Kande Beach
MALAWI
A Short Stop in Malawi
By LYNDI
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Our Lonely Planet guidebook gives a brief introduction to every country it covers including their major highlights. Tanzania is known for the Serengeti, Mt. Kilimanjaro and the white sand beaches of Zanzibar. Uganda is known for the source of the Nile and is infamous for the terrible regime of Idi Amin. What is Malawi known for? It’s the place Madonna adopted two babies. So it goes without saying that we went in to the country with a blank slate.
Our tour was basically headed down to Victoria Falls in Zambia, but because of the vast distances we have to cover on this continent, we made two stops enroute in Malawi. The first stop was a small town called Chitimba where our enormous yellow Tucan truck pulled into a small campsite on the enormous Lake Malawi. The lake, funny enough, is also referred to as the “Calendar Lake” because it’s 365 miles long by 52 miles wide. What are the chances?
The camp was like any other – well-run, clean, lively bar, and plenty of sand to spread throughout every article of clothing you own. The highlight was probably the pig we slow roasted over coals during the evening – and the impressive thunderstorm that raged during the night.
I’ve seen a lot of big storms in my day, but this thunder was absolutely deafening. Aaron and I huddled in our tent and between the whiplashes of rain, the blinding lightning and the, well, thunderous thunder (sorry, my brain’s thesaurus apparently is useless today), it was kind of a fun – if not sleepless – night.
The lowlight came the next morning on our Chitimba Village Tour. Aaron and I are normally not ones to be interested in “human safaris” where rich tourists visit poor villages and expect to be enriched and feel like they’ve had some insight into the local culture in return for either a small fee or an unwanted piece of jewelry you’ve felt guilted into buying. But this tour was included in our entire tour cost so we thought, okay, might as well go see what Malawi is really like. But we still couldn’t tell you.
Our guide walked us first to the local school (out of session for a local holiday) where there were kids lingering and playing. Several small girls tried to hold the hands of everyone coming through, so I had to occupy my hands with my water bottle to discourage any clingers. When the headmaster arrived about 20 minutes late, he took us to his office where he explained that they have about 200 kids to one teacher, they are terribly underfunded and understaffed, and here is the donation box thank you very much. Not much a tour of the school, but sobering figures nonetheless.
Then we were walked to the community witch doctor that would show you his medicines and cures – for a fee. Finally we went to Chitimba’s hospital where a nurse told us about how underfunded and understaffed they were and here is a donation box thank you very much. To be fair, he did explain that that vast majority of foreign aid that comes into Malawi never makes it to its destination – instead landing in the pockets of state, then regional, then local politicians – leaving the actual hospital with nothing. They don’t even have electricity or mosquito nets, but a small donation from tourists that have already paid a fee to the community is not even equivalent to a band-aid to this massive and wide-spread corruption.
Back on board the Tucan bus we drove all day to arrive at another lakeside location called Kande Beach – well-known among overland trucks as a party destination. It was an impressive campsite – another fully loaded bar, pool table, foosball table, ping pong table, volleyball net and again an enormous lake to occupy our idle hours. The first night we all made a huge “trash can punch” in the cooler and had a pool tournament, but only little Chris and Papa George felt any effects from it. Around 11pm the massive thunderstorm from the night before again reared its ugly head, so everyone ran frantically to their tent to put down the flaps and try to salvage any dry space inside. In the process, we got absolutely soaked, our tents were thoroughly drenched, and we called it a night and slept in wet tents on wet sleeping bags. Pretty gross.
Our second day there, once the drizzle and rain cleared up around noon, everyone hung everything up to dry on every available clothing line, tree branch and askew nail. Luckily, when the sun did finally come out it was strong, and it didn’t take long until everything was dried out and we were playing in the water to cool off. After three full days of driving, it was nice to have one full day to catch up on clothes washing as well as having a place to beat your husband in ping pong. Twice.
The next morning we were off bright and early to head to a new country. Being on an overland truck tour where you stay in campsites run by foreigners, patronized by foreigners, and cooking our own food and just kind of keeping to ourselves, I don’t feel like I got a sense of Malawi that much, though I think that will be a common theme as we travel on tour.
Nonetheless, the scenery we saw out of the window was some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in Africa – small hills in Tanzania turned to small mountains, the lakeshore was nearly always within sight, and the greenery intensified – and the handicrafts we saw at markets was amazing. Men working on the side of the road can carve anything into anything, and I went a little nuts at one of our stops (we’ll worry about how to ship home a huge, carved wooden bowl later…).
I just hope that Malawi straightens itself out soon. The funding and the organization is in place, but so is rampant corruption. Malawi was definitely an excellent stopover on our tour, but of course a part of me wishes we had done it independently so we could have gotten a better feel for it at the same time. But I wouldn’t trade our comfortable and spacious bus for anything I saw on the road!
