Green everywhere! (Day 4 of our adventure in Malawi)

 The next day we woke up and met Grandfather.  He is this cute, old, half Indian half Malawian man who welcomed us into his family and home.  He kept saying to each of us, “Most welcome, Madam, your most welcome”.  We chatted with him, took some bucket baths, they insisted that we give our dirty clothes to their workers to wash while we were on our next adventure of the day, so we complied and finally had some delicious breakfast.   Roy came in and started the day with his usual sentence, “Today we are going to… o so what do you want to do today?”  By this point we had surrendered all control of the trip to him and returned the same questions, “so, what are we going to do?”  He informed us that we were going to go up the other side of the mountain to where there were tea fields and a beautiful dam that the tea plantations use for hydroelectricity. 

We set out on the drive, and this might be one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever taken. 

Tea fields and Mountains

The road we were driving on.... best views ever

More tea

Best color of green... am I right

Tea everywhere we looked

The Three of us at the dam

We were surrounded by tea fields on every side, and for those of you, who have never seen tea fields, they are the most beautiful color of green ever and to top it off, it was surrounded by mountains, too.  Then we started to drive up the mountains and the view continued to be of more mountains, tea, and beautiful trees.  We arrived at the part where we could no longer drive and then continued on a 45-minute hike up to the dam.  We sat at the dam for a while and then walked a little further up to another little pond.  Again I think I could have sat there for days.

By the dam

The Hike up

                We finally got back to Grandfather’s house and he scolded us because it was around 3pm and it had been 6 hours since we had last eaten.  We did not go hungry by any means at any point of this trip.  When we returned the cook had prepared us a traditional Malawian meal, which was very similar to Mozambican food.  Nsima (xima), Chinese cabbage (basically the same thing as couve), pumpkin leaves, and chicken for us.  Once again, it was delicious.  We sat around talking and it was prayer time for the grandfather, the family is Muslim.  I am not a religious person but I love learning about religions and watching religious traditions so this was very interestings for me.  We got to watch him as he did the ceremonious ritual of washing before he went to the other room to do his prayers (he washed his hands, feet, and head a special way).  We could also hear him doing his prayers and even though I could not understand him at all, it was a very beautiful sound to hear the kind of song like prayers he we doing. 

At that point, Roy suggested we go walk around to see more of Malonje but the three of us were exhausted so he told us to take a nap and he was going to go to his plot of land to do a little work.  So we laid down on the couches and took a nap until we were woken up by some of his family members who lived there (there were probably about eight or so people living there) and we played some cards with the little kids until he returned.  We then left to go get a small dinner and some drinks, had some debates and then decided we were all still exhausted and returned home to get a good night’s sleep.