Traveling with mom to Nyika
Posted By Sika on June 8, 2010
In mom’s and my whirlwind tour of Malawi, I tried to balance seeing things that I hadn’t been able to see, and showing mom what my life was like in Malawi—well, at least as close as I could given that I my life in was functionally over. We went up to Nyika Plateau, which was gorgeous and mellow and full of wood smoke.
The trip up there was, um, interesting in bits. I didn’t want to drive all the way to Nyika in the little time we had, and so Derek let me hire away his driver for a few days. Traveling with a driver and a car is a far different experience than traveling without a car.
For one thing, you’re far more likely to attract notice at the roadblocks. There’s something you should know about me: I can’t lie. Maybe, if I was paid a million dollars, maybe I might manage a semi-convincing whopper. So, when the police at the roadblock started asking about the car, figuring that the car was a hire without the for-hire license. When I said that the car was Derek’s and he loaned it to us along with Ndala’s driving, the policeman was less than believing. He kept asking stupid, irrelevant questions like, “if it’s not a hire, who is paying for petrol?” Finally, in response to that most idiotic question, I said Derek had actually filled up the tank to start. So the police officer got a leering look and said, “Oh, he’s not your friend, he’s your husband. He obviously didn’t mean husband.
Traveling with a car and driver, you have to think about where you want to stay before you get there. You have to know if it has a brick fence, if there are cheaper rooms for your driver to stay, and if the place is actually secure. Figuring all this out without good phone numbers and up-to-date guidebooks was difficult. More than once, we ended up paying extra for Ndala’s rooms just so we wouldn’t have to add having another, cheaper, resthouse nearby to our factors to consider.
Traveling with a car and driver you also meet far fewer people, and when you do meet people, the power and privilege imbalance is much more obvious, harder to refute, and harder to move past. Kris’ much better Chichewa was helpful in getting past that barrier in some ways, but still, it changed things.
As annoying as delays and problems traveling are, it is in those issues that a lot of the actual traveling, the part that makes traveling better than just buying a postcard and saying you went somewhere, happens. I do like to have breaks from minibus travel and hitching, though. I’m not so hardcore that I don’t tire from working so hard just to go from point A to point B, and I do, at times, enjoy the easy life. But I do think it’s important to recognize the trade-offs I make when I make seemingly easy choices.
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