Lake of Stars: Exploring Malawi in Style by Leo Bear

Arriving at Lilongwe airport, the first thing I see is a man selling T-shirts that read ‘Adopt Me’. Madonna’s clearly made her mark here. I’m curious to find out what the Malawians make of the megastar and vow to do a vox-pop* asking questions along the lines of ‘what’s your favourite Madonna song?’ and ‘what do you think about her adopting a baby here?’

Watery Mass

It’s roughly a two-hour drive from Lilongwe (Malawi’s capital) to Lake Malawi, the vast watery mass that dominates twenty per cent of the country. Along the way we pass trucks carrying what look like giant shammy leathers, which turn out to be bails of dried tobacco (a main export). Slender women stroll along with buckets on their heads. Boys chewing on metre-long sugar canes grin and wave, and farmers stand around swinging lethal-looking machetes. I catch the afternoon sun glinting off a line of fish hanging out to dry on the front of an oncoming bus, and in every direction there are tiny mud-brick houses with neat grass-thatched roofs. Some have chicken houses set high above the ground, away from the snakes.

Like its neighbours Tanzania and Zambia, Malawi offers safaris. In the south you can see the ‘big five’, but in the unspoilt north where we’re going, there is very little tourism. It’s as if the modern world hasn’t found it yet. No electricity, no GPRS, shoes optional. I may not see elephants, but according to our Malawian driver, Pike, there are hippos and crocs in the lake. He says the people of Malawi refer to the lake as a person. ‘She has moods. She can be calm or angry. She rewards and she also takes away,’ he tells me. When we pull up at Senga Bay, an orange sandy beach lined with baobab and mango trees, I lay eyes on the lake for the first time. She’s magnificent, vast and intensely blue.

Mufasa

Our home for the next six days is a 32-foot catamaran called Mufasa. She’s resplendent with a tall, blue sail and surgically-clean deck. Passing fishermen stop and stare – Mufasa is the only transport vessel on the lake apart from the Ilalla, a towering Victorian steam ship. Our grounded South African skipper, Howard Massey-Hicks, reckons that if he added up all the miles he’s sailed on the lake in the last ten years, it would come to the equivalent of twice circumnavigating the globe.

We also learn from Howard that ‘Chambo’ is the local fish in Malawi (not to be confused with ‘Chamba’ = marijuana); that people in Malawi mix their ‘L’s and ‘R’s, so ‘rice’ is ‘lice’ and ‘relish’ is ‘lerish’; that Malawian men have sex about nine times a day; and that the chef who cooked Madonna’s meals at the Kumbali Lodge in Lilongwe, received a hand-written recommendation from the ‘queen of pop’ and now earns four times his original salary. ‘Madonna has really put Malawi on the map,’ says Howard.

The next six days are spent snorkelling in the lake’s crystal-clear, skin-softening water, squeaking along white sand beaches, stopping off at fishing villages and horse-riding through waterlogged fields of tall grass. We spend a couple of nights on dry land in eco-lodges boasting palatial chalets carved out of rock (Kaya Mawa and Nkwichi Lodge). They sport four-poster beds crafted from local hard-wood and have wildly decadent outdoor bathrooms. There’s nothing like lathering up when all that’s between you and the untamed jungle is a thin bamboo wall…

Kind of Darkness

On our last day we anchor down in a quiet cove called Chiofu Bay on the eastern shore. Howard goes about setting up a beach braai (wood fire grill) and it’s bottles of Carlsberg (‘greens’) all round. By a quarter to six we are plunged into the kind of darkness you only get in places where there is no electricity. Fishing boats start to collect a few hundred metres away in a horseshoe formation. We watch the fishermen throw down their nets and shine bright lamps into the water to attract fish. Listening to the men calling out to one another makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. It’s as if they are crying out to the lake herself. This is Africa at her most real.

Back on board, we lie out on Mufasa’s deck with the Milky Way plainly visible above us. As Howard lights his final cigarette of the evening, he points in turn to Jupiter, the Southern Cross and Scorpio’s upturned tail. Mesmerised, I understand why the famous explorer David Livingstone named this lake the ‘lake of stars’. Silly me, it was nothing to do with Madonna.