FOOTNOTES Journal-ista Nick Clarke ran an eco-lodge in Malawi with his wife, Dasa, and over six months of hard-work, happiness and, ultimately, a brush with death, learned something very important about life back in Europe

Epicurus said, "If we really knew what we wanted, there are few things we'd be tempted to buy." What I wanted was for someone to open a window. The waft of charcoaled fish smoke blended in well with the general aroma of sickness and over drinking: Welcome to Nikata Bay, our first night in Malawi. We were en route to take over an eco-tourist lodge. Following a twenty hour journey over land and sea, we sat and listened to lake-vine advice on malaria, dodgy geezers and the infamous Malawian gold. Over the next six months, little in the way of conversation changed when fellow lodge owners, travellers, nurses or dynamite blowers met up to drink. These times we savoured, but they were not our real stay, they were escapes. When, on a shopping trip from the lodge, we staggered up the steps to the Tropicano bar, over-laden with supplies, it was a relief, an escape back, a chance to remember who we were, even if we never really enjoyed meeting our 'real' selves again.

For that six months we lived an idylic, frustrating and sometimes terrifying life. We found parts of us we had forgotten and parts we didn't know existed. On our Lakeside Lodge we laboured, laughed and cried with the local villagers, tearing our hair out along the way. We were isolated, away from transport, energy and communication, in a developed world concept of these things, (in Swahili, 'on safari' means away, unobtainable and out of touch) but we discovered new, for us anyway, ways of doing things. Transport meant an awful lot of lugging and walking or waiting and blagging, more often than not, all of these things. The frightening journeys in the back of overcrowded death traps known as 'Matolas' (open backed pick-up trucks) and small mini-buses were a world of discovery all of their own involving endless squabbles about the over-crowding and bickering over money. I spent many a long hour sweating and resting my face on the ample backside of a big Mama whilst fending off her dangerous looking pet monkey. My wife at one point joined a baby suckling on its mother's breast in an effort to stop herself from throwing up over the smell of over-dried fish. But you learned to love the trips, well, sometimes! We loved the banter, the feeling of belonging that recognition by people brings. I bought the passenger-touts beer at first but when they could see that I was in a bad mood or racked by frustration, they bought me one.

The main energy source was human toil. All jobs could be done, one way or another, by hand, and had to be. Things could be found, somehow or other, usually by the incentive of money. How do you get 150 tree trunks down from the forest for the re-building of roofs? Simple! You sponsor the football team and get the manager to include it as part of their training. OK, so it took 6 weeks - and there were constant arguments and threats and the wives of the team ended up doing the carrying whilst the men went off and got stoned and drunk - but we got them! They said it couldn't be done without a large fleet of lorries, but we did it! And the beauty of working side by side as we constructed the framework and laid the thatch. Pure, brute strength mixed with skills that no one had learnt at a college! It felt good to be a man.

Fire and water were our other sources of energy. The wood burned constantly like an Olympic flame; the biggest kettle in Africa providing water for washing-up, endless mugs of tea and the occasional warm, pulley-bucket shower. It heated the charcoal that was used to surround our bread-making pots and the stone-oven that roasted tougher than old boots ducks or chicken. Water was used in African fridges; huge clay pots where the water evaporated to slightly chill the beer bottles and keep home-made cheese and butter for a day or two longer.

Communication was often not achieved and my resorting to shouting or waving a knife at the guys in the kitchen when they had forgotten to produce dinner for our infrequent guests produced a white-toothed grin or a shrug of the already droopy shoulders. The threat of not paying someone for a job or for goods became the best weapon. The best way of communicating though, was by eway-mail. It works like this: I send a guy off with a rumour, on the way he meets a guy who on his way meets your guy, that way you get an eway-mail message through. Works every time!

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