Pilgrim's progress.

---

I remember arriving in Santiago de Compostela, the great Spanish pilgrimage city, on a cool, misty, Galician morning. It was that blue pre-dawn hour when anyone with a bit of common sense is curled up beside a pretty Spanish girl, not tramping around with an oversized backpack, looking for their hostel. I had arrived by train, from Madrid - hardly the arduous, soul-sapping slog across 800 miles of French and Spanish countryside that constitute the famous camino del Santiago. In the plazas, already bracing for the day’s traffic, they were setting up their souvenir stalls: the plastic rosaries and wooden crosses, the pocket-sized icons of Jesus and St. James. In the morning, with the sun lighting the flagstones outside the cathedral, I watched those road-weary pilgrims trudging across the plaza, their legs spattered with mud, their faces lit by some beatific glow. You could see their soul’s rapture in the dancing lights of their eyes. Some had endured six, eight weeks of tramping through the rain, across those moody Spanish highlands, guided by some moral compass pointing the pilgrim’s way to Santiago.

I say this now because, after a brutal two-day pilgrimage, after the Mohammed Coach buses and matolas, the arduous work of telepathically sealing my bladder for 40-plus hours straight, I’ve reached my own Compostela here in Lilongwe. And we’re a very long way from Santiago. It is, even by African standards, a charmless town, a by-product of the myopic vision that sees a capital city where the rest of us might see a parking lot. It’s a rootless sprawl, a place that, just minutes from the city center, is swallowed by the lush, overgrown greenery of the tropics. No sooner than you’ve entered the city and turned a few corners than you seem to be back on the road to Mzuzu, or Blantyre. This is hardly the same as Saul seeing the light on the road to Damascus.

I’ve based myself at Mabuya Camp, a busy little backpackers place on the fringes of the Old Town, where I’ll spend a few nights bookending my trip to Pumulani. The timing of my visit couldn’t be much worse. While I’m hardly one to complain about a night of luxury lodgings, the mad dash I made to get here only ensures that, in just a few days, I’ll be backtracking to start my explorations of the north. I have a day to take care of some business in town - to get some cash at the Standard Bank, to change some Tanzanian shillings, to get a new SIM card for the Malawi phone network - before flying out to Pumulani. And then, after a day of subjecting the place to my withering professional scrutiny, I’ll be back in Lilongwe and bound for the north - at which point, I suspect, my real Malawian journey will begin.

It doesn’t take long around town to recognize a regional shift - a move away from the centripetal pull of Nairobi, and toward a new center of power in Johannesburg. It’s the first sign that I’ve finally left East Africa behind, that the next chapter of my African adventure has begun. For the past year, from Kisumu to Kigali, from Kampala to Kigoma, all roads led to Nairobi. It was the political, the economic heart of the region; it was a place young Africans could aspire to, an energetic, free-wheeling, money-making town, a dreamscape of skyscrapers, of strivers and petty hustlers and big-eyed entrepreneurs. It was a point of reference wherever you went. When you wanted to tease a villager about the pace of life in his ramshackle, one-shop town, you could smile and sigh and shake your head and say, “Well, it’s not Nairobi.” When students, desperate to leave their impoverished village lives behind, hoped for a chance to make their fortunes in the wider world, it was to Nairobi you could steer them.

But in Lilongwe, with its South African chain stores (Shoprite, Nando’s), with its streets paved and paid for by Pretoria, there’s a new dynamic to take into account. Suddenly the rand gets prominent billing at the Forex bureaus, alongside the dollar, the pound and the euro. (My Tanzanian shillings, in fact, will prove all but worthless: the only people willing to change them for Malawian kwacha offer an almost criminal rate.) South African TV networks and radio stations dominate the airwaves. And if you meet a white man on the street, there’s a better chance he’ll invite you for a braai - a South African barbeque - than for a civilized, British cup of tea.

