This episode continues the story of my travels through Malawi. I left off from last episode being stuck at the capital Lilongwe, where I spent a day in the bank trying to getting money wired from Australia. This was the days before internet so they relied on phones. It was explained to me that the bank had to make a call to the old capital, Blantyre, to South Africa and finally to Australia. They could not make that first call from Lilongwe to Blantyre so I was kicked out of the bank at the end of the day with no money and facing a weekend and Christmas in a very bad way.

A South African man, supposedly a diamond smuggler, came to my rescue and whisked me off down to Cape Maclear on the beautiful Lake Malawi (the longest freshwater lake in the world) to spend Christmas and New Year (1995) there. Cape Maclear was a fishing village but was used to South Africans and intrepid travellers coming to stay. The waters were beautiful and clear and it was like swimming in an aquarium as this lake is one of the Great Rift Lakes where African cichlids originate. I fell in love with the boldness of the cichlids and in later life kept a cichlid tank for many years. I spent the days swimming and snorkelling and did attempt a dive, but I panicked.

In the interim, I still had no money and had the South African guy, Errol, pursuing me around the area. I escaped in a dugout canoe across to the closest island, Domwe Island. At the time this island was uninhabited and had no development. The only activity would be fishermen landing at the small beach to cook their meal before heading out to a night of fishing. I spent three blissful days here swimming with the cichlids and watching the African fish eagles do amazing stunts overhead as they locked talons mid-flight in territorial displays and caught fish from the lake right in front of me. There were also blue or samango monkeys on the island that would come down to watch and play in the trees above.  

This period in my travels, when money became an issue and I lost my independence when I had to rely on someone else, was a difficult time. It was the first time I felt uncertainty and a feeling of being trapped and I had no control of my destination. It was the first time I had started to stop just going with the flow and reacting to each situation or opportunity that was presented to me. I started to look within myself, a task I had been avoiding, to start thinking what I really wanted and who I really was. It is amazing that sometimes when everything you take for granted is taken from you, as a Westerner, it makes you start questioning yourself.