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"The what trail?" we hear you ask. We shall explain in a minute. The Ugali trail, however, coincides in many places with the trail that David Livingstone took last century, so we managed to see many of the places that the great Scottish explorer was the first white man to visit.
We finally left South Africa after spending 6 weeks there. On the way north we teamed up with a British expat from Kenya who drove us across the border to the Zimbabwean town of Masvingo. The South African side of the border was fine: they even gave us some money back for all our shopping (VAT refunds, you see). The Zimbabwean side was not so easy for Richard, the expat. He had a carful of spare parts which he was driving back to Kenya, and that seemed to upset the Zimbabwean officials who wanted a deposit. The opening offer was outrageous: 80,000 Zim dollars (around 2000 US dollars), payable in US dollars and refundable upon exit in Zim dollars. The Zim dollar is about as valuable as an old newspaper. Finally Richard haggled them down to 20,000 Zim dollars payable in Zim dollars and refundable in US. "Thank God, we are back in Africa" we thought. No obstacle is ever serious enough. If only Her Majesty's Customs and Excise would allow a bit of haggling ...
So we did make it to Masvingo where we said good bye to Richard. The reason for coming to this obscure little Zimbabwean town is the Great Zimbabwe ruins about 20 km away, apparently the largest subsaharan man-made structure. It is indeed a very impressive sight in both size and craftsmanship. Unfortunately, its inhabitants never left any written records, so unlike the Greeks and Romans, the Shona of Africa passed up on their chance to torment students of classics. However, this gives archaeologists plenty of room to speculate. Take this claim for example: apparently, the grooves in the buildings are female and the buttresses in those same buildings are male, because they are as many of one as there are of the other. Sounds like archaeologists speculating. We think that the buttresses make very nice beer tables to rest your goblet of beer on (the Shona drank a lot, and still do), while the grooves make a decent back rest for when you are drinking, and there are probably as many drinkers as there are beers. But no-one believes our theory because we are not archaeologists. Of course, a place like Great Zimbabwe should have been teeming with tourist coaches. But there were none. We had the place to ourselves, and the hostel in Masvingo to ourselves. And the hostel in Bulawayo the following day to ourselves. Something is telling us that we are either being avoided, or there is something wrong here. The truth is that Bad Boy Robbie (Mugabe) is scaring people away, and his financial planning is turning Zimbabwe into a banana republic. We were forced to change money in the "parallel" market (obviously, it can't be called "black" market here), or we would have got half of what the dollar is worth. You could get into a town, but getting out was a bit of a lottery depending on fuel delivery. Despite these hitches, we had a wonderful time in Zimbabwe - the countryside is stunningly beautiful and the people really open and friendly, not at all like what is depicted in the news. We have not been bribed to say this, we are already several thousand miles away from the country!
Our final stop in Zimbabwe was Victoria Falls. Lots of water tumbling down doesn't quite match Livingstone's "flying angels" description. We could see the Falls, or rather the spray mist from about 10 km away, and we could hear them from our hut about 1 km away. But we never actually got to see the bottom half of the Falls. This is the fullest they get, as we are right after the rainy season, so the spray mist is so intense that everything gets soaked within 150 metres or so of the Falls. We wore our bathing suits to go inside the Falls area, and felt a bit sorry for all the people trying to keep their hair-do in shape and their see-through tops dry.
