Weekend the first!

After a long week of exhausting, 7-hour days with 2-hour lunch breaks, the other students and I decided that we'd earned a little vacation. Time to blow this Lilongwe popsicle stand and launch out for Malawi's most dramatic feature: Lake Nyasa (as the locals say), aka Lake Malawi.

They nickname it the "Calendar Lake" - 365 miles long and 52 miles wide, a long and skinny freshwater border between Malawi, Tanzania, and a little bit of Mozambique. We flew over it in the plane coming into Lilongwe, a huge blue expanse that stretches out over the curvature of the earth. It begs to have toes dipped in it. We'd decided to do a overnight visit to Cape McClear, a little nubbin of land that sticks out from the southernmost tip of the lake and has national park status. But how to get there? As with all African transport, we're always striking a balance between adventure, comfort, and safety - a private plane is lovely but doesn't give you much of a feel for the country, and public buses, while clearly the people's transportation, might just give you scabies. Ee.

So we opted for a middleground - a boat ride! We launched from Senga Bay, on the west coast of the lake, and zoomed out into some pretty coccyx-smashing waves (the Zimbabwean lady who set up the our ride kept calling the breaking waves "white horses", which I liked). I was having the time of my life in the front, despite some serious wind-knocked-out-of-me moments, but I suspect that some of my fellow riders were very grateful for the fact that we'd chosen to do the return trip by car. If only they'd grown up boatriding with my Uncle Joe, who makes it a point to drive right up and over as many waves as he can, they would've been ready.

No docking necessary - we zoomed right up onto the sand directly in front of our little lodge, where we found our "chalets": basically sturdy little huts with private porches, perched about 20 feet from the lake edge. Couldn't ask for a better view. We took bets on the exact time of sunset as the giant orange ball dipped below the surface.

The lake itself is fully integrated into the community, in ways I wasn't expecting at all. There's a tourist economy, of course - plenty of young guys walking the beach and trying to convince you that you want to go on a boat ride or have a beach fish fry or head out to the nearby island for snorkeling. (For that last one, they were right. We were secretly dying to go snorkeling. I think they saw through our pretended nonchalance during the haggling session, but it was definitely worth it. We plunged off the boat into the cool clear water and were immediately surrounded by cichlids of every color, backlit by afternoon sunlight filtering down from the surface. Awesome awesome awesome.)

But it turns out the lake is more than just looks. It's a huge source of food, of course - we saw dozens of fisherman paddling around off the Cape in handcarved canoes. But it's also a giant kitchen sink. From the time we woke up in the morning until the sunset, there were lines of men, women, and children lined up along the shoreline, washing their clothes and their dishes and their babies. It caught me completely by surprise, mostly because I was expecting Cape McClear to be a tourist spot - a freshwater Aruba, maybe. But even though my brain went "Oo! Ocean!" everytime I looked out into the water, I should've suspected that folks in a country as dry as Malawi would take full advantage of endless, free freshwater.

A hike through a baboon-infested park on Sunday, a cramped-but-amazingly-scenic carride back through the orange Rift Valley mountains, and we were home...if home is a net-covered bunk bed, I guess. A worthy adventure. And no one got sunburned! We're a good little bunch of dermatologists in training.