Sunday, June 16 and Monday, June 17
Camping on the Beach
Six of us -- me, Randy, Nicole, Paul, Steig, and Kumba (one of our guides) --
set off kayaking the next morning. Giros, the other guide, was driving a
speedboat with all of our stuff, the tents, and food. The lake was crystal
clear and still, and not carrying our gear in the kayaks made them very fast.
We soon adjusted to the Malawian way of kayaking: paddle for an hour or so, then
sit and rest for 10 or 15 minutes, repeat, and then stop for a meal. Not a
bad life. When the wind picks up just a little, we hold our paddles over
our heads; we look fairly stupid, but we do catch some wind and sail along
for a bit. The lake, although calm, is at a record high as a result of
recent rains, so when we stop for lunch or to camp for the night, the beaches
that remain are very, very narrow. We keep ourselves entertained by
singing
Kenny Rogers' The Gambler
Xð
, over and over again, a holdover from Paul and Nicole's Kilimanjaro trek
.
The first two nights we camped on beaches, providing quite a bit of entertainment for the local kids. With little else to do, we took their pictures (a great source of amusement for the kids), I did some gymnastics with them (a great source of amusement for the rest of the group), and we played ball and frisbee with them. Conversations, though, were limited. Most of the kids knew "Hello" and "How are you?" The next question they'd always ask was "What's my name?" At first, we thought it was a guessing game, but then we realized that they wanted to know our names, but just weren't very good with pronouns. Still, their English was a whole lot better than our Chichewa.
After dinner (yummy grilled fish on rice with a vegetable curry sauce one night, and pasta with beans and vegetables the next), we sat around the fire and entertained ourselves. The entertainment highlight was Paul doing interpretive dance on the beach while twirling two flaming sticks and humming the theme from Chariots of Fire Xð.
Low point of the day: Finding a scorpion in our tent when we cleaned it out in the morning