After all, there was some exchange.
Off the Beaten Track in Malawi
BY MARINA LEWYCKA
Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, after World War II, and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was published when she was fifty-eight years old, and went on to sell a million copies in thirty-five languages. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit and the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Her second novel, Two Caravans (published in the US as Strawberry Fields), was shortlisted for the George Orwell prize for political writing. We Are All Made of Glue was published in 2009, and touches on the property boom in London, the conflict in the Middle East, epilepsy, cats, bondage and glue. Her fourth novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead, published in 2012, is the story of a family who lived in a commune in the ’70s, whose children have grown up with different aspirations: one has become a banker, one is a schoolteacher, and the youngest daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, just wants a place of her own.
It’s easy to get off the beaten track in Malawi. In fact it can be difficult to stay on it, as we found one early evening in July three years ago, when we were driving up the lake road from Salima towards Nkhata Bay for a week’s holiday, in my daughter’s old low-slung Nissan Bluebird, her boyfriend at the wheel.
It was that dangerous twilight time when the roads are swarming with villagers, their children, chickens, runaway piglets, wayward goats, workshy dogs, all dashing to get home before nightfall; drivers of vehicles without functioning lights or brakes career around potholes, also hurrying homewards. For twilight is short, in Malawi, and when night comes, the darkness is absolute. Road accidents are frequent in this dusky light. Children are often the victims. It’s also the time of day when disease-vector mosquitoes come out to feast on human blood.
By now it was obvious we weren’t going to get to Nkhata Bay and we’d have to stop somewhere overnight. We tried a couple of up-market lodges on the way, but they were closed, or full, or they just didn’t like the look of us. We were directed to other, more remote places, which either didn’t exist, or were also full; we were beginning to get worried. Suddenly, out of the dusk, a crooked hand-painted wooden sign flickered across our headlights: Maia Beach Cafe Accommodashon. We let out a cheer, executed a U-turn, and set out down the sandy track signposted towards the beach.
After a kilometre or so, the track divided into a number of less distinct tracks. The tracks were definitely not beaten – they were hardly more than faint trails. There was no light ahead – in fact there was no light anywhere, apart from the stars, which hung so close and bright you almost felt you could reach up and pick them out of the sky like low-hanging fruit.
Suddenly, our wheels hit a patch of soft sand, skidded, and sank in. The tyres were spinning, but not gripping. We were stuck. Getting out to assess the situation, we saw it was even worse than we had imagined. Three wheels were hopelessly churning up the sand; the fourth was spinning free, perched over a sandy bluff with a four-foot drop beneath. If we slipped down there, we would never ever get the heavy car out again. Beyond the narrow beam of our headlights, it was pitch black. All around us were prickly bushes, their vague menacing shapes blocking out the lie of the land. Swarms of mosquitoes smelled our fear, and swooped.
While my daughter and her boyfriend took turns at the wheel of the car, vainly trying to get it moving, I hunted desperately through the bags for some mosquito repellent. It was my first time in Africa. What happens in a situation like this, I wondered, without the AA or even a farmer with a tractor to call on? We held our breath and listened to the silence. Somewhere far away there was a sound of drumming, and we could smell wood smoke. There must be a village – but where? Then we heard voices, coming from somewhere beyond the bushes.
The voices drew closer, and two boys appeared, followed by an older man. They greeted us, grinning. In fact, they might have been laughing at us. We didn’t care. Greetings were exchanged. People are very polite in Malawi. My daughter had been living in Malawi for six years, and speaks Chichewa, though the dialect is different along the lakeshore; still, it didn’t take many words to explain what had happened. The three of them and the boyfriend all got behind the car and started to shove, and slowly, slowly, the car inched onto firmer ground. We gave them some money, and asked for directions to the Maia Beach resort. It had closed down last year, they said. But someone in a nearby village had a key.
