Gilligan's Island Meets Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

15 July 2007
Yesterday Ben and I decided to day trip it to Dedza, a town about an hour south of Lilongwe, that is known for its pottery/artists community as well as a restaurant at the pottery shop with real coffee and desserts.
www.dedzapottery.com
We browsed the grounds and the shop and I got some great gifts, which I was able to ship home for a very low cost, and then hit up the coffee shop for the famous (at least in Malawi) cheesecake and apple pie. The desserts were good and the view was beautiful.

However it was at the coffee shop having lunch that our day trip turned into “A Three Hour Tour…” a là Gilligan’s Island. Just replace the skipper with our waiter who would disappear for 30 minutes on end, Gilligan with the magpie on the roof above us waiting to steal food, and Ben and I for the other characters and you get the idea. The theme song was on loop in my head the entire time we were desperately trying to finish up, pay the bill and start looking for a minibus back to Lilongwe before dark.
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The Skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour...a three hour tour.
The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed,
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost...the Minnow would be lost.
The ship's a'ground on the shore of this
Uncharted desert isle,
With Gilligan, the Skipper too, the millionaire, and his wife,
(first season) The movie star, and the rest,
(second and third seasons) The movie star, the Professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.
Here’s me “putting on my happy face” as I try to exercise profound patience:


After a marathon tour on foot of Dedza (it is actually a beautiful mountain town around 5300 ft. altitude, with craggy peaks, groves of pine trees, and a nice boma) while trying to find the minibus depot, we finally found perhaps the most dilapidated vehicle I’ve seen yet. It only had a few people on it which meant it was going to spend more timing looking for customers, and instinct screamed not to get on it, but it was the only one in sight and the sun was setting. We climbed on and proceed to retrace our foot tour of Dezda on the minibus. It quickly became clear that this minibus is the party minibus of Dedza. Despite a very rusted exterior, a sliding door that only opens from the outside by squeezing the coat hanger handle through the open window, a missing window replaced with strips of clear packing tape, and a baby poop yellow spray painted interior – this minibus cruised the streets, bumping Malawi hip-hop (which for some strange reason often features a sample of a baby’s cry mixed in) trawling for passengers. We pulled up at the bus depot and parked for 10 minutes while the driver and ticket-taker/doorman got out and hung with some friends. The music of course stayed on and all the vendors at the bus depot gathered around as our minibus because the center of Dance Party Dedza! Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe the experience.

My anxiety quieted down as we finally got going. It was getting dark (you DO NOT want to be on the roads in Malawi in the dark because: 1. the roads are very treacherous, 2. everyone drives like a maniac even though the roads are treacherous, 3. there are no street lights, or lines to guide the driver to stay on the road, and 4. there are way too many cars on the road with no headlights) but I reasoned to myself that we would be back in Lilongwe in an hour, hour and a half max, as it had only taken 45 minutes to get to Dedza. HA!

Because we were not full, we trolled for passengers the whole way, made umpteen stops, and accepted and deposited a steady stream of characters and their animals through the broken door which came off its track EACH time. I kept waiting for Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Freud to get in the next time the minibus stopped a là Bill & Ted’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Ted's_Excellent_Adventure).
The comedy became even more ridiculous when the doorman got dropped off about halfway through the trip, which meant the driver had to get in and out at each stop to let people on/off. At one point we stopped at a police checkpoint, and an extra guy (4th person) got in the front seat. The police officer told the driver that was too many people (mind you there were 20 of us crammed in the back, but for some reason it’s the front seat that is a safety concern?) so the guy gets out, jogs through the check point maybe 20 yards, then tries to hop back in. At which point the driver stops again, gets out and throws him and another guy out of the front. All Ben and I could do was laugh and sing the Gilligan’s Island Theme Song once again.

Suffice to say, we did finally (2 and a half hours) make it back safely.
P.S. I promise I will try to make this my last minibus adventures post!