Julia's Travels: Zomba…

From Cape Maclear, we continued south to the city of Zomba. Zomba wasn’t originally on our itinerary, but Chris and I have heard so many travelers rave about the hiking in Malawi, that we figured a few days of fresh air might be pretty nice.

During colonial times, Zomba was the capital of Malawi, so even though it isn’t a major city now, it has lots of beautiful old buildings. Zomba was also one of the greenest places we visited in Malawi. Since winter is the dry season, much of the countryside we’ve seen has been bone-dry and a little barren-looking (especially when you get away from the lake). Zomba was lush, green and cool…an excellent change of pace.

We were only in Zomba for a couple of days, but we had a great time hiking up and around the Zomba plateau. I, for one, haven’t been able to exercise regularly during this trip, and it was definitely a wake-up call for my body when we decided to hike 7 km uphill one afternoon. Fortunately, we got a ride back down the plateau and saved our knees from the downhill walk. :-P

Zomba doesn’t seem to be on the main backpacker circuit in Southern Africa, so we didn’t meet any other travelers there. We did, however, bump into a group of super-friendly resident expats during our hike up the plateau, and they invited us over for dinner. Most of them are in Malawi working for NGOs, and it was interesting to hear their perspective on life in Malawi. As a traveler, it’s relatively to cope with some of the challenges of living in the developing world (e.g. evening power outages that you can set your watch by), because you know that you only have to deal with the inconveniences for a short time and will eventually be returning to the world of orderliness and comfort. When you are living in rural Malawi for several years trying to manage an organization, these challenges become a much larger part your life. On the flip side, living in a place like Zomba for an extended period of time gives you the opportunity to integrate yourself into the community and learn about the local culture in a way that you just can’t do as a visitor. In any event, it was a wonderful and unexpected evening of dinner and conversation with some awesome people.

-Julia