We left the car on safe ground and followed them down a series of dark winding tracks, without knowing who they were or where they were taking us. I felt alternating waves of panic and resignation, for I realised that if they wanted to rob or kidnap us, they could have done so already.
At last we came to a small hamlet, half a dozen thatched mud-wall houses, all closed up for the night. They called, and a man emerged from one of the houses; he was tall, and blind in one eye. We asked whether we could stay at the Maia Beach accommodation. ‘You are welcomed,’ he smiled, apparently unsurprised by these three pale strangers who’d turned up on his doorstep in the middle of the night. He fetched a bunch of keys, and we followed him as he set off again down a winding track through the bushes. The other man and the boys tagged along too, and a few villagers who’d come out to see what was going on. We were the best entertainment they’d had all week.
After a while the bushes thinned out and I could see the soft star-lit glimmer of Lake Malawi spread before us like a wide swath of grey silk, so still you’d never have guessed it was water, apart from a faint ripple that wrinkled its surface when the breeze stirred. And there, along the shore, was a cluster of small bamboo huts. One was opened up for us. A torch was found. A price was agreed. Bedding was brought – three thin stained pieces of foam, and ancient and musty sheets that smelled as though they hadn’t been washed since the last visitors, whoever they had been. The mosquito nets were full of holes, but I had a sewing kit, and the kindness of our hosts more than made up for any discomforts.
This beach resort, we were told, had been created by an English couple from Birmingham, who intended to use the proceeds of this tourist venture to fund a school and a health centre in the village. But few tourists had ever made it here. There was the wooden skeleton of a restaurant and lodge, still unbuilt, and a scattering of decrepit huts, gradually returning to nature. The Birmingham couple had not been back for a while. No one knew whether they would ever come again. Our rescuers smiled and shrugged, and vanished into the night. After they’d gone, we spread out our malodorous bedding, stitched up the biggest holes in the mosquito nets, and fell into a deep sleep.
Bright sunlight woke us, needling through the cracks in the bamboo wall, and the sound of children’s voices. I pushed open the door of our hut, and gasped at the sheer beauty of our surroundings. After all the trauma of the previous night, we’d landed in paradise. There, just a few metres away, was a crescent of silver sand lapped by the crystal water of the lake. A couple of palm trees waved lazy branches against the sun. And, as in paradise, there were angels: a gaggle of ragged smiling children had gathered at our door, chattering excitedly. As I stepped out into the sunshine, they fell silent for a moment, then burst into a chorus: ‘Good afternoon. Good morning. How are you? Do you speak English? What is your name? Manchester United! Give me money!’
I smiled back and chatted for a while. Gradually more and more children arrived. There must have been at least twenty, staring curiously as I tried to wash and clean my teeth (the electric toothbrush drew squeals of delight) and following me to the hut which served as washroom and toilet.
‘Please, that’s enough. Go away now,’ I pleaded.
‘Gowayno,’ they echoed, smiling angelically.
I retreated into our hut and closed the door, hoping they would go away. They didn’t. Little hands pattered on the walls, and little voices outside
persisted, ‘Do you speak English? What is your name? My name is David Beckham. Merry Christmas!’
Sometimes even angels can get a bit irritating.
In the end, we surrendered. We emerged from the hut in our swimming gear, ran down to the beach and into the water. Some little boys who could swim followed; others hung around the hut, peering curiously inside. We played splashing games and beach football with them. They did somersault dives from the rocks, and brought us mangoes. Later, fishermen came by with fish to sell, which we cooked on an open fire, thanking the good luck that had brought us to this place; others appeared with vegetables and fruit. Our good luck was also theirs – a few extra kwachas to boost the local economy.
