Malawi

So we stayed at lake Malawi, a huge freshwater lake which consumes a third of the country.  We were near a village.  The most profound thing about Malawi was the people.  When you left the resort compound the kids would flock to you, and try to hold your hand.  They wanted to be picked up, and they had little songs they would all sing.  You could hold hands and sing with them and even when you weren't doing anything with them they would show up just to watch you.

We did a tourist sell thing where we did a painting with a local craftsman, who was like a lot better than his life.  He was a quiet thoughtful man with a delicate brush stroke.  But his only decent brush he had made by cannibalizing other brushes, and his paints were shitty primary school acrylics you had to take a 4 hour trip to get at the big market in Lusaka.  And he functionally only did one painting BC it was for tourists.  We asked him how many he could do in a day, and he said 15 but he couldn't sell that many, so he just did them as they sold.  He took a lot of patience with us. 

His nephew was one of the beach sellers, seen as a nuisance and kind of one, but very friendly and the only viable job in town and what all the young men were doing.  Independent but not cutthroat there were some accepted cultures about talking to one tourist at a time so they didn't get too inundated.  They held a bonfire party on the beach, I guess to lure tourists off the compound because they were still a bit on the clock but they also had the fire and the kids came out and danced and they taught us local games and invited us to the local bar. 

I later met a guy in Johannesburg who told us that when he was a kid in apartheid he used to think white people were like gods and he wanted to touch them to see if they were real, but your parents would beat you if you tried it.  This reminded us uncomfortably of the kids in Malawi. 

It would be strange and wonderful to be somewhere like that long enough that you became unexceptional, that you could interact with these amazing people a bit more like a person yourself. 

I went snorkeling with the super cool snorkeling guy who was living this dream along with the cool girl who was doing biodiversity research.  We motored out to the island and floated around seeing awesome fish. 

The fish color and diversity was great, the most diversity of species of a certain kind of fish  in the world.   There were these rocks from which the island was built and in the cracks in between those you could see the fish more readily, who his in their sheltered harbors. 

The downside of this is you have the waves from the wind crashing against the rocks.  And where I come from you don't hang out face first against crashing waverocks.  Jes gave up pretty quickly in the face of this and a dodgy fin, I continued around the island but as I came around to the windward side it got more and more intense and then I lost my mask and in the process of retrieving it lost a fin and in the process of dealing with all that washed up on shore.  I took this opportunity and the shakiness accompanying it to explore the island with Jes and hang out on warm rocks and then I went to complete my circuit around the island.  I did make it, and got some more awesome fish views, and then we motored back, a pretty great day all around. 

The night before we partied hard and late, at the bar then the bonfire, then when we got back there was dancing on the bar.  And the afternoon was the painter and then this local meal with dancing and singing with the kids.