It’s largely a credit to the policies of Malawi’s first president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, that this would be the case. In the 1970’s, a decade into what would eventually be 30 years of rule, Banda refused to join ranks with African and Western leaders in ostracizing the apartheid government of South Africa. Banda cozied up to the repressive regime in Pretoria, and Malawi was rewarded in turn by a heavy flow of investment from John Vorster’s government. Military aid and training poured into the country (the president’s notorious Young Pioneers - a fierce youth brigade which terrified the political opposition - were allegedly trained by South African forces). During Banda’s rule, South Africa would open its only embassy in sub-Saharan Africa in Lilongwe. Sleek new government buildings were paid for with South African money - though most would be run by European ex-pats (the American- and Scottish-educated Banda being notoriously finicky about the qualifications of his countrymen to run their own country).

After more than a decade of economic struggles, though, as well as the mismanagement and corruption of Banda’s successors, Bakili Muluzi and Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi remains one of the world’s poorest nations. Because of the instability of the kwacha, foreign currencies in Lilongwe are in high demand. (A South African ex-pat in Mzuzu will later explain how easily illicit money is made here: by bringing dollars into the country, then flipping them on the black market at a favorable rate, you could quickly make $150 on a $1,000 investment.) At the National Bank of Malawi, the current exchange rate for US dollars is cheerily posted on an electronic board; but the dollars themselves are in short supply, and I have no luck finding them at any of the banks around town.

Despite the country’s currency woes, though, you’ll see none of the exaggerated denominations - the endless procession of zeroes - that you’ll find on the hyperinflated dollars of Zimbabwe, or even the shillings of Tanzania or Uganda. The largest unit of currency in Malawi is the K500 note - the equivalent of about three and a half bucks. And in a sign of how a country scales its financial operations to the demands of its clientele, the minimum withdrawal from an ATM is just K200. Enough to buy some maize meal for the week, perhaps, or to pay for a matola from the city back to your village home.

Mulling over such thrift-driven economics, pondering the fat stack of K500 notes stuffed into my wallet, it’s ironic that I’d choose this time for a luxury getaway. But duty calls, and in the morning I’m walking across the tarmac at Kamuzu International Airport, getting into the charter plane that will take me to Pumulani. The lodge is the first Malawian venture for Robin Pope Safaris - the venerable Zambian safari company - and with its opening just a few months ago, it seemed like a good chance to get my foot in the door with a certain luxury glossy. The flight is short and smooth; we spend most of the hour coasting over dry fields and brown hilltops, gliding over the blue, placid lake before touching down on the bumpy airstrip at Monkey Bay.

A crowd is gathered along the landing strip, shielding their eyes from the dust: schoolkids and young hang-abouts, the bored masses of Africa looking for a bit of novelty to break the day’s routine. There’s a swank white Range Rover waiting for my arrival, a couple of ruddy seniors getting seen off by the Pumulani staff. Everyone is flushed, genial: there’s a lot of hand-pumping and back-slapping and tipsy bonhomie. Life at Pumulani, their manner suggests, is awfully grand. The weather in Monkey Bay is dry, hot, choking. A few lanky souvenir sellers crouch in the Range Rover’s shade, unfurling some paintings in the dust. I buy a pair - for the next day, if nothing else, I’ll play the part of the Tourist with Cash to Burn - and then take a cozy seat for the half-hour drive to the lodge.

For the past year I’ve packed into the backs of buses and matatus and pick-ups, squished in by the ample rears of husky African mamas, jabbed by the pointed elbows of men with arms like matchsticks, and have always found, with my face pressed against the window, that the sight of a white man barreling through the bush with shoddy local transport is a cause for celebration. Dirty naked kids and frowning elders and men taking savage hacks at stalks in the fields would, more often than not, respond to my eager waves with great mirth. The ever-excitable children would go scampering back toward home, no doubt sharing the news of their sighting with incredulous friends, the way the Victorians would return to civilized London after years of exploring the African interior to report their discoveries - mythic lakes and wild tribes and untapped El Dorados - to the crowds crammed into the Royal Geographical Society’s halls.

