The olden days of Malawi

Within half an hour of crossing into Malawi, Tille commented that he felt as though he had just stepped 100 years back in time. We ride through scenes where women only wear dresses, older men wear hats, most are on foot or bicycle with very few cars to be seen (in fact the only taxis are a bench on the back of a bicycle), women are riding side saddle on the back of the man’s bicycle, with nearly always, a not-so-small-child strapped to her back.

The mountains reach up to the west and the hills roll down to Lake Malawi on the east. Most land is used for agriculture, all of which is done by hand; there is not even an ox or donkey in sight. Judging from by what is for sale in the lean-to wooden structures that serve as shops in the small villages, the lush land grows corn, tomatoes, capsicum, onion, potatoes, mangos, bananas and the biggest money maker for the country, tobacco – the lake provides all manner of fish which for the game, can be purchased on the side of the road.

We ride through village after village where life is basic to say the least, the vast majority of houses clearly have no running water, are made from mud, have chickens and children running around the yard and we are pretty sure that there is no electricity to speak of – for those that have it, power cuts are a daily, if not hourly occurrence. We start to wonder what these people are like. We stop next to one of these wooden lean-to shops to buy a coke and see if we can chat to the locals a bit – they are sitting in the shade away from the heat of the afternoon sun with reggae on – they asked us if we like to dance, here in Malawi – we like to dance they tell us, with that they laughed and went back to their conversation.

Malawi suffers from having neighbours with massive tourist attractions and whilst it has the lake, some mountains and really beautiful countryside it just cannot compete. The others rely on tourist dollars to keep their economies afloat – growing and exporting tobacco clearly doesn’t cut it. The life expectancy is a shocking 44 years old with HIV/AIDS being one of the main causes of death. We heard a government official on the TV give a presentation within which he praised the ‘one cancer specialist’ in Malawi, saying that if there were more, further lives could be saved.

It is hard to imagine that such a backward world still exists, but lying here in the middle of southern Africa is Malawi, trundling along at its own pace and outside of the issues they share with all developing countries – they are in quite a nice little bubble that the locals definitely seem to like…