Hello World,
I’m going to split last week into two separate posts, so
prepare yourself for one today, and one tomorrow. This past Monday, Noah and I
ventured to the northernmost tip of Malawi, Karonga, to conduct an amateur
geothermal survey of a couple of hotsprings that we had read and heard about.
IT took the whole day, 12 hours to arrive in Karonga and we got to our splendid
beachside hotel, Club Marina after dark. The place had great lake food, cheap
drinks and had a straight view of the beach that had been totally obscured by a
massive water treatment facility. Our nights seeing the reflection of the full
moon, over a crystalline beach were somewhat dampened by the hulking tin and
steel superstructure and its chorus of rumbling machines.
However, Karonga seems a prettier transit town than most of
its African colleagues—its beachfront location makes up for the usual dusty
roads, poor man's strip-mallesque layout of the town and above average numbers of public
boozers, orphans and prostitutes. Our work took us out of Karonga along the road West to
Zambia, at all times, no more than 20km from the Tanzanian border.
Here, we found and conquered our first hot springs with
geothermal potential. Not able to find a ride, we first walked 10k into the
wild before a passing sedan agreed to let us squeeze into the back with 4 other
passengers for the remaining 15k to our site. The site was an inconspicuous town on a small riverbed with it's distinguishing feature being the concrete bridge stretching the river.
After making various unsuccessful plunges through thorny copses (which screamed: you-are-about-to-get-bitten-by-a-poisonous-snake) trying to make our way to coordinates where we had been informed there would be hot springs, we finally decided just to wade along the riverbed. Whilst making our way there, I kept bending down to feel the temperature of the water. In one of these particularly grimy looking pools, the water was abnormally warm. Immediately, I went sprinting up the hill in search of its origin. There, we ran into two locals: Aorbi and Roosevelt. These two gentlemen helped us to discover not only the hot springs we had been told about, but also a new hotspring, which we named American Freedom, in honor of July 4. The other hot springs have been dubbed "Little Bubbler" and "Roosevelt's Hole."
With this coup, we returned to Karonga (through another bush be-trodden walk) and rested before waking to our independence day. We spent the morning schmoozing up the local District Council and gathering socio-economic info on the region before heading down to a Peace Corpalooza party at a retreat overlooking the sparkling lake. For the rest of the day we enjoyed corn hole, burgers, ameritunes, southern accents, cold drinks, bonfires and even some prematurely ejecting and maddeningly depressing fireworks.
Debby downer though was that we had to share a tent that night with the only non-Americans there (Australian maybe). Creepiest dude on the planet: only told Chuck Norris jokes, while everyone was partying he practiced his stick-fighting and he had a large tattoo that stretched from nipple to elbow that looked like a cat orgy.
Sweaters and Steaks,
Foxybrown
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