July 18th
Woke up to what looked liked Heaven on Earth, especially after yesterdays tiring ride here. Serene lake, mountain background and golden sand beach. I honestly I have never seen this side of Malawi before and it is truly amazing to discover all these places. We need another month of holiday. Witnessed some fishermen going to fish on their canoes. This has been the most serene I have seen lake Malawi. As we wanted to stopover in Liwonde to try once again to go to a game reserve; we left soon after breakfast and headed over to Zomba, our destination for the day. On this route we saw a lot of large Baobab trees lining the road for miles. We bought and enjoyed some of these fruits, papayas, guavas, custard apples, bananas, tamarind (Bwemba), “Masau” and of course the Baobab fruit, it’s called “malambe” in Malawi. Checkout BBC news dated July 17th on this, apparently the Baobab fruit is now declared a super fruit, with it’s anti-oxidant properties…upon reading that we bought extra!!!
In Mangochi, we made unscheduled stopover at Club Makokola. It happened to be at lunch time so we decided to eat lunch there as it was buffet style. Food was fantastic. This place was so amazing. Beautiful Malawian landscape; flowers so brilliant, lake so sparkly you could easily think you were in the Caribbean, mountains on the other side reminded you that this was Africa. How can it look so wonderful in the middle of Malawian winter? We all wished we had time to stay there a little more. However, our reservations were made in Zomba for the night so we started back on the road. Due to more construction on the road; the stopover at Liwonde Game Reserve was cancelled as we did not want to travel in the night. At around 5pm we reached Zomba town and headed up the steep inclines up to Kuchawe Inn, a hotel at the top of Zomba Plateau which is at 1800 meters above sea level. Breath taking as everyone enjoyed the views once more as I closed my eyes again. We reached the top as the sun finished setting. So we are looking forward to more splendid views tomorrow morning (this time, my eyes wide open; I can‘t stand driving up these places, I am happy once I get there and I am afraid when we have to get back down). It is cold up here; however a BONUS! Fireplace in our rooms. Must go to sleep now, can’t wait until tomorrow! We are also meeting Abambo Hamelin for breakfast as we reached Zomba late in the afternoon. Looking forward to seeing him.

July 17th

Malawi is on fire! - NOT. It seems like everywhere you look there’s a fire burning in the bush. We haven’t seen a fire truck insight. Mind you the fires we have seen are only on the roadside and in the mountains. You see smoke in a lot of places. Today we traveled from Lilongwe to Cape Maclear via Dedza. It is supposed to take 3 hours but we painfully took 7 hours to get there because of road construction and rough detour roads. Before you feel sorry for us, we enjoyed tremendously about 3 hours of the driving from Golomoti turnoff near Dedza. It was literally breathtaking! I had to close my eyes plenty times. Steep bends and sharp curves on two way traffic road in what looked like a single lane road. However, the views were amazing, spectacular, picturesque and exhilarating! Probably the best views we have seen that’s far. Very panoramic and out of this world! You could see clearly very far distances.

We got to Cape Maclear on Lake Malawi at around 7pm. It gets dark at 6pm in Malawi so we had absolutely no idea what the area looks like as there was hardly any light…total darkness except for the infrequent cars that passed us. At one point we sang all kinds of songs in the minibus - the highlight “Kumbaya my Lord”.

We checked in at Chembe Lodge at the edge of the lake, ate supper and quickly went to bed.

P/s. We met Doris’s brother at the lake. Actually it was a guy that looked like Doris’s brother and Andrea called him her uncle.