Nkhata Bay

After a smooth shared taxi drive I was in the middle of the small fishing village of Nkatha bay. Lake Malawi sends small waves to the shores and people sell “sipa” (tiny sun dried fish) on the main road. Huge bags full of sipa are getting loaded on trucks to be sold in Mzuzu and Lilongwe. One 80kg bag costs about 20$. The whole center of the village smells like fish, not badly but like fish. People are friendly and you only get harassed by the cool Bob Marley type Rasta boys, which use American slang. There business is selling Marijuana and art to tourist to get drunk in the evening. I have never seen a village so focused on alcohol (sometimes ethanol mixed with water) as Nkatha Bay. If you go out during the night (actually also during the day) and go into the cheapest bars you see people past out, guys struggling to stand or people trying to get to that stage while ordering beer or drinking sachets with 40% alcohol. There are no women in the bars with the exception of the occasional prostitute. “Shake-Shake” is the cheapest beer in town. You get one liter for less than half a dollar. It is based on maize and has to be shaken before drinking. The empty Tetra Pak cartons are scattered all over… ok, enough about the alcohol problem of this village, but it is really extreme.

I checked into the Big Blue Star which is nicely located on the lake shore and has a sundeck, hammocks, TV, a bar with panorama view, good but pricey food (read 6 dollars for a pizza) and chilled out atmosphere. There was a Swiss guy, that has been travelling (he worked on the way and went back to Switzerland several times) for the last 5 years with his motorbike around the world. Then of course the Peace Corps volunteers who are talking about them selves and having sex with the local community, as there would not be a huge HIV problem. Some English doctors who are travelling after their internship, a random 60 year old Austrian sex tourist, a chilled out Israeli spending his military money, a interesting, elderly Japanese guy who made me want to visit Japan even more, a gay, Canadian receptionist who has a cocaine problem and many more. A nice zoo to research human behavior under the influence of alcohol.

I always ate in the village either at the Hot Spot which serves 1.75$ rice with beef stew dishes, the Indian place who has curries for 3$ or the Christian place who has a version of Spaghetti Bolognese also for 3$.

If you buy French fries from the street you can have a plastic bag full with a bit of salad and an extra splash of old oil for 33$cent. A beer is generally 66$cent. Malawi is good to your wallet.

The hostel also has a canoe to use, which I took around the bay area several times. Local kids love to swim in their lake and the mothers are doing laundry at the rocky shores. The lake is also good for scuba diving and has (if I remember right) the greatest amount of fish species in a fresh water lake of the world.

Great times, but after 10 days the ferry arrived (1 day late) to take me all the way down to Monkey Bay.