From the rear of the Range Rover, though, the reception is mixed. Old women follow our passage with hostile regard, teenage boys crane their necks to get a peek inside. My waves and thumbs-up go unreturned. Even the young barefoot boys and girls - as reliable for canned mirth as a laugh track - seem cagey. Something about the regal pomp of our passage defies the casual give-and-take of smiles with the locals. The Range Rover, after all, has almost mythic portent in Africa. It is the carriage of government honchos and NGO workers, of all the bureaucratic emissaries of the international aid racket, debarking in nameless villages with their amorphous goals and dubious smiles, seeing conditions “on the ground” before retreating to their gated compounds in the capital. It is as far from the transport of the masses as a space shuttle. No doubt the appearance of these Range Rovers after Pumulani’s July debut signified that something momentous had occurred in Monkey Bay’s backyard. And it didn’t take long for the locals to discover - if they hadn’t already heard from a cousin or friend, a mason or carpenter helping to build the lodge - that rich white men and women would now be passing through their scruffy village several times a week.

Along the way we stop at a village school: one of the other passengers - herself an American teacher - is curious to see the learning conditions in what is undoubtedly one of the world’s poorest school districts. The school is a ramshackle affair of long brick bungalows and corrugated tin roofs. We’ve arrived at the lunch hour, and the students - boys in their early-teens, thin and hyper, blue uniforms disheveled by all manner of horsing around - crowd around us. I walk with a group of twenty or thirty through the yard, asking about their studies, their upcoming exams. Most are juggling nine or ten courses - math and biology, English and chemistry, history, geography - though they have just a few slender notebooks tucked under their arms. The Scholastics of the world haven’t made much of an inroads in rural Africa. A textbook in Monkey Bay might be a few pages photocopied from some 1960’s English-language primer, or some modest Chewa grammar schoolbook printed in Lilongwe. (In Zanzibar, I was shocked and dismayed to find that the health “textbook” being used by secondary school students was the sort of anti-smoking pamphlet you might find in a doctor’s waiting room.) One of the students, a 16-year-old with a brilliant smile, asks how he can find American students looking for Malawian pen pals. I try to imagine, in this digital age, an American teen writing out a letter, licking the envelope, affixing a stamp. It is like trying to picture the invention of the wheel. I ask if any of the boys have used the Internet before, and they tell me that their school has a computer lab, though none of them have ever set foot inside it. On the way out I poke my head inside, where dozens of mismatched PC’s sit in woeful states of disrepair. A teacher explains that they were donated by American NGO’s, but there’s no one at the school with the technical know-how to actually get them up and running.

Back in the Range Rover I exchange platitudes with the Americans - “such a shame,” “they’re so eager,” “such bright kids” - and then we’re off making our gas-guzzling way to Pumulani. The landscape is brown, barren - some sort of scorched vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Bicycles clog the road, old three-speed models with rusted frames weighted down by bundles of banana leaves and sacks of charcoal. Along the way we make a few staticky calls to the lodge’s managers, who have grown increasingly alarmed by how long it’s taking us to get there. When we finally pull in there’s relief all around, and after checking into my capacious villa and looking admiringly toward the sun-capped lake, I settle into a late lunch, swapping safari tales with a mirthful English couple who have made the trip to Pumulani overland in a fully outfitted Land Rover, via South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia.

It’s a hot but lovely afternoon, my mild disappointment at the lodge’s aesthetics - the concrete villas squatting over the hill like fall-out shelters - more than made up for by the general cheeriness all around. There’s a hike around the lake’s shores, a healthy dose of kayaking (during which a certain travel scribe spends most of his time paddling in circles), and a spirited discussion on how you can distinguish the different species of otters by the way they wag their tails. At dusk, drifting along in a marvelous creaking dhow while we sip sundowners, I have to admit that, all things being equal, travel writing is not a bad direction in which to steer the kids.

Because of the unreality of the whole ordeal - the hectic, 40-hour haul from Tanzania, the G&T’s by the hillside infinity pool - it’s only the next morning, after returning to Lilongwe, that my Malawian journey feels like it’s truly underway. As if to underscore that point, we pass a billboard along the airport road: “Welcome to Lilongwe, the Home Town of Akshar Cement.” Beneath it, in almost sinister reproach, comes the addendum, “Be Malawian, Buy Akshar” - as if to imply that only some douchebag from Zambia would buy a lesser brand. Back at Mabuya Camp the backpackers are immersed in their grungy revels, the birds trilling in the treetops, Bob Marley soulfully lamenting over the speakers. It was a long, terrible slog to get here, but here is where - for the next few days at least - I’m happy to be.

---