Likoma District

After exploring southern Malawi I headed back up to Monkey Bay where I was going to catch the Ilala ferry. Forewarned with the knowledge of the flooding this time I managed to get a kayak to the hostel, a good job too as when I arrived there was a pod of hippos merrily wallowing right at the back of the accommodation building!
The Ilala ferry was built in Scotland in 1949 before being dismantled and shipped to Malawi via Mozambique, and has been in service ferrying people and cargo up and down Lake Malawi since 1951. And believe me it's age shows! It moves at around 7 to 14 km/h and has many stops with the most inefficient system of loading & unloading passengers and cargo. Consequently it took 31 hours to make it 225 km to Likoma Island. Luckily I had one of the 7 cabins on board, complete with countless cockroaches! There were a few other tourists on board that I had gotten to know at the hostel near the port the night before who I had fun hanging out with, either chilling out in the saloon or joining the locals at the bar on the top deck.
As the journey went on the boat got busier and busier as it picked up more passengers and cargo. People sat on every available part of the deck and you had to tip toe your way around sleeping figures to get anywhere. After a night in my cabin I woke up at around 6 am to the hustle and bustle of a docking so I went for a walk on the top deck. Once I'd made a route through the sleeping people I was quite surprised to see a full blown party going on at the bar! There was a lot at drinking, singing, dancing, twerking, all while the sun had barely risen. I guess it's like being at the airport, there is no inappropriate time to get drunk on the Ilala!
Eventually we reached Likoma Island where I was disembarking. The process of embarking/disembarking at the stops without a dock is complete chaos, as in there is no system. Small boats come up beside the boat with people and cargo getting on the boat, and at the same time people and cargo getting off the boat are loaded into the small boats. This leads to lots of pushing, shoving, shouting and instability, not what you want when you have your bags with you! Because of the total lack of a system the exit of the boat on the lower deck is rammed and can take hours to clear. The other way to get on and off the boat is to just climb to/from the upper decks. After considering the people doing this to be crazy, this is exactly what we ended up doing to get off the boat! In one of the videos you can see Alice, one of the friends that I made on the boat, climbing down from the 2nd deck, and if you look you can see me popping my head out and watching how she does it because I'm about to follow! It was one of the most insane experiences that I'd been through yet while in Africa.
All of that chaos was to see Likoma Island, an idyllic island close to the Mozambique shore with nothing to do but chill. The island has golden sand, crystal clear water, and is dotted with baobabs. I stayed in a hut right on a private beach where I passed between reading on the beach and cooling off in the lake, and communal lakeside dinners at night. I also explored the island by foot and by boat, and did some snorkeling to see the brightly coloured cichlid fish.Read more