The Travelling Teacher: Malawi - There's a Malawisaurus??

December 31

Hello everyone!

Time to dig into Malawi’s history. Prehistoric history, even. Let’s find a Malawisaurus!

Behind me is the Malawisaurus. Really.

Location of my last afternoon and evening of 2020

To find a Malawisaurus, I needed to come down from the great heights of Livingstonia. Last time I mentioned there were two routes to the village in the clouds. In order to get to the northern lakeshore town of Karonga, I needed to take the other way down. The one I described previously as a steep, rocky, windy stretch, which I hesitated to call it a road.

Makes it look so simple...

...and then you see this (internet photo).

This was the acid test of my little Rav4. In 4-wheel-drive for the entirety, Mavuto (we named our car the local word for ‘trouble’, and with good reason) plodded along over slippery rocks and through stretches of churned mud.

Approaching one of the 19 hairpin bends

An example of the terrain -
some of the rocks were over 30 cm tall

The descent is almost 1000 metres in the space of about 10 kilometres. This staggeringly steep decline is made possible by a series of hairpin bends (I think there are 19). Quite a few of them were too tight for Mavuto, resulting in me regularly needing to reverse and straighten to avoid plunging off the cliff. Better safe than sorry!

View on the way down - distracting to the max

An example of a muddy hairpin bend

Hilariously, Google Maps reckons this can be done in about 30 minutes. It probably would be by the ambulance which shot past me at triple my speed (it was probably going 20 km/h) when I had stopped to remove a boulder from the middle of the path. It took me over an hour, with my nerves being frayed for the whole time.

You wouldn't want to slide off to the left...

Luckily it hadn't rained too much!

Still, taking that rocky road saved me hours and the likelihood of having to squeal and squelch through mud going the other way. Aside from one small stretch of potholed mayhem, the remainder of the road to Karonga was remarkably smooth as it meandered alongside Malawi’s northern lakeshore.

The Rift Valley, seen from the M1

If taking this pleasant drive to the north,
Lake Malawi is on your right

A lack of police checkpoints also helped, though two of these made for entertaining moments on my drive. Firstly, a tall military man with gun asks me to roll down the window. We do the usual conversation and then he asks where I’m going. Karonga, I say. ‘Great...can you give my friend a lift?’ is his reply. Not being sure whether I could say no to a soldier with a large weapon, I said I’d be happy to help. The tall man shouts back and a younger colleague runs over through the rain...

A stock photo example of what a police
checkpoint often looks like in Malawi

...holding a cord. Which itself was holding six medium-sized fish. As if Mavuto didn’t smell bad enough with the stench of mildew (there’s a hole somewhere near the boot and it’s rainy season). Thankfully, the young man hooks his fish to my wing mirror before hopping in. A 10 minute drive with Lovemore (yes, that is his real name) before he asked to get out, shortly before the town. He didn’t forget the fish.

A stock photo of where fish are often hung on a car mirror

Remarkably, a similar event happened on the way back. At a customs checkpoint (where cars aren’t normally stopped), an almost identical conversation occurs. This time a police officer called Innocent hops in. He tells me he isn’t celebrating New Year tonight as it’s been a tough year. We get talking about why and then he lowers his voice and leans in a bit. ‘Tell me something...this Covid business...it’s 5G, isn’t it?’ Thinking carefully about my response to a police officer, I ask where he heard this. ‘The social media.’ I politely explain that my social media has different opinions and that 5G was used in countries before Covid. Not sure that’s what he wanted to hear as he got out soon after. To go to the betting shop. ‘Not betting on the Malawi Super League - it is corrupt.’ Maybe I should pick people up more often…

Driving through Karonga was a sodden, pretty
sorry experience aside from my passengers

I had stopped for a while in between these taxi rides in the town of Karonga itself. Bizarrely, this was briefly the front line in the First World War. The German East African Colony (which today is Tanzania) British Nyasaland (which today is Malawi) were joined. The story of the two battles is hilarious if you’re British. The first involves a Scotsman taking multiple attempts at firing shells to sink the one German boat on the lake, before seeing his drinking partner leap off into a dinghy as no one had told him that the two countries were at war.

The first battle happened a little way from this beach

The second battle was on land and at Karonga itself. Accounts suggest that the opposing troops marches straight past each other on the nearby plateau without realising, so were on the wrong side when they faced off the following day. What isn’t accounted for is the loss of life among local soldiers fighting on behalf of the two European powers, suggesting the lack of importance they placed on their lives.

An artistic account of the battle at the CMCK

This is nothing compared to previous history in Karonga, however. This was the site chosen by a Swahili leader called Mlozi from which to collect and ship off human slaves. In the 1880s. Less than 150 years ago. Apparently the local tribe, the Nkonde, had avoided the perils of the slave trade suffered by others up to that point and that man. Horrendous.

Mlozi is sat in the middle, surrounded by tribal
mercenaries to do his horrible bidding for him

Livingstone's commitment to the 3 C's helped the
land find an eventual path towards ending slavery

Much of this I learnt from a combination of the Bradt guidebook and the Cultural & Museum Centre Karonga (CMCK). Quite a few people had a similar response when I said I was visiting Karonga: WHY?? Well, this place was the main reason.

Wonder what could be inside...

It calls itself Malawi’s only museum, a bold shout considering I had been to a museum of sorts in Livingstonia two days prior. The CMCK has a much better setup, mind. In that it looks like an actual museum and has exhibits that don’t look like they were produced before I was born.

The small but information-packed museum hall

There are also sections on
earthquakes and human evolution

The main attraction is something which is a lot older. A fossil from a dinosaur which was found a couple of kilometres from Karonga.

This is a fossil. I could have touched it.

From this leg and other fossils which are not on display, they have been able to speculate and create what they believe was the entirety of this dinosaur. 12 metres long and 3 metres tall, the Malawisaurus (yes, that is the real name) replica understandably dominates the museum hall. Different pieces have been found in different decades, with the first being found in the 1920s.

The replica of the Malawisaurus

What I found interesting was that people don't
actually know what colour or gender different dinosaurs were

Some information about the dinosaur

The museum is a fascinating place, which made it quite sad that I was the only visitor. The signing-in book suggested that the CMCK is lucky if it gets more than two visitors a day. It’s an excellent museum which unfortunately is just too far away. I mentioned this when chatting to the manager, who replied that Westerners see 3 hours as a long journey to get somewhere whereas Malawians don’t. This may be true, but isn’t going to get any greater footfall through the doors.