Our trip to Kande Beach

Written by Anna:

For Columbus Day weekend we headed out to Lake Malawi. This time our friends, David and Lauren, came with us. They are Peace Corps Volunteers here and live in a village outside the capital city of Lilongwe. We left Saturday morning and had a four hour drive to a place called Kande Beach. If you look at this map,(click on the link)

http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/malawi.pdf

Kande Beach is just south of Nkata Bay. (Look on the east coast of Malawi in the Northern part of the country to find Nkata Bay. Look in the middle of the country to find Lilongwe.)

Tyler had been to Kande Beach before but the rest of us hadn't. We arrived around 1 PM on Saturday afternoon and checked into our chalets which turned out to be about 20 feet from the water. It was excellent. We relaxed for the first day and really enjoyed the beach and the water. While Lake Malawi is the size of one of the Great Lakes in the U.S. it's not nearly as cold at they are. The water was the perfect temperature and we had a lot of fun playing football, volleyball, and frisbee in the water.

That evening before dinner we enjoyed a game of Trivial Pursuit...we borrowed it from a friend since ours is not here yet.

We had dinner at a small restaurant that they had on the property. It was really reasonably priced but you did have to order what you wanted for dinner before 4:00 PM to ensure that it would be ready by 7:00 PM. (Don't ask why...I think it's because they have to make sure they have the right amount of ingredients, etc.)

The next day we debated either sailing (on catamarans) or horseback riding - both of which were available at the beach. We decided on sailing but by the time we got motivated to rent the catamarans around 3 PM the wind had died down too much. So we ended up with a paddleboat. We paddled out to a small rocky island off the coast where the guys walked around and Lauren and I just sat and chit chatted (and maybe got a little burned!)

That night we went up the coast a little bit (by car) to another resort about 5 miles north of Kande Beach called Mukuzi Beach. They are a bit more famous for their campsites which are quite nice. Some other friends of ours were staying there and having a braai and invited us. For those of you who don't know (and I didn't until I came here) a "braai" is the South African word for barbecue...very confusing...they even sell something here called braai sauce - the equivalent of our BBQ Sauce. Anyway, our friends our South African thus we went to the braai.

Sidebar about overland treks: So...for those of you have travelled around Europe you are familiar with the Eurorail (travelling by train) and staying at hostels. Europe is pretty do-able in a summer because there is pretty cheap transport and lodging and good infrastructure. However, Africa is quite the opposite. My brother asked me about travelling around Africa next summer and I started looking into it. While there is plenty of cheap accommodation there is not plenty of cheap, good accommodation. Also, the transportation systems are not reliable and sometimes unsafe. Not to mention the fact that Africa is so huge so to get from country to country by bus could take ages...Anyway, that got me to thinking about overland treks which I had heard about and we just saw about six such trucks at Kande Beach. Essentially these overland trek trucks are as big as a semi and carry people (bus-style seating) and all their gear plus tents and food/cooking supplies. A person pays one price for the trip which can go all over Africa but many of the trips go from Cape Town, South Africa to Nairobi, Kenya and stop in places like Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania. The price is about $1500 to $2000 and includes your transportation by truck, all your meals (cooked by the trek company on BBQs) and your accommodation. Sometimes the accomodation is in tents at campsites and other times it is in chalets. Judging from the people who were at Kande Beach on these treks when we were there, it seems like lots of young - just out of college - do them. Anyway, some of the names I saw were Absolute Africa, Africa-in-Focus, Kamuka, Nomad Tours, and Dragoman if anyone wants to look them up from more information.

On Monday we had to head back and we stopped at Nkotakhota on the way back. (On the map this is a little bit south of Nkata Bay). Nkotakhota is also on the coast and has a small pottery studio and a restaurant. We stopped there for lunch and ran into another Peace Corps Volunteer and one of Tyler and my friends from Lilongwe...I'll tell you what these tourist places are few and far between so whenever you travel on a holiday weekend in Malawi you can almost be assured that you will run into someone you know...weird.

The ride back was long and hot - the temperature is really starting to climb here. October and November are the hottest months until December when the rainy season starts. Then things begin to cool off. For now it's about 95 degrees at the middle of the day but luckily there is very little humidity so the heat is not too tough to tolerate.

We dropped Lauren and David off at their village before coming home and when we got there we realized that we can nearly see our house from their village and it's probably not more than 5 or 10 miles away from us. However...there is no road between us so we have to go all the way around the city to get to them! (We're thinking of checking out any bike trails between them and us. We'll see...)

We took some pictures while there and you are welcome to check them out at:

http://www.snapfish.com/share/p=198111129029036456/l=62914078/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

Hope all is well with everyone...we miss you all.