Choosing adventure over comfort

our wonder at the rolling montane grassland swilled about our heads alongside views of incomplete China-funded construction sites and the half-built edifices that had come to characterise what is considered to be the plundering of resources, patronage and impunity of the current government.

About 90km outside the northern capital of Mzuzu, we alighted at a bus stop where young girls sat outside mud-walled and thatch-roofed homes with babies on their laps. In the distance, a dilapidated sign had been upended and stood at an angle, looking like some heliotropic tinman informing the sunset that Livingstonia was 15km away.

Less than a minute later, two young men in flip-flops came speeding toward us on King Lion motorcycles. A signature Palahniuk line lurched into my brain: “This is Russian roulette with half the chambers loaded. It’s either the end or it isn’t.”

My friend seemed undeterred by my quiet trepidation. The 15km trek along 20 elevating hairpin bends toward Livingstonia would be my first motorcycle experience that did not end in disaster.

The experience was purely romantic – whizzing past canopy trees into the sunset (literally), wholly focused on the crooked road that seemed to shift my head into a different gear. Nothing about the 150cc piece of steel intrigued me other than that two enterprising motorcyclists had afforded us the gift of adventure over comfort.

Over time, our organised and controlling selves allowed these random acts to become a type of modus operandi. To get from point A to point B, you have to befriend a person who knows another person who has a best friend or a sister with knowledge about a next destination – or a motorbike for rent.

It was this faith – in both the goodness