Meditations on travel’s dualities
News about Salman Rushdie’s stabbing reached me via the Morse code-like stutter of a downloading newsletter on my phone. On a lakeshore roughly 12,000km away, my sun-addled brain stumbled through the minutiae of the news report and curiously affixed itself to one word: “Chautauqua”.
I was too young to comprehend the notion of a chautauqua when I first encountered it. But as the meaning of Rushdie’s haunting “we all owe death a life” revealed itself to me in a single poignant moment, traversing a narrow curving strip of African country would eventually reveal the true value of journeying to “edify the mind”, as Robert Pirsig put it in his iconic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
With passports and newly printed vaccination certificates, a close friend and I boarded a plane to a country neither of us had ever seen. We’d travelled together in the before times, swimming next to elephants in Botswana, sliding down Zimbabwean zipline gorges and meandering over railway bridges into Zambia to jostle vervet monkeys for seats on plush wingbacks.
Our chosen destination? Malawi – a “crack-in-the-Earth” country. The pages of this journey are dotted with stretches of grassland, disillusionment and marvel. We’d been beckoned to find the crests and troughs of the East African Rift Valley, a giant luminous lake and … a chautauqua for the ages.
Our passage through Malawi began with the revelation of the extensive vestiges of David Livingstone and his colleagues’ missionary work in the form of a Christian pastor’s message on an idling coach departing from Lilongwe. The tidings from Luke 13 verse 10, relayed in Chichewa, the local language, seemed to reassure our fellow masked travellers, who sat nodding in enraptured praise.
As the bus pulled away, we found ourselves pondering the foreign-tongued reminder to notice the direction of our gaze.
Coasting away from central Malawi’s Euclidean planes, the vista from the bus window implored us to follow and notice the dramatic Rift Valley contours, untrammelled forests and quirkily named businesses, such as Let Them Talk Shop.
Along the M1 motorway, the manifestations of conquests of African soil that were implicit in the colonial era cast a disconsolate and weighty shadow on our moods.
On we went, toward the undulating verdant northern reaches of the country, where