Killing time in Lilongwe
Trip Start
Feb 20, 2007
1
28
38
Trip End
Jun 2007
Lilongwe,
Malawi
Thursday, May 3, 2007
I rode in the back of a pickup truck to Mzuzu, which was quite exciting, although became a bit miserable later when it started to drizzle rain. In Mzuzu I learned that the last bus had just left for Lilongwe, so I was forced to travel by matatu. I slept for most of the way, often being woken up by the woman next to me who was concerned that my nodding head would hit that of her baby's.
I didn't arrive in Lilongwe until after dark, and took a taxi to St. Peter's Guesthouse, a nearby Christian hostel. The place was nice and quiet, and I got a three-bed dorm to myself for the duration of my stay there. Lilongwe is dangerous to walk around in at night, which somewhat restricted my evening activities while there. On my first night there the hostel's security guard kindly accompanied me into town where I ate a decent meal before going to a bar to watch the Liverpool-Chelsea Champions League game. After the game ended a few of my fellow drinkers offered to walk me home to the hostel, once again displaying the Malawian hospitality which I have grown so used to here.
I set off to explore Lilongwe the next day, and was rather disappointed with what I found. The city doesn't really have any focal point; it is in fact a lot like two cities in one. Where I was staying was near the "old town", which has a few streets with shops and restaurants and a market. About a kilometre away, along a road which I was told is too dangerous to walk even by day, is the "city centre", which is a sort-of CBD. Both ends of the city are quite soulless and are completely devoid of any sort of character. There wasn't much to do for tourists here, or any sort of popular places where Malawians hang out. I had to collect my visa for Mozambique, but other than that I didn't really get up to much in this city.
I met a few local artists in the old town who were from Nkhata Bay, and who knew most of the artists I had befriended there. In true Malawian artist style they had renamed themselves with ridiculous names - the two I spent a lot of time with in Lilongwe were called "Lemon Squeeze" and "Cheese on Toast". After we had established that I didn't particularly want to buy anything they were selling we sat down for a chat and hung around for an hour or so one afternoon. We went up to Ziboko, a popular backpacker's lodge that night for a few beers. There we found that there were three of those ghastly "overlander" trucks there, so the place was teeming with about seventy people.
I spent much of the evening talking with some of the tourists who travel with these trucks. Again I was shocked at how insulated they are from any sort of contact with Africa. For example, they had arrived in Lilongwe today, and had only ventured into town to use the internet. They left the following morning, and so their only experience of Lilongwe, Malawi's capital, was a walk to an internet café. Usually they only spend a day or two in places, before driving seven or eight hours to another location. Their typical stay somewhere consists of them getting ridiculously drunk at a backpacker's, where they eat, sleep and stay without often going out to explore their surrounds. Most of those I spoke to complained that they felt they hadn't met many Africans, and hadn't experienced any sort of African culture. They also end up paying about double what I am paying for my trip, and cover the distances in considerably less time than I do (and I would consider my pace to be far too much of a rush).
I had to start making plans for getting my finances in order for Zimbabwe, where I will have no choice but to bring dollars with me. I withdrew lots of Kwacha from an ATM and went around town looking for places where I could exchange my money. I soon realized that everything was set up to screw you if you wanted to convert Kwachas to dollars. To make matters worse, the rates had worsened since my arrival in Malawi, by about 10%. While hunting for cheap rates around the place I noticed, to my astonishment, that arbitrage (a term in Finance, which essential means making money from nothing) was possible. The Buy-Sell rates in the banks were about 138-141 Kwacha to the dollar, with 1% commission. In the Forex bureaus it was sometimes as high as 145-154, with no commission. This means that if you changed a dollar at the Forex you would get 145 Kwacha for it, which you could convert at the bank and get roughly $1.01 (after commission had been taken). So if you had a few thousand dollars you could go back and forth between the banks and Forex bureaus and make money from nothing. I didn't get a chance to exploit this as you need to have a Malawian bank account in order to change money at the banks. I did, however, call into two Forex bureaus where the rates were so high that arbitrage was possible, and explained the problem to them. In both cases I was met with bemused looks, they didn't really seem to realize that this was (in my opinion) a fairly significant problem.
I tried to find an NGO to call into in the city centre, but I could only find one, called Plan. They "strive to achieve lasting improvements in the quality of life of deprived children in developing countries through a process that unites people across cultures and adds value and meaning to their lives". Unfortunately I didn't get to learn much more that that which I jotted down in my notepad from a poster on the wall, as the receptionist told me that everyone was "too busy" to talk to me. I waited for half an hour reading brochures given to me in the hope that someone would find time to answer a few questions about their work, but darkness (and thus, danger) approached, so I had to leave. All that was in the brochure was the usual vague details of projects they undertake filled out with statistics and data. In fairness to them, the receptionist did say she could arrange for me to meet someone the following morning, so I think that they were genuinely busy, which is of course a good thing. I had to leave for Blantyre early the next morning, so this meeting was not to be.