While we were staying in a hostel in Livingstone on the Zambian side of the Falls, our culinary talent was at last discovered by Dave, the manager of a place called "Jungle Junction", an island resort in the middle of the Zambezi, about 70 km upstream from the Falls. Dave popped into the kitchen while we were making one of our famous pasta sauces and said: "This smells good. Can you do something with aubergines? They are in season right now and the Africans don't know how to cook them". It so happens that the Greek national dish, moussaka, is based on aubergines, so we found ourselves half a day later heading towards Jungle Junction. "You'll enjoy the boat trip" were Dave's parting words. When we got to the river bank, we were both expecting some sort of ferry, but not even our extragalactic adventures had prepared us for the 'makoro', the floating dug-out tree trunk operated by two locals that are balancing at the tips while you are trying to stop the canoo from toppling over. It's not so much that the makoro is wobbly, or that nobody seems to mind that some water is coming in, or even that white water rafting would seem tame compared to the speed we are going at. It's more the thought of that little drop 70 km downstream that was abit disconcerting. Only after we got to Jungle Junction were we told that the locals do this all the time, they are really skilled and never topple. Well, Jungle Junction really is a jungle and is in the middle of a very fast flowing Zambezi. There is no electricity, but plenty of running water, the kitchen was a heaven for 2 budding chefs and our hut was 2 metres away from the water. So our job was to teach Moffat, the Zambian chef, how to make moussaka. Moffat proved to be a very diligent student, who watched very attentively and promised that he could recreate the Greek masterpiece in our absence.
The moussaka night could't go without a hitch of course - the supplies which usually arrive in one of the makoros at 4pm didn't get to us until 5.30. No great disaster. Then, as we were one hour into the cooking, we ran out of gas. For a minute it looked as if Moffat's moussaka lesson was over. Dave, who has spent much longer in the jungle than we have, and is beginning to think African, got two campfires going. Kristian impressed everyone by making a completely lumpfree cheese sauce on the campfire, while Markella grilling the aubergines, cooking the mince and coordinating something that resembled a vegetarian version of moussaka on the second campfire. Well, Pericles's and Socrates's long-suffering wives must have done moussaka without gas at some point so why not us? Fortunately, the oven was wood-fired, and so by 9.30 the aubergine masterpiece was ready. It must have been good, because Dave asked us to stay for as long as we liked and be his chefs. We liked the idea, and we thought that Moffat's career as a chef would benefit greatly if he learnt a Danish recipe too, so the following night we taught him how to make frikadeller and kartoffelsalat, a traditional Danish dish consisting of meat balls and potato salad. Kristian made a faithful reproduction of Jytte's, his mum's, recipe, and once again Moffat proved to be an excellent student. We believe the Danish night was also a success: "I am not usually a meat ball fan" said Dave, "but there are meat balls and there are meat balls". So we assume he liked ours. We hope than in a few hundred years time, we can confound archaeologists, who will be trying hard to find a link between Greek, Danish and Zambian trade routes to account for the unprecedented spread of moussaka, frikadeller and kartoffelsalat in the daily diet of tribes along the Zambezi. During our evenings in the kitchen, we had some most unexpected visitors, in the shape of a pair of genets, two furry civet-like creatures, that are supposed to be nocturnal, very shy and an extremely rare sighting in wildlife parks. Obviously the smell in the kitchen got the better of them, and not only did they sit on the shelf watching us cook, but they actually took food from our hands, making them probably the first genets in history to have eaten moussaka and Danish meat balls. Anyway, the days went by and the more we cooked, the more we were asked to stay. A very tempting offer as Jungle Junction is a truly enchanting place. We spent our mornings splashing in the pool, a croc-free enclosure in the river, or having a 'jacuzzi' in the nearby foaming rock pools, while planning the evening's menu. We never got to see the famous 'Stevie the croc', a very fearless creature, that allegedly got into an Aussie's tent once, and dragged his rucksack downriver, where it was later found. As a consequence, the Aussie's mum was told that her son had become Stevie's lunch, but the Aussie was oblivious to all that and continued drinking in the bar, briefly mentioning that his rucksack 'had been mislaid'. Stevie also managed to jump into the pool once, but not while we were there. The only wildlife we saw apart from the genets, was an enormous 2-metre long monitor lizard, and some fresh dung from a hippo. So we spent 4 wonderful days in Jungle Junction, but it was time to tear ourselves away and move onto Livingstone and Lusaka (rhymes with moussaka - what were they thinking?). From Zambia we travelled east to Malawi, spending a few days in Nkhata Bay, on the north-east coast of Lake Malawi, in the ever so stressful environment of reed huts, 10 metres away from the lake shore. One of the highlights of our stay there, was diving in the lake to see the thousands of blue stripey cichlids. You have probably all seen the documentaries, where mother cichlid opens her mouth when she perceives danger and takes in all her baby cichlids, the sort of scene you imagine only the likes of David Attenborough are lucky enough to witness after having camped at the bottom of the lake for 3 days. But actually it seems to happen quite frequently. All you need to do is swim up to the fish, she sees big fish dressed in rubber suits blowing bubbles, she decides they look quite dangerous and oops! there go all the babies in her mouth.
