malawi
April-May 2024
People. So. Many. People.
"Give me money!" A woman says as she taps our windshield. "Food! Please!" She motions with her hand towards her mouth, as if she's eating.
The crowd turns at us to see if we comply. I try to avoid eye contact.
But we're sitting in our $30,000USD rental vehicle in downtown Lilongwe, in gridlocked traffic. There are people everywhere, ambling between cars, touching my mirrors, looking at my tires, going wherever they're going. They know we're foreigners, and foreigners mean one thing: money.
A policeman in the center of the intersection looks at me. I pretend to not see him. He turns away.
The traffic moves by about 20 feet. The crowd stares at us. I ignore them. An hour passes until we've covered 500 feet and are finally free.
We drive out of the capital, past a shirtless man selling dogs on the highway, to a gas station with no gas, then a gas station that won't take credit cards, then an ATM with no cash, and then finally a gas station where we fill up. Yet again, locals ask us for money while I squeeze the pump, wishing it would fill faster.
We drive onward to Mulanje, passing through 12 police checkpoints en route.
*****
Malawi has a a reputation for poverty, expats and a bilharzia-filled lake. It's mostly safe, and the weather is fairly good, and a fair amount of people speak some English. While it's not exactly paradise, it's certainly an adventure for most travelers.
We spent two weeks in Malawi with our 4x4 overlanding truck as part of our Coast2Coast2Coast Africa Overland Expedition. We'd heard rave reviews of how great Lake Malawi is, and cautious reviews about how bad the poverty was. Needless to say, we entered from Zambia not knowing exactly what to expect.
What we found in our short time here was a vastly overpopulated country, with people, mostly kids, living in the bushes, on the streets, walking roads to nowhere all day and night. It proved difficult to escape the mass of humanity for the few remaining wild and beautiful places left in this tiny, deforested nation.
Birth rates are high, patriarchy dominates, women's rights are nearly nonexistent, and society prioritizes quantity of people over quality of people. Many young women are forbidden from higher education by village chiefs and even their own fathers, instead being told they must stay home and bear children for their husbands. The end result is more children than any parent can manage. We saw masses of children in every village, playing, running, singing with no adults in sight. All of them asked us for food and money. We also saw plenty of children working in the fields, instead of at school, with no adults in sight. Malawi is a nation where adults may bring children into the world not for love and respect, but instead to serve as a worker on a farm. It's hard to look past the unfairness here.
Additionally, Malawi is essentially a police state. Police and military are everywhere. For us, this meant endless highway checkpoints. Every road, often every five kilometers, has checkpoints. Metal gates, policemen, soldiers, AK-47s, crooked smiles. They ask for bribes, ask to see your license, your insurance, your registration. They invent lies, make up laws, ask for cash, and direct you to the nearest ATM to get more cash. It's maddening. We passed through more than 70 checkpoints in our time here. Policeman asked us to be our personal bodyguards, asked us for US visas, asked us for food, for money, for rides. One huge and intimidating cop had me write down my phone number "So I can call you to get money later" (I gave him a fake number). In the end, however, we always insisted we'd done nothing wrong, and we weren't carrying cash. Unfailingly, they always eventually let us go.
For the traveler, however, it's an interesting country. Climbing Sapitwa Peak, the highest peak in the country, is one of the best adventures in Africa (which is saying a lot!) We spent three days on this massif, doing it illegally without a guide, in bad weather, carrying all our own gear. This involved a full day of off-trail bushwhacking through the cloud forest, where we found wild monkeys and stumbled upon one of the best swimming holes on the continent.
From Mulanje, we took more than a week to amble north along the mediocre shores of Lake Malawi. It's filled with bilharzia in most spots, and countless villages discharge sewage into the lake. Not a great place to swim, in my opinion. After a few days in Livingstonia, we went through a hectic five-hour ordeal into Tanzania at a corrupt border post where military officers took us into a corner room, shut the door, and kept asking us for 'a cold drink'. We played dumb, said we didn't have any drinks, and then that we didn't even have cash to buy them a drink. We never paid their bribes, and they waved us on.
