"The Captain is a Good Man, but When He's Drunk He's a Madman"

"Do not disrespect Malawi," boomed the absurdly drunk captain over our ship's loudspeaker as we pulled away from the dock. "Anyone who treats Malawians bad is rubbish," he continued in a voice so fire-and-brimstone like that we thought we were listening to some sort of bon voyage prayer. Apparently, the captain had taken the crew of our boat, the MV Ilala, into town to get drunk for a few hours, which would seem to provide at least a partial explanation for why the ferry was nine hours late in its departure from Nkhata Bay on Lake Malawi.

What we would later learn is that the captain and some idiot owner of a Land Rover4x4 were in a heated dispute over who was responsible for damage done to the 4x4. The Ilala goes up and down Lake Malawi one time per week in each direction, and the owner of this car had it loaded onto the bow of the ferry and taken north. They banged it against the side of the ship when they got to port, denting the front quarterpanel. The owner was pissed, the captain got pissed that the owner was pissed, so he headed into town with his crew and got pissed. The owner waited on the dock for a few hours, fuming, and when the captain got back he started telling him off, and didn't finish telling him off until we were well out of port.

Ahh, Malawi. Instead of "you will find life jackets under your seats and life rafts here, here, and here" it was "you are a fucking rubbish for disrespecting Malawi." You might think that if the captain goes out to the bar to get drunk that a first mate or some other sort of person in charge would stay behind to be responsible. But no. The first mate was wasted as well. "Very, very drunk" was the quote we got. Later we saw him and I can vouch that he probably couldn't even have found his own nose let alone some small coastal port in the middle of the night. Drunk pilots have become such a routine here in Africa that my only reaction to hearing this news was to look on the top deck to find the best liferaft and then laying my sleeping bag out right next to it.

All of these sordid, drunk details we later learned from Moses, the bartender of the Ilala. The Ilala was built just after WWII in Scotland as a steamer to ply the waters of the Clyde near Glasgow. The boat was dismantled and shipped here in the 1950s (I couldn't figure out why exactly), and reassembled to serve as the ferry that links all of these small coastal towns together on Lake Malawi. It's a beautiful, old, classic ship that looks exactly like what you would expect an African ferry on Lake Malawi to look like.

We met Moses through Charlie and James, two Brits who are on a tour of all of the bars and gin joints in Africa. Charlie, James, my two Kiwi friends, and I were the only muzungu on the boat, so we spent quite a bit of time together and drank quite a bit of James' gin (it was for the malaria, Mom, the malaria...). All in all, it was an incredible experience and will go down as a highlight of the trip. I wish we could have stayed on the boat longer...