Our final stop in Malawi was a rather unusual place - the Scottish mission of Livingstonia named after Livingstone, although he was already dead when it was established. The Scots first built a couple of missions by the lake shore. They soon discovered that Scottish midges might be a nuisance, but they don't give you malaria like them Malawian mosquitos. So after several missionaries had died, they moved the mission somewhere cold, wet and foggy just like home. Livingstonia is at 1900 m altitude, up a steep escarpment that takes 3 and a half hours to climb. It's mosquito free. We stayed at the mission itself, a stone house built in the Victorian style with Victorian furnishings inside. The kitchen is a museum in itself, equipped with old Victorian gadgets like a potato masher, a peeler for orange rind and several pudding bowls. Like any respectable Scottish house, no window closes properly and therefore all the rooms but especially the bathroom are draughty, and there is no hot water but plenty of blankets. It was a fascinating step back in history and momentarily back in Europe.
Just before coming here to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, we stopped in Iringa in the south west of the country, where Kristian had spent some of his time during his long career as a student. By chance, we bumped into a Greek couple who own a tobacco farm 40 km away from town. Naturally, they don't get to see many Greeks in this part of the world, so they really wanted to show us round their farm. It definitely had the "I had a farm in Africa" feel to it. We spent a fantastic day with them, seeing all the stages of tobacco growing and drying and sampling some of Marietta's (the hostess) delicious Greek food.
Ah, yes the food. And an explanation on our title. From Zimbabwe, through Zambia and Malawi, we have been travelling through the ugali/nshima/sadza zone. This is the staple, or rather the only local food to be found - a white pulp made out of maize meal, with the consistency of plasticine and the taste of ... eh, hum, the taste of ... well at least if you put salt on it you can taste the salt, and the taste doesn't clash with anything. Also, in case you can't eat any more, you can mould ugali into weird and wonderful shapes and leave them on your plate. Ugali/nshima/sadza comes invariably with a piece of meat or fish, a blob of boiled cabbage, a watery sauce made of cooked tomatoes and, if it's your lucky day, a spoonful of beans. Once in Nkhata Bay we were offered fried bees which were a bit on the greasy side, so we didn't pursue that dish very much. Difficult to account for this lack of culinary imagination, but we put it down to the fact that the cuisine of East Africa was sabotaged by the former colonial powers in an attempt to establish a national cuisine that was even more desperate than their own. The plot was a success. Here in Tanzania, things are looking up foodwise. There is of course ugali for those that hate surprises, but thanks to the several thousand Indians and Arabs that have passed this way, our diet now includes exotic items like samosas, chapatis, chicken masala, shawarma, also cashew nuts and the most divine passion fruit. So while Livingstone went and died somewhere in some malaria-infested lake in Zambia, we have deviated from his chosen route and are now on the coast of the Indian Ocean, in Dar Es Salaam. Before we leave you, we have a serious question, so if anyone knows or can find the answer, we'd like to know. If Livinstone was after the source of the Nile, why didn't he just follow the Nile upstream, instead of wasting his time around lakes in south-central Africa? It wouldn't make this last leg of our trip any more or less enjoyable but it would be nice to know.

Lots of love to everyone.
Kristian and Markella

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