Malawi, Mozambique & Zimbabwe

As always, our first impression of a new country is based on the interaction with the authorities at the border crossing. No visa, no car fee, no carbon tax, no annoyances; lovely. Despite Malawi ranking 5th on the list of poorest countries in the world, corruption is remarkably less present compared with Tanzania and the people are very friendly and polite. Ed from Chitimba Camp, who comprises one-half of a Dutch (Limburgs) couple running a beautiful campsite alongside Lake Malawi, gives us a good reason for this. Acccording to him, this friendliness is partly due to Malawi being spared most of the troubles that have plagued Eastern Africa. The country also hosts a lot of former refugees, who fled for the violence in the neighboring countries, making Malawi the peaceful place it is. We are happy to agree on all that.

The main attraction in the country is Lake Malawi, which runs for over 500km in a north-south direction and forms the eastern border with Tanzania and Mozambique. Apparently about 90% of the fresh water aquarium fish are found in this lake, so we did a night- and a day dive during which it felt a bit like, well, swimming in an aquarium.

From Nkhatha Bay we drove southeast towards the capital Lilongwe to try and find, again, some parts for our car. This has been an ongoing story for the past 5 countries we’ve visited and, after again getting a ‘no’ from the suppliers, we were getting quite fed up with it. So we decided to contact people in the country where we know we can actually get our parts; South Africa. We had already dropped the country as a ‘buffer’ to our trip but, after doing the math (meaning kilometers), we have put it back on the calendar again. While we were changing our itinerary, again, and after receiving mixed info about the prices of visa and car entry (up to 300 dollars for two persons and a car) for Zambia, it appeared just as wise to drop Zambia in the process and go for the short cut through Mozambique to Zimbabwe.

This was, as usual, not planned, but then again, a plan is worth only so much in Africa. So Mozambique it was. Unfortunately not all of the country is as safe as it once was, meaning we would have to limit our visit to the northern part. A rendez-vous with Louisa (who studied with Richard) in Harare, was scheduled for Saturday. This meant our time in Mozambique was also limited to only 2 days. It is hard and probably incorrect to extrapolate this short time and small area visited to the whole of the country, so we don’t even bother. What we do know is that we spend our only night in Tete, a mining town roughly halfway the Malawian and Zimbabwean border, at a very run down but lovely campsite along the Zambezi river. Coming into the country we got a cold reception from immigration and ended up paying 86 dollars per person for a visa (it seems the countries we spend the least amount of time cost us the most amount of money, with Burundi topping the list at 90 USD), but the frequent police checkpoints didn’t cause us too much trouble nor money.

Coming into Zimbabwe we were told our car insurance wasn’t valid there and we had to pay a 30 dollar ‘mzungu’-insurance to allow our vehicle into the country. On the positive side; our visa was with 30 USD some 20 dollars per person cheaper than we had anticipated.

On Saturday afternoon we arrived in Harare, after spending a good hour along the way looking for some ruins and caves that where nowhere to be found. At Louisa’s we were given a hot shower and a bed in the guestroom. This was a very welcome change from the two weeks we’d spend in a moist-to-soaked tent in western Tanzania and Malawi. She’d planned two days of partying and relaxing in Harare which we exploited to the fullest. Hung-over but happy we left on Monday for Great Zimbabwe, with a short stop at the Balancing Rocks in southern Harare.

In Harare we also managed to stock up on dollars, which you can get at the ATM (with a VISA card, Maestro/MasterCard didn’t work for us). To us this was a real moment of relief, as we were running short on the currency that is necessary to pay border crossings and visas with. After years of hyperinflation, the Zimbabwean economy has recently transformed to a US dollar economy meaning that groceries and fuel have to be paid in it, because the former Zimbabwean dollar is not valid anymore.

Our next touristy destination was Great Zimbabwe, what gave the country its name. It consists of a series of ruins positioned on top of a massive mountain of granite that poses a spectacular sight. On the way to it we sadly had to give up our clean sheet we still held with respect to paying bribes to cops. Until now it had cost us three cookies in Tanzania and four beers in Burundi to keep the police happy, but this time we had to come up with dollars to satisfy the officer. A $200 fine for not having white reflectors on the front of our car was negotiated down to 50 dollars (which was still way way way too much) but we were allowed to continue our journey.

From Great Zimbabwe we continued via Bulawayo in the southwest to Hwange National Park close to the Victoria Falls in the north. Driving up there we discovered a dinosaur-fossil-finding-location on our maps and gps, but on the ground it turned out to be a woody area (probably full of poisonous snakes) with not an outcrop in sight; good thing it was only a 150 km detour J.

The national parks and tourist attractions are very well prized in Zimbabwe (some 10 – 30 usd a person compared to 40 – 65 in Tanzania or Kenya), as are the campsites. Well noticeable though is that, following years during which the economy was in shambles, maintenance and repair works have not been carried out for a long time. All the infrastructure is still there (street-lighting for instance), but none of it is working and also the roads have degraded quite badly in places. Whereas other countries we’ve visited so far all seem to be on the rise, Zimbabwe appears to have had a peak years ago and looks like it has been on the decline for a while. However, it is slowly starting to recover from that only recently.

It was only a short stretch from Hwange NP to the Victoria Falls, where we are at the moment. Today Anouk decided it was time to tick-off bungee jumping from her list by plunging 111m into the canyon cut out by the Zambezi River below. The rest of the day was filled with devising a plan to get two Volkswagen 4x4 gearboxes from our Belgian friends (who are on the Zambian side of the river) across the Zambezi whilst evading custom taxes (read smuggling). But with a different solution being found to that issue we now have an easy afternoon off.

Tomorrow we’ll head for Botswana; first Chobe National Park and thereafter the salt flats that, weather permits, we tend to cross with the Belgian couple in a few days from now. After that it’s only a small 900-km loop through the Kalahari Desert on the way to Pretoria to finally pick up the long-awaited parts for the car.