I needed to renew visa for another three months and so I had been planning on which country to go to, to renew. The options were to go back to Uganda or Kenya or try a new country. The new countries on my list were Malawi or Zambia.
William had suggested that I could get a visa by not leaving the country but by merely paying someone in Mbeya to go to the border and get a back-dated visa. This idea worried me for various reasons, not least because I didn’t want to give a stranger my passport and I cannot afford to get into trouble and kicked out of the country.
I bought an air ticket to Mbeya and stayed there one night and the next morning got ripped-off on a dala dala ticket to the border. It wasn’t a lot of money but getting ripped-off leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
The dala dala journey was the usual crush and at one stage there were 6 people on four seats including me. And then, to make things worse, we had to stop to pick up more passengers from a broken down dala dala on the side of the road.
The bus doesn’t actually take you to the border but to a border town. Then you need to walk or get a boda boda to the actual border. There, I chatted to the friendly Tanzanian customs officers and said I’d see them in a few days for another three month visa. I waved them goodbye and then walked across a bridge over the river which forms the border.
That’s when I had a good idea… I had always wanted to enter a country illegally so I took my chance and walked with the locals and with confidence straight around the barrier and into Malawi. I couldn’t have looked more like a tourist if had tried. My skin was the wrong colour for a local and I was carrying a backpack but still nobody seemed to notice.
I had got away with entering a country illegally – what a feather in my cap! After 10 minutes of walking I hopped in a shared taxi and was on my way. I’m not sure if it was good luck or bad luck that, sometime later, the car was stopped at a temporary police road block.
The police saw my white face and asked for my passport. I could see them flicking through it looking for my visa and knowing that I didn’t have one, I got out of the taxi and told the driver to carry on without me.
The policeman said “Do you have another passport or is it just this one? I can’t see your visa” I knew the game was up and I said to them that although I had looked for a customs office, I had not found it and assumed I could go straight through.
I don’t think they believed me but they laughed and put me in a taxi and sent me back to the border. I had wasted over an hour of my time and now I had bought myself a very expensive ($75) visa I was really on my way. I held the visa proudly in my hand to show to the police at the road block but sadly, and not a little frustratingly, they had gone and there was nobody to see my expensive piece of paper.
The Mushroom Farm is very famous in Malawi and seems to be the only place to stay on the northern part of the M1 highway. William had told me about it and so I booked not knowing anything about it.
I was the only one who got out of the dala dala at the road head. I later learnt that the dirt track up the escarpment actually has a road number – which is unbelievable given it was barely passable. Even on a boda boda ait was tricky.
The next 40 minutes was a boda ride from hell. The road was just shale and rocks with occasional concrete patches on the worst bends. I had to ask the driver to stop several times as I was being bounced off the back. In the end I had no option but to hang on to Martin as we navigated our way up twenty hairpin bends to the top of the cliff.
When I got to The Mushroom Farm I could barely walk. I was happy to be off the bike but the thought of doing that all again a couple of days later brought a sense of dread. Little did I know that I would have to do the return journey after a heavy 4 hour electric storm that turn the road into a mud slide.