Some Closing Thoughts

(from Wednesday/Thursday)

This will be my last post from Africa, and it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of thoughts from the last several days, sometimes weeks. I’ve got another entry to do while traveling, and then I’ll try to post some of the pictures from the trip once I’m home and have better access to high-speed internet. I’m not sure if I’ll post the pictures in previous entries, where they sort of belong, or do some photo only entries, or save the images for a photo show that I’ll be doing in a few months time. Perhaps a combination of all of the above. In any case, thanks for reading the blog, and here are some closing thoughts:

So I’ve not said anything about Malawi, and that’s mostly because I was only there for a few days and saw a very small portion of the country. But what I did see was really very pretty, especially the tea fields that met me immediately as I crossed the border from Mozambique. Not sure what it is about tea fields and people picking tea that is so calming and romantic. It’s likely back-breaking work for the people doing it, yet I really love seeing it from afar. I’m not really a tea drinker so I’m not sure what the connection is besides gorgeous countryside, but it’s certainly worth seeing.

• Internet speeds picked up a great deal in Malawi. It may be a very poor country but they’ve got the internet figured out. I didn’t have a chance to talk to anybody about Madonna and Malawi, but the thought crossed my mind to do a web search of that when I was in an internet café. I’ll have to do that upon my return, since that seems to be Malawi’s claim to fame in the last couple of years. Too bad!

• Malawi also has beautiful roads and almost no pot-holes at all. That made traveling much less tiresome, and considerably quicker. What made travel in Malawi less enjoyable, at least on one long-distance ride, was the number of drunk people who got considerably more drunk over the course of the trip and wanted to engage me in conversation. We saw such a small number of drunk people on this trip—what a joy—but interestingly and sadly it seemed to increase as the trip moved southward.

• The majority of the people with whom I interacted with on this trip were either Christian or Moslem, and my guess is that those two groups were pretty evenly split across the trip. And I was struck by how much the Christians want to put their Christianity on other people, where that was seemingly absent within Islam. At meals and meetings and other gatherings, it seemed that Jesus and amens had to be there, and I can recall a bus ride in Malawi where a Jesus-lover came on and spent about 15 minutes ranting to everyone about the role that Jesus needed to play both in regard to the bus trip, and to life. Quite obnoxious.

• Never has there been part of the world where I’ve consistently enjoyed the music so much, and I’m referring to the music I heard on buses, in restaurants, and on the streets. I’ve always claimed to have been born without rhythm but there’s certainly been something about much of this music here that connects with me. Maybe I need to take an African dance class, but the African music that I heard in East Africa seems much different than what we get in the States. What I heard in Uganda was particularly delightful.

• I can’t remember where it was that I experienced this before but I got to once again participate in a sweet “community event” in Malawi’s commercial capital…rain. I was in a Blantyre travel agency when it started raining, but really really raining. It started raining so hard that the streets in Malawi’s largest city turned into rivers with water at least six inches deep. And everything in the city—at least everything that was outside came to a halt for the twenty minutes that it rained, and people either stood or sat under overhangs to just watch the water come down.

• Perhaps one of the most frustrating thing about third world travel is the practice of filling up buses before they depart. Now from a environmental and efficiency standpoint, I totally understand and appreciate it, but from a getting somewhere perspective, it’s quite maddening. After all, who knows when the bus (or taxi or truck) is going to finally fill up and when we’ll be able to leave on our trip. I can remember several instances when I waited for at least two hours as a vehicle seemed to get closer and closer to filling up, when the conductor would tell me ten more minutes or just another half hour, and then the wait become eternal. And once, when it looked like we were just about there, and I had finally committed to buy my ticket, the professional bus-sitters would get off the bus—about ten of them—and their seats needed to be sold. I guess nobody ever wants to be the first person on the bus, the first person to buy a ticket on a vehicle that may never sell out, so it helps to sell the “idea” that we’ll be hitting the road shortly as an attract to all the other passengers. In fact, I’m not sure how much it mattered to the locals. Even if they were in a hurry, they didn’t seem to be, and they seemed calm while my impatience grew by the minute. It was a bad feeling for me, and I tried to tell myself that it’s more about the journey than the destination, but rarely to any avail.

• Once the bus arrived from Blantyre to Lilongwe, the final bus ride of my trip, I was struck by how many of the people stayed on the bus. It was around 10 or 11PM by that time, and I inquired if there was another stop, since it didn’t look like a very busy bus station when we got there. Maybe this was not the place I was supposed to get off. But it was, and all the people on the bus intended to stay right there. They were some of Malawi’s famous “bus sleepers” and they would remain on the locked bus until 5AM. I’m not sure if it was a law or policy, but bus companies were not supposed to let people off the bus after dark unless they had someone picking them up or were going to an announced nearby destination. So while I couldn’t wait to get to the nearby hotel to sleep and shower, they were combining lodging and transportation and seemed perfectly happy to be doing so. And rumor has it that it’s had a significant impact on crime rates dramatically in the country—far fewer people to be preyed upon late at night. Seems like good policy to me, but I’m also glad that I didn’t get locked on the bus myself.