Lake Malawi

The sunrise at Chitimba beach this morning was incredible. I woke up at around 6:00 and laid in my sleeping bag for a few minutes until I noticed the colors of the sky outside the tent window. I couldn't see the horizon because some palm trees were in the way, but even high above the trees I could see bright red and orange rays reflecting off the clouds. I grabbed my camera and hurried out to the coast and it easily was one of the most amazing sunrises I've ever seen. I've heard great things about African sunrises and sunsets and until today I hadn't seen one that really lived up to that reputation. Hopefully I'll see a few more before leaving Africa two weeks from now, but even if that's the only really good one I'm pretty satisfied.After a couple of hours of driving this morning we stopped at a clothing market in a town called Mzuzu. The market was filled mostly with tiny kiosks selling shoes, underwear, and men's dress clothing, but also had a few selling cheap electronics or fried potatoes. The market really amounted to a giant outdoor thrift shop. Some of the stores were selling cheap new items, but most of what was there looked like it had been used before; probably in more developed nations. I saw a lot of well-worn backpacks and shoes with Korean writing on them and a lot of items that looked like they could have come from the US or from Europe. I've heard before that a lot of donations to thrift shops end up being sent to developing countries, but it was still surprising to wander around the market and realize that this is where it all ends up. I saw one really random thing at the clothing market today - a Malawian man wearing a beat-up black fleece with text that read “Salt Lake 2002” and the accompanying olympic logo.

About an hour after leaving Mzuzu we made a quick stop at a rubber tree plantation. Hundreds of rows of tall brown rubber trees covered the landscape and scrapes along the trunks of the trees showed where sap had been drained to make rubber. I took a short walk into the plantation with a few other people from the truck and watched as an African kid made a cut into the trunk of one of the trees and stuck a small implement into the end of the cut to drain the sap into a bowl. While visiting the plantation I couldn't help but wonder how Malawi could possibly dig itself out of the economic pit that it's in right now. The country is the poorest in Africa and has very little means of supporting itself partly because it has sold the rights to most of it's natural resources to foreign investors to pay off old debts. Enterprises like the rubber plantation may be all that the country has left to support itself. There are so many people unemployed in Malawi yet so much work that needs to be done to improve the country's infrastructure and standard of living. It seems that the real missing link is the lack of money to bring in raw materials and other necessary supplies.

Back when I was 12 or 13 one of my favorite hobbies was setting up aquariums in my room and filling them with colorful, exotic freshwater fish. The fish occasionally got neglected and the aquariums smelled, but I loved them anyway and was determined to keep them until a few years later when I realized my bedroom was much better off without them. I learned from Dan Kimball that the most colorful and most ferocious freshwater fish, which we both had, were called African ciclids and came from someplace in Africa that neither of us knew much about at the time. A couple of years back when I learned that the fish come from Lake Malawi, I dreamed of diving in the lake someday and seeing the fish in the wild for myself. Today I had the chance to do that.

This afternoon we pulled up to our campsite at Kande Beach on Lake Malawi and I headed straight to the nearby dive shop, Aqua Nuts Divers, to arrange a couple of dives. Thirty-five bucks was all it took to rent all the necessary equipment and head out to a dive site at a small island in the lake with a South African dive master named Johann. Johann and I suited up and descended about fifty feet into the cool green water below the island. Ciclids are everywhere in Lake Malawi. Within minutes I saw hundreds of the fish, most of which were much bigger and more colorful than ciclids I've seen in any home aquarium. It was interesting for me to see the fish behave much the same way as the ones that I used to have in my own room. In any given area at the bottom of the lake there was usually one dominant male that was very territorial and chased away any other fish invading his space. The floor of the lake was covered with several sandy craters that the fish had built for breeding purposes. For nearly an hour I swam along the giant rocks lining the lakebed and passed by hundreds of brightly colored ciclids. Diving in Lake Malawi today almost made me want to set up a few aquariums all over again.