At dusk we walked along the shore to the village, and watched the fishermen setting off with lamps in their unstable canoes carved out of hollowed-out tree trunks to fish for the teeming cichlids. Lake Malawi is up to 700 metres deep, 75 kilometres wide and 560 kilometres long, with treacherous submerged rocks and violent storms that can blow up out of nowhere. But while we were there, there was hardly a cloud in the sky – apart from a great black swarm of hatching lake-flies pluming over the water one morning, a natural wonder and a local delicacy when caught and fried. Lake Malawi is also home to snails that carry the debilitating bilharzia parasite, and locals who swim in the lake regularly are likely to be infected; but for tourists like us, a dose of Praziquantel usually clears it up. Anyway, such thoughts were far from our minds as we splashed in the water or let our feet sink into the warm sand.
Next day was exactly the same: sunlight, sand, water, heat, shade, fruit and fish, nightfall, starlight, sleep. And the day after. We gave up our other plans and decided to stay. Without electricity, the batteries on my toothbrush, phone and laptop gradually ran down, and I let the slow rhythm of the sun reorganise my workaday brain. I became lazy, dozy, sunburned, forgetful. I started to take our paradise for granted, and I even snapped at the angels to leave us in peace. They ignored me or pretended not to understand.
At last our money, our anti-malarials and our drinking water were running out, and it was time to go. When we packed up our things in the car, I found my dog-eared copy of Middlemarch by George Eliot and the electric toothbrush were missing. Maybe some of the angels were not so angelic after all, but given the unimaginably huge disparities in income between them and us, it was a small price to pay. And I think George Eliot would have been rather pleased.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Recently I visited my daughter in Malawi again, with a bit of time to spare, and we took our camping gear and drove up the lake road thinking to spend a few nights at Maia Beach. We drove north from Salima, past Nkhotakota, looking out for the crooked painted sign, but it had disappeared. At Chinteche we turned around and drove back slowly, seeking a turning off the road, a track towards the lake, but there was no opening, not even a gap between the prickly bushes where the track should have been, only the same unremitting vista of low trees, bushes and sand.
We stopped some passing locals to get directions, and asked at a couple of stores near where we’d first spotted the sign.
‘Maia Beach?’ They shook their heads. ‘There is no such place around here.’
Had we imagined the whole thing? I remembered the terrors of our previous visit, the spinning tyres, the loose sand, the mosquitoes, the dark trail through the bushes, and my heart pounding with fear that the villagers would kidnap or rob us. That’s when it occurred to me that maybe, in their own gentle way, they actually had.
Adrift in the Solomon Islands
BY MARK DAPIN
Mark Dapin’s Australian debut novel King of the Cross won the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction in 2010. His short story ‘Visitors’ Day’ was chosen for the anthology Best Australian Short Stories 2011. His second novel, Spirit House, has been nominated for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. A journalist, editor and lecturer, Dapin compiled the Penguin Book of Australian War Writing, and has worked on magazines from Penthouse to the Australian Women’s Weekly, and written for newspapers including The Times and the Guardian in the UK, and the Sydney Morning Herald and Dubbo Weekender in Australia.
In 1990, I kept a diary of a six-week journey through the Solomon Islands, a bracelet of emeralds between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, east of Fiji in the South Pacific. My journal was handwritten in a spiral-bound notebook and, after the trip was over, I gave it to my friend Chris, who had travelled with me and my partner, Jo. Chris was to keep it for six months, then return it to us. Half a year later, we would give it back to him. It was communal property, the shared record of our last great adventure.
But I didn’t see the notebook again for twenty-one years. Soon after I came home to Sydney, I found my first job in journalism and, from then on, every intense, crowded year passed faster than the last. I split up with Jo and, although Chris and I met in pubs and bars in Sydney, Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Bahrain and France, I hardly thought about the Solomon Islands, and lost all my photographs when I moved house in 1997.
Chris finally gave the diary back to me in December 2011. I read it with amazement. I had forgotten the people we used to be.
Back in 1990, I was working as a typesetter and Chris, my friend from university, was an accountant with a short-term contract in the Solomon Islands’ capital, Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal. Jo and I flew out to meet him, travelling by Air Nauru, and stopped over for a night in Nauru’s de facto capital, Yaren.
