Our hiking trip to the Mulanje Massif began well. A quick minibus and transfer to a pickup dropped us at the entrance to the park just a few hours after leaving Blantyre. That, however, was where things turned for the worse.

Dozens of locals were massed at the base of the mountain offering their services as guides or porters or both. We fought our way past them, turning down every appeal. "We'll be fine," we said. We started up the mountain and got immediately, hopelessly lost.

"...only to diverge again a few hundred feet later."
Despite any descriptions of named walking trails in the park, there are simply no marked paths of any kind. In fact, trails diverge into three and four-way intersections... only to diverge again a few hundred feet later. We suspected the "guides" had removed what little signage there ever was.

Within two hours of our start up the mountain, we were completely off any trail... bushwhacking up a slope nearly too steep to climb. We reluctantly accepted that we were not going to reach the mountain top hut we were aiming for. Knowing we had to turn around in order to reach the base by nightfall, we started down. Thanks to our GPS, we did not spend the night in the woods.

"She got lost, hasn't been found and is presumed dead."
Now that you know we're safely off the mountain, it's a good time to tel you about the Dutch girl everyone here is talking about. She went hiking in the park a couple of weeks ago, got lost, hasn't been found and is presumed dead. The Dutch embassy brought in helicopters and dogs. Nothing. Locals say the mountain spirits snatched her and are keeping her safely in an undisclosed location.

So disappointed at not seeing much of Mulanje and angry at the lack of marked trails, we decided to completely give up and head for the beach. The original plan had been to spend three nights on Mulanje before heading to Monkey Bay and Cape MacClear on the southern coast of Lake Malawi. From there we'd catch the following week's Friday ferry up the lake. Now we were going to make haste for Monkey Bay and catch the ferry a week early.

This began the dash to Monkey Bay. "Dash" would seem to imply speed, which was seldom the case. But it was hurried, stressful travel to be sure.

After facing the requisite "told-you-so's" as we exited the park with our heads down, we hitched into Mulanje town and spent a night at the Mulanje View Motel... rising the next morning at five for the journey to the lake.

"We made our fatal mistake."
Quick minibuses were spiriting us nicely toward Monkey Bay until we made our fatal mistake. We got on the "Big Bus." We forgot that the "Big Bus" is for people traveling with enormously large things that could never fit into the

Our First Sighting of Lake Malawi

minibus. Items included room-size thatch rugs, 100-pound sacks of corn, 20 cubic feet of foam padding and a remarkably intact dead goat.

The "Big Bus" is crammed until not one more person can squeeze into the door. This left Matt at one point with a facefull of a large woman's ample posterior. "Humanity's Bear Hug," he called it.

"Inevitably, the person wanting off is in the very back."
The crowding isn't so much the problem, though, as the constant stopping. Every stop every two miles brings a near complete unloading and re-loading of the bus since, inevitably, the person wanting off is in the very back of the bus. So funny that the bus runs daily, yet every day it seems it's the first time they've ever attempted such a thing.

The "Big Bus" finally dropped us in Monkey Bay where we learned prices for the ferry have doubled since our Lonely Planet was printed. But we're going anyway. It'll be a 48-hour cruise up the lake to Nkhata Bay, described as a laid-back budget resort town. Sounds like just the thing.