11-14 September 2010: Nyika Plateau
Posted By Sika on June 8, 2010
At about this time, my journal writing became even more sporadic than usual. And, no, all these nine-month late posts did not come straight out of my pristine memory, but out of my journal, so you can see the problem. Or, the wonderful freedom of it all. Or, something.
Nyika was beautiful. It was a long, dusty drive up there, using up nearly half a tank of petrol from the nearest petrol station. We sent Ndala back down the mountain to stay because the prices had recently changed and there was no cheap option for him. It used to be the chalets were hired out as a whole, but now there’s a per person charge with a minimum, and so we couldn’t afford to let Ndala stay up there with us. I felt a bit bad, but mostly about the whole weirdness of having a driver. Ndala was awesome, however, and very helpful. Just as we were heading up the mountain to the plateau, I was thinking, I could’ve driven this. And then we wouldn’t have to worry about all this driver-related stuff. Then we hit several km of road I really don’t think I would’ve made it through. And it wasn’t even rainy season.
The chalets are gorgeous, if simple, and we got our own helper, Jeremiah, to keep the fires lit and to even cook for us. Kris and I both enjoy cooking, and so I think we asked him to help us by starting something that was to take a long time to cook one time when we were going to be out on a hike, but other than that, we did our own cooking.
I spent a lot of time with my new camera—mostly using the aperture priority mode, since aperture priority means practically nothing when the glass in your camera is tiny. Kris would name some of my pieces of art: the still life with a coffee press was renamed “Carafe full of Happiness,” and the picture of her phone receiving no service was called “My Anxiety.” Of course, that made sense as Kris received about 100 million calls from work on our way up, and the calls started again less than five minutes after we regained service when we were leaving.
Mom was sick most of the trip: a 36 hour journey to Africa, followed by two days of several hours of driving, followed by a cabin filled with woodsmoke, will do that to a person. So that slowed us down a little. I think mom was the most upset about it, though. She wanted to be out, and doing stuff, whereas Kris and I were content to do our yoga and pilates, take little walks, read, patch clothes, and take pictures. Well, Kris was less than content about how many pictures of her I was taking, but, NEW TOY! I had to! I just deleted most of them and agreed not to upload most of what was left.
The way the cabins were set up were amazing. There was only electricity during a few hours each night. It was solar powered, and was just enough to charge mom’s laptop, or batteries for our headlamps.
All our cooking was done on an awesome wood burning stove, and while it was a bit tricky to learn when it was hot enough or too hot, which parts of the fire to stoke to keep some burners cooler than others, and that kind of thing, I think were were catching hang of it by the end.
The hot water came from a geyser outside with a fire set under it. The geyser was even big enough I took a huge, hot, slightly soot-flecked bath, and there was still loads of hot water for other people to wash up.
Vegetables were kept cool not in a fridge, but in a “fridge,” a mesh sided box suspended in the shadows under the porch roof out the back door. It worked pretty well, keeping nearly all our vegetables fresh over our time there.
Kris and I went to explore the upscale lodge that had been built and abandoned. The cabins maintained privacy too well, so we couldn’t really see what everything looked like. The walkways were falling apart—wood planks melting into soppy nothingness, but everything else still seemed to be in good shape.
The night before we left, we went on a night game drive, the best part of which was finding a gorgeous leopard. For 15 minutes she tried to figure out why we wouldn’t leave her alone, and, if we insisted on hassling her, was the car at least edible? At one point she rolled on to her back as if to say, “See, I’m so cute, you should come over here and rub my tummy. Rub my tummy! Rub my tummy so I can EAT you”
We did not rub her tummy.
Kris so enchanted Samuel, our guide, with her Chichewa, that he agreed to take us out to Chosi point the next morning before Ndala came to pick us up. Chosi point offers a lovely panoramic view of plateauness, and we saw many impala and other antelopes and such on the drive. Samuel seemed to think our deadline was a fluid thing, and so we had to gently remind him a few times that we really needed to get back to Chalet 3 so Ndala wouldn’t be left waiting.
Eventually Samuel brought us back, and we were off for the next part of the trip.
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