I remember parts of that first day. The Australian at the Air Nauru counter at Sydney Airport sniggered when we checked in, and said, ‘I presume you haven’t flown Air Nauru before,’ as if anyone who had wouldn’t do it again. He warned of ‘trouble’ in the Solomon Islands and assigned us window seats, although he said ‘locals’ would probably be sitting in them already.
When we passed through immigration, an official said our arrival had doubled the number of people he had ever cleared for Air Nauru flights. (The airline regularly ran at 20 per cent capacity, and most passengers boarded in Melbourne.)
The 737 was crowded with people, plants and food. There were indeed Nauruans in our seats, hulking men with heads and fists like great brown boulders, blue tattoos, and rails of silver rings climbing their ears, so we chose another row. Belted bolt upright in the seats behind us were two trees. Behind them, the furniture had been removed to accommodate tinned tuna fish.
Soon after take-off, an inaudible announcement came over the tannoy. From the reaction it provoked, it must’ve been something like, ‘Will all Nauruans please stand, light cigarettes and move to the rear end of the aircraft. There will now be a competition to see who can drink the most Foster’s.’
Five minutes into a conversation with a red-eyed tank of a man named ‘Rommel’, we were invited to a party to celebrate the return of his Nauruan darts team from a competition in Melbourne. They had won about half their matches and come home with a trophy and a shield, which were jubilantly passed up and down the aisle. We said we’d join Rommel after we’d checked into our hotel – but it didn’t seem likely, as he had no address.
The darts team had all bought Australian khaki bush hats with dangling corks to keep off the flies in Victorian hotels. They intended to wear them en masse as they stepped off the plane, but only three of them remembered.
I accidentally walked through customs and out of Nauru International Airport while looking for the baggage carousel. The only man who had his luggage examined was Rommel, who insisted on opening his bags to show off the trophies.
The next day, we woke up early so as to have the time to explore all the delights of the Republic of Nauru. We were out of the hotel by nine, but unfortunately our bus back to the airport was scheduled for ten o’clock, so we had half an hour too long. Nauru is one of the world’s smallest independent nations. Decades of heavy phosphate mining had left it with a surface like the moon’s, and a population only slighter larger. Yaren had a post office and a ba
nk, a couple of Chinese restaurants, and a gift shop. We bought stamps and postcards from the post office and nothing from the gift shop, which had nothing in it.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Chris picked us up from Honiara International Airport in an old Holden Kingswood. I am relying on my diary now, because I remember none of this. We drove down a road lined with coconut palms to his timber house a few kilometres from the city. Chris had to get back to work, but he managed to cram in a short tour of Honiara, including such interesting features as the Solomon Islands’ only set of traffic lights.
At night, we drank at the Point Cruz Yacht Club, where wealthier Islanders shared the bar with expatriates, but only black women sat with white men.
We drove to the La Perouse Restaurant to pick up Chris’s Islander girlfriend, Estelle, who worked there as a waitress. She was dark, pretty and shy. She didn’t have much to say, possibly due to Chris’s choice of conversation – the early mortality of the indigenous people.
Chris, Jo and I planned a ferry trip to villages in the Western Province, to visit some of Estelle’s wantoks, or family. They lived in leaf huts on islands in Marovo Lagoon, with no local telephone service, so we couldn’t warn them of our arrival, but all the Islanders were supposed to be traditionally hospitable and proud to accommodate visitors, especially if they brought with them rare supplies from distant towns. At Consumers supermarket in Honiara, we spent $60 on navy crackers, tinned corned beef, tinned tuna, tinned mackerel and Two-Minute Noodles.
That night, two of Chris’s Islander workmates came to Chris’s house to smoke my cigarettes. I asked them about village life, and what sort of things we might be able to buy in the trade stores.
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