"Travel"

During my stay here in Malawi I've been getting around using mini-buses and buses, which are what most people use most of the time to get around. Whenever I plan a trip back down to Torino I consider leaving at 6am from Berlin and arriving in Torino around 3pm to be a long day. I take a train to Berlin's airport, a plan from Berlin to Milano and a bus or two trains from Milano to Torino. That's a long morning to cover about 1000 kilometers. Friday it took me 14 hours to travel 326 kilometers.

The amount of time and stress that is lost to travel is depressing. Malawi feels like a much bigger country than it actually is since it takes so long to get to places. Lilongwe, from PGSS, is a day away, unless you have your own care, in which case it's 370 kilometers, a short morning.

This is a problem as much for people as it is for goods. The roads are generally good, but there is no reliable and efficient means of moving around on them. Mini-buses are common and cheap, but it's impossible know when you'll arrive. You could say, with 90% certainty, that if you leave early in the morning from PGSS you'll arrive in Lilongwe around dark, but who knows?

A lot of the students here at PGSS have never been to Lake Malawi. The southern part of the lake, Mangochi, is only a few hundred kilometers away, but given the time and cost involved it might as well be Times Square for many of the girls here.

So, why does it take so long? Mainly for 2 reasons: 1) minibuses travel when they're full. If there's one minibus leaving from Jenda and going to Mzimba you're going to sit in Jenda for as long as it takes for the minibus to fill up before you start moving. If Jenda just happens to be a small trading center on a slow day you might be waiting 2 or 3 hours for the mini bus to fill up. Then the mini-bus, which is going to stop and drop off and pick-up people as often as it can, will slowly make its way up to Mzimba. This is assuming you don't have any mechanical difficulties, in which case you may find your self on the side of an empty road outside of Kasunga under a hot sun waiting for something, anything, to pass by. The problem is that since you're close to Kasunga the only thing that's passing by are full mini-buses, since no mini-bus is going to leave Kasunga empty. I was lucky in that I only had a back pack with me and could hope on an already full mini-bus, the two women with their children who were walking with me weren't so lucky.

All this is just discussing the time and headache involved, it's also expensive. I spent 2100 kwacha to get from Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay, and while I probably paid a little more than a normal Malawian would have that number is more or less what it costs. 2100 kwacha is half what the carpenters here make in a month, it's not surprising they've never seen the lake.

Another example: Agatha bought maize for her family the day I arrived, She spent 13000 mkw for 480 kg of maize and 2000 (15%) to transport it back to her home.

So if you don't travel, how do you know what happens on the other side of the mountain? You don't really. While everyone certainly a cell phone (or two) they use it to keep in touch with people they already know, and there's no internet to speak of and the few newspapers don't provide a lot of non-local news, nor do I see too many people outside of the cities reading them. It really does feel like each province in Malawi is its own little world with only limited interaction with its neighbor. Traveling is something you do when you have to, and it's to be avoided due to the cost and time involved. Tourism, for Malawians at least, is just a strange hobby the foreigners have.

this picture was published on saturday, may 16 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 70.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/125; iso: 100. this image has the following tags: malawi.