So this weekend I decided to visit Cape McLear (a gorgeous cape at the bottom of Lake Malawi) with Katie and Anna (2 students from Edinburgh who are doing their elective in Blantyre - the other big city). Off I set in my Toyota Corolla rental car to meet them in Monkey Bay which is about 20km away from the Cape and all was going well until the minute we turned onto the road to get to the cape. Cue a dirt track with constant divets the whole way along it...not the most comfortable road but bareable......until we nearly died.
A cow decided it was time for itself to walk into the middle of the road and I thought "OK I'll just brake now" but my foot went straight to the floor... there were no brakes. Luckily I managed to swerve and pull off some sort of emergency stop so the cow and the three of us escaped intact (thank goodness cause if you hit an animal here then you have to pay for it!). Unfortunately the brakes did not come off so well so we had to crawl the rest of the road (which at this point we thought would only take a couple of minutes) to get to Cape Mclear. An hour and a half later with cramp in my hands from gripping the steering wheel I had managed to coax the car to the cape with absolutely no brakes (it turned out we were absolutely miles away from the Cape when the brakes stopped working!). Once we arrived we stayed at a place called Mufasa's where they said that they would check the car out the next day (they thought it just needed some new brake fluid).
That night we went for a nice meal to a place called Gecko Lodge and met up with Anna (another student who's from York and quite possibly has the same brain as me is doing her elective at the same hospital as me - she got annoyed that I hadn't mentioned her so here it is Anna!!).
On Saturday we chillaxed most of the day, I went in for a swim in Lake Malawi (I'm on the look out for signs of schistosomiasis as I type) and managed to burn the back of one leg and not the other. Standard. During the course of the day my new Malawian friends text me asking what I was up to and I mentioned the fact that my brakes were non existent anymore. After going for dinner that night got a phonecall saying that my 3 knights in shining armour were outside where I was staying! They were further up the Lake and had driven down so that I could get back to Lilongwe the next day! So obviously I had to go out and buy them a drink to say thank you......this turned into a lot of beers and some tequila, singing Westlife at the tops of my lungs and not getting back until 4.30 in the morning.
Now had I not done tequila I think the next part of the story would not have happened. I woke up at 7.30 (on a Sunday - its a crime!) to find that I had managed to misplace my wallet at some point the night before. So the next 2 hours were spent frantically trying to find it, bribing locals and eventually giving in to the fact that i wasn't going to find it. At the same time I managed to convince myself that I had lost the car keys to the damn broken car but thankfully this was just a slight hungover mishap as they turned up in the bottom of my bag.
One of my knights decided he was going to drive my car back (he used to be a trucker) so he went back with the 2 Finnish nursing students that I had offered a lift to (forgetting that the car was broken) and we went back in the car with Blessing (coolest name ever lol!). En route we stopped to fix the car a bit better (when I say we the girls stood about in the sun and the guys were underneath the car!) and stopped to take a look at the scenery (which was totally stunning!). Katie and Anna flagged down a bus once we were back on the main road (the M1, could not be more different to the M1 in Britain, lots of goats and people on bicycles) and I went back to Lilongwe with the Malawians and the Fins thinking "yes I can get to my bed now" but nope!
I was dragged to watch jazz outside a posh pub where everyone was dressed up really nicely...I hadn't washed and hadn't slept so curled up in a deck chair and tried to look inconspicuous. After that I had the best BBQ steak ever in a place I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to find again then eventually got home!!!!
I think I might stay at home next weekend...
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