Hiking Dedza

I finally got out of Lilongwe! I went with 3 of my housemates, Sonali, Bryce, and Melike (all just finished 3^rd year of med school), to Dedza for a day hike. The day began with us miraculously finding petrol without even waiting – we saw a car filling up just outside of LLW, we pulled up behind them and 5 minutes later we had a full tank. In a fuel crisis, this was awesome and clearly a sign of a good day. We then continued on our journey and parked at the base of Dedza mountain.

Me at the peak

I assumed we were taking a leisurely hike up a not-so-high mountain (more like a rocky hill), which turned out to be false. Perhaps that’s because we started on the wrong trail after being led to some random path. Said path was pretty much at almost a 90º angle, which was hard on my knees and on my lungs. It may be the altitude or diesel fumes, but I think my childhood “sports induced asthma” might be coming back (aka I’m out of shape). Meanwhile, there were these women carrying probably over 50lbs of sticks, no, logs, on their heads down the narrow snakey paths. This made me feel even better about myself, I maintain its asthma…

view from the top. sometimes you can see lake malawi

everything is burned!

We finally made it up to the top where there were several signal antennas then realized that we still had 3km until the peak. We continued on, scaled a rock face, and finally reached the top. Although the dust and smoke from people burning nearly everything clouded the views, it was still stunning. After eating a power bar, thanks to Melike, we started to make our way back. We decided that we definitely did not want to slide on our butts down the initial path we took, so we looked for the “road,” or wider path with some overgrown grass, that appeared to switch back and forth up the mountain. When we reached this road, we followed it for a bit then decided that we had no idea where we were going so we cut down the mountain on what we thought was a trail. False. We ended up sliding and bushwacking down the mountain until we reached the really steep path we took up and vowed to avoid. Poor Bryce was doing this with a sprained ankle. We took that for a little then when we hit the second road, Sonali found a less steep path that we took down to where we parked our car. Turns out this nice path was the one we should’ve taken in the first place. Whoops!

dedza pottery

After reaching the bottom, we drove to Dedza Pottery (an overpriced store that sells and makes famous Malawian pottery, obviously). The shop has a lodge and a restaurant. We stopped to eat lunch at like 3pm. I had a fanta passion, quiche, cheesecake and tea. All delicious especially considering all I had to eat was that power bar, cereal and a nalgene of water. Then, we went home.

Although I am wiped now, it was a great day and really really nice to get out of Lilongwe. I was able to display my awful sense of direction to my new housemates, which perhaps contributed to our adventures down various wrong paths (while I adamantly maintained that I knew exaaaactly where we were going). 

mmmm cheesecake. nom nom nom