Malawi Gin

It’s been a whirlwind tour of Malawi, being in the country for just over a week.  Our route took us down the M1, alongside the expansive Lake Malawi where we rested and swam and then up into the hills before descending on Lilongwe for a few days.  Our views of Malawi are probably therefore not that well developed, but a few key features of the country stand out – booze and tobacco!

There is a reason that this section is called Malawi Gin – the local spirit which can be purchased by the shot in a plastic pouch for less than a pound.   Malawi Gin has its competitors – ‘Double Punch’ and ‘Rider’ can also be found in this easily consumable form.  We have found some great posters of the likes of Mandela, Obama, Pele and even Michael Jackson (a slightly mixed bunch) supposedly recommending these beverages (‘Great people make great choices’).

 

If the shots are too much for you, then you can instead go for the innocuous looking ‘Shake-Shake’: what claims to be ‘international beer’ in a carton.  Made from maize and yeast, you give the cartoon a shake (as you might guess), leave it in the sun for some time to ferment and have a grainy, vinegary tasting toxic beverage.  Whilst we weren’t man enough to give the shots a go (athletes and all that), we did sip at one of these and decided that it was an acquired taste. 

 

Malawi is tobacco country.  It fills much of the fields that we ride past, as a much more lucrative crop than maize, and we regularly see it being dried by the road side.  Whilst in Lilongwe we visited the tobacco auction, a huge complex of warehouses bustling with life.  It is a buyers’ market, with the growers watching on avidly from the perimeter as each of their 100kg sacks is passed over in a mere three seconds by the rapidly moving procession of starter, auctioneer and buyers who cruise relentlessly down the aisles.  The pace is dictated by the huge quantity of tobacco that they have to get through.

The quality of the tobacco is checked by auction house staff who assess it for length, height grown above the ground, colour and leaf.  The sacks are marked for this grade, but ultimately it is with a brisk turn of the leaf that the buyer makes up his mind and wiggles or retracts his finger signalling his interest, or lack thereof. 
 

 

The growers have travelled from round the country and their trucks are lined up outside, sometimes waiting for several days to get their position on the auction house floor.  This moment will set their income for the time being but they are not completely at the mercy of the system, if they feel the price is too low the grower can reject the sale.  Equally the auction is not the only means to get their tobacco on the market; there is also a direct contract option where the price is pre-set: around a third of the tobacco each day seems to go through this contract mechanism.   

Interesting to see this whole process take place, still just part of the journey that happens to get the tobacco from the roadside to the cigarette in your hand.

On the road itself speed bumps, rumble strips and other forms of traffic calming have been present for a few countries now.  We are very familiar with the different forms these take and which are most effective to slow the traffic (perhaps we should pimp out our research to the Highways agency?) Whilst we are fully supportive of efforts to slow down the traffic, which is at times terrifyingly fast, these irritate us immensely because we see how ineffectively they slow the trucks, vans and cars, and yet how horribly they rattle our bones, knock our bottles out of their cages and, most concerningly, loosen the quick release on our wheels.  We mention this now because in Malawi these have been accompanied by signs actively deterring speedy driving, the straight forward ‘Speed Thrills but also Kills’ and the somewhat more self congratulatory ‘Road Signs Save Lives’.

In a fly-by visit we have still noticed that the poverty is greater in than in most of the countries we have seen for a while, despite this the general level of people’s English has been impressive.  We had a nice evening in Chitimba where some of the local boys prepared us fish for dinner, chatting with them , whilst not overly complimentary of the government, education was one aspect they felt was being handled well in Malawi.