Not much happening in Malawi
Trip Start
Jun 25, 2006
1
39
127
Trip End
Aug 01, 2007
Lilongwe,
Malawi
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
From Seychelles we flew back into the African continent to spend the balance of our time in 2006 touring the nations of the south. Since many of the states here have had somewhat similar pasts I'm going to give you the very simplified version of their history. Most southern African nations started in prehistory as small regional tribes controlling small territories. The slave trade began to dramatically affect the region in the 1700's, and by the mid-1800's all nations of southern Africa were under European colonial domination. In the 1950's and 60's pretty much all of the region was granted self-government. Since independence, most of these nations have struggled with their share of successes and tragedies, which I'll go into in more detail on a country-by-country basis.
Our first stop in southern African is the nation of Malawi, which has recently appeared in news headlines since the pop singer Madonna just visited to adopt a child. We didn't see her here. We only spent a few days in its capital, Lilongwe, which unfortunately doesn't have a lot happening or sights so see, so we contented ourselves by hanging out with some fellow travelers
Katie feeling a bit at home in Malawi
. Spent a day at a nice hotel pool, hung out at our guest house/camp, had a barbeque and got a bit of reading in. Met a few really cool Brits that we planned to meet up with a bit later on at Victoria Falls. Through our guesthouse in Lilongwe, we arranged a safari to go to South Luangwa Park in the neighboring nation of Zambia. South Luangwa is supposed to be one of the best parks in Africa for viewing game, and we were told is not as crowded as some of the more accessible reserves in Kenya and South Africa. So tomorrow we are off to Zambia!
She Said:
We reluctantly left the amazingly beautiful Seychelles for Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. I tried to finagle our airline tickets so we could spend a few more days in Seychelles, but those flights book up early, so no luck.
I must say that I was a bit nervous on the flight to Lilongwe because I really didn't know what to expect. For the most part, that nervousness was unfounded, because we found the travel experience in Lilongwe to be pretty laid back and easy. The only issue was that there is NOTHING to do in Lilongwe! Once we checked into our "hotel" (using that term extremely loosely here) and realized that the city was very spread out, and that the only sites were a tobacco auction floor (which wasn't happening since the harvest was completed) and the parliament building, I was very worried, as we had to fill 2.5 days (until our safari departed). Our "hotel" was really more of a camp (no amenities) with tiny little A-frame guest rooms built out of items that used to grow from the ground - like an extremely rustic KOA campsite from the 1970s. The bathrooms were just cinder block rooms with wood doors and a pipe hanging out of the wall with extremely dodgy water pressure. My first shower actually stopped when I was standing there with shampoo in my hair and soap all over my body. My little towel is more like a hand towel than a bath towel, so I couldn't just wrap up in it and go to another shower. I stood there for like 5 minutes and finally a tiny little trickle came out (thank god), and I spent the next 15 minutes waiting for the drips to wash all the soap off. One good thing was that this shower experience successfully burned some time! And the "roughing it" part certainly helped prepare me for the next 8 weeks or so in which we will spend most of the time camping.
Thankfully, we met some other travelers and had a great time walking around "downtown" Lilongwe and swapping travel stories with them. It certainly reminded us how nice it is to have friends! We miss all of you!!! The other positive was that there were two "camp" dogs that were so cute and reminded me so much of our dog Forbin. I spent a lot of time just petting them and hanging around on the couch with them. Even dogs in Malawi get on the couch!
