Malawi part two

The rest of the Malawi visit was fairly uneventful after the excitement of visiting the coffee farmers. We managed to get a lot of work done with the programme team and came away feeling really positive. 

For our 'down time' my colleague and I spent most of our time looking for nice places to eat and visit - not an easy task in a city that's hard to get around. Lilongwe is divided into areas, with big spaces in between (often planted with maize which makes you feel as if you are driving from village to village rather than through a city) and the taxis are expensive. In addition, there is very little up to date web information about places to go. 

We did manage to find a couple of nice local places - including an Italian restaurant and a little garden cafe. We spent the whole afternoon at the Italian on Sunday; we arrived for a late lunch and realised they were closing at 2:30 (we arrived around 2:15) but they kindly stayed open long enough for us to eat. Not only that, they allowed us to stay in their garden and use the wifi until they re-opened at 5:30... so we decided to stay for dinner. And we had dessert! I was pretty excited about that. I couldn't think why at first as I am not much of a puddings kinda gal, but I realised it is very un-West African to eat dessert and I can't remember the last time I went for dinner and finished the meal with a sweet. We both had tiramisu - not the best in the world but nice enough, and I was able to polish off the lot! 

The little garden cafe was expensive but nice. They were clearly catering to western tastes and had lots of fresh salads, juices, nice coffee, and interesting things like falafel. 

On the way back home I was allocated a different layover hotel in Addis Ababa, which I was pleased about. It still didn't give me an authentic taste of Ethiopian food, but I did have a nice bolognese, and the spiciest salad known to man. It looks innocent but had slivers of extremely hot pepper running all the way through. 

The room was nice, and had a lovely view over a misty Addis in the morning.

And as this blog seems to be mostly about food, I will finish by saying it was nice to get home and cook for myself - including satisfying a long held craving for a cheese sandwich. 

Spicy groundnut stew with boiled plantain and beans

Malawi part one

The plan for the two week Malawi visit was to spend the first week focusing on the coffee project and seeing the reality out in the field, and then spend the second week working through some of the programme requirements and project documents. 

So, after a a few meetings in Lilongwe, we set out at 6am on Thursday morning to drive south to Ntcheu and Blantyre. 

Our first stop was just outside Ntcheu, where we had a roadside breakfast / snack and waited to be joined by our partners and one of the volunteers. 

Once they joined us we had a meeting with the Board members of one of the cooperatives, and then travelled to see a coffee farm. 

The meeting was held at a local school,
in beautiful surroundings

This cheeky chappy started posing for a photo
as soon as he saw me taking pictures!

The views were fantastic and getting out into the coffee field was really interesting.

One of the vols

In the coffee nursery

We left the farm and started the drive down to Blantyre stopping twice along the way - once for lunch (nicest food I ate in the whole two weeks) and once to deal with immigration officers. One guy was getting a bit stressed about the fact that my colleague and I were travelling with copies of our passports rather than the originals, and that we didn't have a photocopy of the entry stamp. After ignoring some less than subtle requests for money/bribes we managed to get underway without coughing up any money. Once in Blantyre we had a meeting with another NGO and then retired to our hotel for the night. 

After hours on the road together it seemed everyone was keen for some 'alone time' in the evening. I went for dinner and a cold beer in the hotel where I met a very animated older Malawian guy who was disappointed I only had one night in the city, wanted me to find him an English wife (preferably around the age of 40) and kept trying to get me to go out drinking with him. Knowing that we had an early start I accepted a beer in the hotel and declined the offer to see the nightlife of Blantyre! 

Setting out at 7am that morning I was pleased with my decision. We had a full day on the road. First we drove back to Ntcheu (about a 2 hour drive) and then drove off-road for about 45 minutes to go and see one of the more distant cooperatives. We had been 'umming and ahhing' about whether to go as we knew that after this visit we had a much further group to drive to, but I am really glad we did. They sang us into and out of the field, seemed really happy to see us, and were a really nice group. 

Singing and dancing

From red cherry to 'parchment' -
a step before green bean.

We then drove back to the main road (another 45 minute bone-rattling journey back the way we came) and started making our way to the furthest cooperative - 100km away on an un-made road. It took us 3 hours to drive there and 3 hours to drive back, but the views were spectacular and my colleague and I were apparently the first white people to go to the village (I'm guessing for some time rather than ever!) so we had some great reactions from kids (and adults). 

At one point I felt like the pied piper

By the time we got back to the main road it was around 9pm but we decided to push on and drive the 1.5 hours back to Lilongwe. I reached home just before 11pm thoroughly exhausted after so much time on the road, but glad we had made the trip. 

* You might notice I didn't mention lunch / food breaks. Four out of five of us had stomach issues from something we'd eaten the day before (the chips maybe? See the first photo!) and we seemed to have an unspoken agreement not to try eating anything while we had so much driving to do!