jonnywhite

We recently had an interesting rest day in Chitumba beach on lake Malawi. We had a beautiful beach, swimming, and a little competition culminating 'Mustache March'. One of our riders, Cory Heitz (fittingly, he is 6"7') organized a morale booster wherein we had the month of March to grow mustaches that were judged on the last day, with some rules attached. The ruling committee was a group known as 'the prophets', who have been growing their beards since day 1 and we simply had to name and model our mustaches for the crowd, who voted by applause. I reluctantly grew my first attempt at facial hair for a month. The mustache came in completely blonde so I darkened it with a friend's eyeliner and won 2nd prize (a humor vote, but that was the idea). My good kiwi friend Duncan took 1st place with a 'Black Sabbath' mustache and runners up included riders sporting mustaches named 'The 17-year-old Mexican' and 'The Uncle You're Not Supposed to Hug'. The following morning Cory's dad, 'Big Mike' Heitz (7"0', I kid you not) organized a big breakfast, fresh-cooked by his committee of riders, that was a welcome treat given the limited food available at the beach 'restaurant' (A prime example of how things work in Africa: mostly they don't). This 'restaurant', which regularly hosts large overland groups, consisted of a guy with a pan who cooked only fries one day and only nachos the next, one order at a time, for 50 hungry riders. Given our complete dissatisfaction with the food they offered to do a pig roast and buffet the evening of our rest day with a vegetarian option. This sounded splendid. What we got was a pig we had to cut ourselves, some potatoes, rice, noodles, and a can of beans for the vegetarians. To complicate matters, we were just given a knife and no fork to cut the pig, so everyone lined angrily up and hacked at the little fatty thing competitively with lots of swearing. If I wasn't so hungry I would have been highly entertained.