and hitch a ride with some very nice Afrikaners who drove very fast and all the way to our villages. I pass out until the next morning. It seems as if the trip really took a toll on all of our bodies, the three of us became sick and only felt better about a week and a half later. Malawi was beautiful, I’m glad I did this trip when I’m still a hardy 24 years of age, but I am never doing another trip like that again. It was brutal. Next time only in style. Malawi wowee.