Day seven: A visit to our competitors – welcome to Malawi

Today I visited my third African country: Malawi. Depending on who you ask, Malawi is in an even poorer shape than Mozambique, though you wouldn’t know it from the place we visited: our main competitors, an ultra-grand eco-lodge on an Malawi island 30 minutes away by speedboat.



This place was magnificent – and at $200 US a night (roughly equivalent to most Malawians’ yearly GDP) you would expect nothing but the finest sunsets and beautiful chalets …



I took the opportunity to escape the beer drinking to check out the local town, Kaya Mawa. It actually looks pretty similar to Mozambique, except for a few key differences: everyone speaks English (hurrah for the British colonies), and there are very few trees, due to lax land clearing laws this side of the lake. This hill should have been full of trees.



I want to reserve my third “wow, how did they manage that?” kudos of this blog (the first was for AIDS workers, the second for school builders) for Christian missionaries. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, Niassa province and Malawi is full of missionaries, and these towns around the lake boast massive Anglican churches (see below!). Apparently these were all built a hundred years ago by a scientist/missionary called David Livingstone (Dr Livingstone, I presume? Sorry). Anyway, the legacy of impressive churches – combined with a large number of Christians in this area – remains. Here’s a local church?!



ps I got to ride the speedboat too – I was hurling it at 40 kilometres an hour (Nuro, who can’t swim, was also ‘hurling’ then too!). I even successfully negotiated canoes that were in our way (okay, there were only two of them, but hey) …