Shh, don’t tell Edith
Posted By Sika on November 7, 2008
I started writing this ages ago and then got, well, distracted. So, despite its wordiness, it’s actually a bit more abbreviated than I intended.
Michelle and I went to Mulanje a while ago. Mulanje Massif has the third tallest peak in Africa (not that we went to Sapitwa to experience it for ourselves) and has the second tallest peak right after Kili (Mt. Kilimanjaro) in Central Africa. Even though we didn’t summit, getting anywhere on Mulanje still involves a lot of uphill very quickly. When I told Flora, the head of my department, that I was going to use part of my 3 weeks of just-not-being-at-work-while-the-students-aren’t-here holiday to climb Mulanje, she was very concerned. “You aren’t going to go all the way to the top, are you?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t decided yet.”
“Don’t you know what happens to people who try to go to the top of Mulanje?!?”
“You mean they disappear?”
“YES! So you shouldn’t go!”
“But I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true!”
Then I remembered that I was traveling with Michelle, who was the most accident prone of all the volunteers until Theresa came into country. Most of the accidents seem to involve Michelle only insofar as she’s caught by what’s happening to the people traveling with her. So I reconsidered and promised Flora that I would not attempt to summit. Flora said good, because they didn’t want to have to send people after me. I like to think that’s because of the sheer grief my disappearance would’ve caused, but knowing Flora she was probably just worried about reassigning my exam questions.
Bryce’s advice was to stay at Mulanje Motel the night before and then get an early start in the morning. This was excellent advice and would have been even more excellent had we left first thing in the morning. Anyway, it allowed me an extra day to break in my trai runners and us a chance to eat at the pizza place on the turn off to Likhabula and the 3 main trails up the massif. The pizza place is famous because of its excellent pizza. By excellent we mean actual pizza sauce and not the rosy-reddish coloured “tomato sauce” that they have instead of ketchup that coats the base of nearly all the pizzas here. And we mean actual, real, freshly grated mozzarella instead of cheese that is labeled as, and resembles in an oblique way, cheddar.
The next morning we woke early but got going slowly and after breakfast headed to Info Mulanje where the lady there told us that Chambe hut is not pretty enough to spend 2 days there (a lie). That the Lichenya path, though long, was easy (lie), and that we had plenty of time even though the map said it was a 6 hour hike and we didn’t leave Info Mulanje until past 9. About 35 minutes later we got off the minibus 1km from Likhabula. A porter/guide was already there . He told us that he had to go to the base camp anyway and that because the road was under construction, so he’d show us a shortcut. He seemed nice enough and not overly pushy, although when his buddy met up with us I got a little nervous just because we didn’t know where we were, we were crossing a river*and going through back paths between huts to the base camp.
I became a little suspicious at how excited he was that we had decided to go to the CCAP hut up on the massif. And even more so when he deliberately took us the way to the CCAP booking office that avoided the base camp. So when the lady at CCAP said she didn’t know him, we decided that we had to trek back down to base camp.
The way the porter and guide system works on Mulanje is this: There are approximately 9 quatrillion Malawians who work as porters and guides. Porters carry stuff up the mountain for you and guides lead you places. The porters get paid MK1000/day** and the guides MK1400/day***. Guides don’t carry stuff and porters don’t tell you interesting things about the mountain or native flora & fauna. Porters can have marginal English, whereas guides must have decent English. The rotation system doesn’t allow porters or guides to go up more than once a month in order to allow as many people as possible to go up as regularly as possible so they can feed their families or pay their school fees.
If you start from Likhabula you are technically required to take up a porter and pay a park-entrance-fee-type-thing (of MK400). You can bypass both of these things by either just heading up one of the paths (if you are with someone who knows Mulanje very well: the paths are poorly marked on the rare occasions they are signed at all.) or you can hire one of the guides or a porters invariably waiting at the minibus stand. The problem with bypassing the office is that you are then circumventing the methods that developed to encourage the distribution of money as equitably as possible throughout the community. This is especially important because Mulanje is one of the few tourist spots that actually attracts people who don’t have to be here anyway.
Anyway, as a result of the vague sense of uneasiness niggling at me, we went to the office and discovered that he was as trustworthy as he seemed, it’s just that he had been up the week before and so it was someone else’s turn. Oh well. He would have been a very good guide, I think. More so than the one we ended up taking, who seemed impatient with my slowness.
But it was ok. We gave our porter half of his money so he could go buy food, and 40 minutes later we were off. The hike was strenuous, although I know people who have done it in half the time it took me when I was pushing myself. But hey, at the end of it I had traveled about 2km up, not to mention the many km over, so I guess that’s not too bad.
Mulanje is beautiful. It’s hard to describe the way it unfolds in front of you in layers as you reach the top of one steep bit and then continue moving up and up after just a momentary break of a semi-flat 10 meters. Getting up was a pain: there was the “this is not going to be fun” bit, followed by the “Oh my god, what did I get myself into” bit and the “when the fuck will this ever end” bit and the “oh, whew, I can do this. This isn’t too bad. Yeah, this won’t be a problem . . . . . dammit, I thought the steep part was over!” bit. But once there, ohhh. The rolling meadows; the loverly spiky/soft pretty/ugly flowers sprouting everywhere; the boulders tumbled into streams and pouring out from cracked cliff faces; views down so low that the mists obscure the signs of civilization.
*Where I banged my head on a rock I didn’t see because of my Carlsberg cap (Now! With nifty bottle opener in the brim!)
**About $7
***About $10—the prices are based on the fees sherpas charge in the Himalayas.
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