MALAWI (click on a photo to enlarge)

When I crossed into Malawi I had reached the Great Rift Valley.  Malawi is a tiny country in the middle of Africa on the western shore of Lake Malawi (which, I believe, is nearly as large as the country itself).  All along the lakleshore you can see people pulling huge amounts of tiny fish caught with nets out of their canoes, then setting them out to dry in the sun.  Sometimes they even put them of the roof of their house to dry!  The fish are then eaten whole.  To me they seemed too small to eat, but they are an important food staple all over Malawi.  Along the lake the Rift Valley is perfectly flat, and further west the land becomes mountainous.  The contry has only two small cities, both with less than half a million people, and everyone else lives scattered around the countryside.  I imagine that most Westerners probably haven't heard of the place.  Malawi probably wasn't worth the bother, and I wish I had gone form Tanzania straight into northern Zambia or into Mozambique instead of passing this way.  I believe that most of the nice parts are in the south of the country, off my route.  There were a few good things about traveling through Malawi, which are as follows.  First, the beer was much better here than in Kenya and Tanzania.  As most of the local beer is made by a subsidiary of Denmark's Carlsberg brewery, here you can get European-quality beer at African prices.  As a result, I drank beer in addition to my customary Coke every time I stopped at a restaurant or supermarket, even if it was 9 AM!  Since it is very hot here and I usually start cycling by 6 AM I think that's OK.  Another good thing about cycling in Malawi is that the roads are virtually free of automobiles.  It's one of the ten poorest countries in the world, so no one but top government officials and businesspeople have private cars, and most people don't have enough money for buses either.  So instead of worrying about getting hit by motor vehicles I only had to concentrate on not hitting pedestrians, cyclists and the occasional monkey, goat, pig or cow with my bike.  Finally, I stopped at several villages along the way where people were performing traditional songs and dances.  These were not special occasions or festivals, but rather everyday ocurrences.  It's nice to know that this sort of thing still happens in some places, as in Kenya and Tanzania I got the impression that everyone listens to rap these days.  African women really have beautiful voices (sometimes they even sing and dance with their babies strapped to their backs!),, the men are excellent drummers, and in Malawi the dance is usually accompanied by one person wearing a large mask made of straw.  In addition to being one of the poorest countries in the world (the official per-capita GDP figure that I saw is $180), Malawi is also one of the more densely populated.  All of my photos from Malawi have people in them, and any photo taken there that doesn't would be a complete misrepresentation of the country.  It is literally crawling with people.  This meant that it was very difficult to find bush campsites - if you're on a flat piece of ground in Malawi it's a good bet that you're on someone's front yard or cropland.  Fortunately, there were several nice "official" campsites on the beaches of Lake Malawi.  One of them even had a bed in a tree.  Sleeping there made me feel like a kid rediscovering a treehouse, although the sensation of sleeping on land directly above crashing waves with flower petals falling on my head during the night was completely new to me.  In 10 days of cycling through Malawi, I believe I can count on one hand the number of times that I could stop along the highway without seeing a person or house.  And that's not all: every house has about seven little kids in or around it, who come running out to the road as soon as they see me.  Some of them yell "Hello" or "Mzungu" (white person) continuously until I'm out of sight.  Others hold out their hands and yell, in a very demanding way, "Give me my money!".  This last one really bothers me, and I hope that the parents and teachers responsible for them, as well as other tourists, are discouraging this behavior.  Most of these kids receive minimal formal education and learn by experience.  Growing up thinking that the way to earn money is sitting by the road waiting for a white guy to come by on a bike like Santa Claus rather than working is not what they need, nor does handing money out to a few individuals do anything to solve the problems of an extremely poor country. The extent of environmental destruction that has already taken place in Malawi is astounding.  Despite being a country in which the average citizen consumes virtually no resources beyond locally-grown food, Malawi's land has been slashed and burned everywhere.  Even hillsides too steep to walk on are being burned to clear them for cultivation.  In many places the land is charred in every direction for as far as the eye can see.  When I cycle through the few remaining pockets of rainforest I can only guess at how beautiful many parts of present-day Malawi must have been before the population explosion.

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