Blantyre

I am normally the first to enthuse over Africa. And I love Africa and Africans. But I shall need to work harder to bond with Malawi. This may not be Malawi’s fault at all – maybe it was me or the circumstances but the long and the short of it is that I didn’t enjoy my trip this time.

SAA only flies to and from Blantyre twice a week – Wednesday morning and Saturday morning. I only needed a day, two at most, there but was forced to either spend 3 (or 4) nights there or else use non SAA / non Kenya airlines like Air Malawi or Air Zimbabwe, which I am a little nervous of. They may be fine – I am just nervous. So I booked Wednesday through Saturday. OK.

Tuesday night I was still packing at past ten and had to be up at 3.30 to get the red eye flight to Johburg, in order to make the 10.30 to Blantyre. The advantage of driving to the airport at 4 a.m. is that no one else is. It was blessedly quiet. Not too quiet mind you – one always wants a critical mass of other wake, warm human beings when driving past the Athlone cooling towers.
I found my favourite parking spot on the 4th floor of the domestic parkade and headed for the VIP check in. Not that I travel business class – I don’t on principle (and because it is against company policy) – but I have managed to attain Gold status on Voyager loyalty program simply by spending my entire life at 39 000 ft above sea level – well, that is what it feels like. And this one time they bumped me up to business class – but only until Johannesburg.

The SAA lounge in Cape Town domestic is crap and will remain so until they finish renovations, I guess. But it did give me a cup of coffee, sandwich and a chance to do some last minute emails. Similar story in Johannesburg. Forgot to get a customs letter for the laptop – the last one has expired. Wondered whether they would hassle me on return.

There is a definite pecking order at the airport. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I suppose it has something to do with volume (number of passengers). Seems to me that if you fly to Europe or North America you get to use the airbridges / elephant tubes. If you happen to be going to Maputo, Nairobi, Entebbe or in this case Blantyre, you can be pretty sure that your aircraft will be parked about 10 km away from the terminal which means that you get to use those rather grotty ground floor exits in Johannesburg, spend what seems like hours waiting in breathless buses on hot aprons until the driver decides to close the doors and switch the aircon on, and then another eternity trundling across the tarmac. I recently got delivered to the wrong plane – some of us had taken already our seats when the cabin controller (who had actually checked our ticket stubs) said “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that this aircraft is bound for Windhoek, Namibia!” Not that I have anything against Windhoek – I just hadn’t intended visiting it this year.

We left on time. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. SAA is not bad in that regard. The flight was scheduled to take just over 2 hours. For some reason we arrived in under 2. Something to do with the atmosphere or the stratosphere or the hemisphere. I had a window seat but as there was cloud cover most of the way just read my book – Karen Armstrong’s book on the prophet Mohamed. Very interesting and surprisingly readable. Then I started feeling guilty because I knew I had to give a talk when I arrived and did some work. When we did do our decline and dip below cloud level again, I was surprised at how brown everything was. Cape Town is lush and green right now. Even Johannesburg doesn’t look too bad. This place looked like it was in the grips of a bad drought. The other thing that surprised me was that I could not see any fence around the international airport runway. I was subsequently assured that there is one but it is not very substantial – just strands of wire. As long as it keeps the cows off, I suppose ....

Blantyre airport is quaint. I think that is the best word. Funny old 2 storey building, which looks like it was built in the days of BOAC (and probably was). There is an upstairs viewing platform which reminds me of my childhood Saturday afternoons coming out to Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and watching the jets land and take off from the open viewing deck there – subsequently closed for security reasons. I think we even saw the Concorde from there.

Passport control was relatively painless. Helps to have an SA passport sometimes. The baggage is brought across in open trailers and tractor and man handled onto a conveyor belt which is about big enough for the arrival of a 12 seater aircraft but has to cope with the arrival of a 200 seater. Everyone stands around it in a cramped, crowded room with no air-conditioning and the Africa sun blazing in through the window. My case took an absolute age to arrive. I am frequently tempted to not take checked in luggage but if the trip is longer than 2 nights it gets a bit challenging. Finally made it through and was met by a friendly fellow bearing a placard with my name on it who said his name was Dave and took my bags. It was a 30 minute drive through to Ryall’s Hotel in the city centre and I fortunately had about an hour to have a shower and re-engage my brain. Ryall’s looks and feels like a medium sized reasonably modern hotel. It was only when I explored the back corridors and read all the picture narratives that I discovered that it had a much longer and prouder history and that the original Ryall’s had been something of a landmark and an institution. Too bad they knocked it down. I found the new hotel a bit sterile and characterless. But it was clean and comfortable and the aircon sort of worked even if it took me two days to work out that the hot and cold on the shower mixer were reversed which was why I couldn’t get any hot water.

I can’t pretend that I explored Blantyre. I had a heavy schedule of meetings and the like and when I wasn’t in those I was back at the hotel on telecons or preparing. My one foray into the city was to find the bank and draw some Malawian kwatchas. It is about 20 MAK to the rand, 150 MAK to the USD. I was hoping I would be able to pay everything on the credit card but got alarmed when I saw that there was an exit tax at the airport of 30 dollars. The concierge assured me one could pay in MAK’s so I drew 10000 (about 60 USD) just in case it had gone up. More of that anon.

I was taken around two of the euphemistically called “high density settlements”. In SA we would call them slums, squatter camps or, to be more PC, informal settlements. But I was told that slums was not a word used much in Malawi. They say you visit a country for a day and write a book about it, a week and write an article, a month and write a paragraph and if you are there for a year you don’t know what to write about it. So I should resist making sweeping statements and jumping to conclusions. My impression was that Blantyre (the economic capital of Malawi, I was told) is a poor city. Very poor. I know that poverty is everywhere and that SA has its fair share. But the kids I saw just had poverty written on their faces. Maybe it was the mood I was in. They seemed happy enough. They just looked poverty stricken.

Leaving was interesting. The SAA flight only comes twice a week – Wednesday and Saturday – and I was booked to fly out at 1.30 pm on the Saturday. My friends advised me that there was little point in getting there more than 90 minutes before it left, and even 60 minutes would probably be fine. It is a 30 minute drive from the CBD to the airport, so I arranged to be collected at 12. Everything would probably have been fine if we hadn’t got stuck behind a wedding procession. There were four cars with the bridal one somewhere in the middle. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was that the two rearmost cars’ drivers were taking it on themselves to ensure that no one passed the cavalcade by periodically driving on the wrong side of the road in the face of oncoming traffic and then violently swerving back into line at the last moment. I asked Dave what was going on – he said they were protecting the bride’s honour and this was a common practice. The result was that I arrived with something under 60 minutes until take off and joined the back of the queue. Twenty minutes later I was still standing in the crowded, hot, humid check in room. I finally got checked in about 5 minutes before boarding but still had to go through passport and customs control. The latter's official asked me whether I had any foreign currency. As it was I had quite a lot since, as I mentioned, I had been told there was an exit tax of $30 and I had therefore drawn MAK 10000 (about 60$) to be on the safe side. I had given some of it to Dave as a tip but I still had most of it since, as it turned out, there was no exit tax – or rather it was included in the e-ticket. The man looked disapproving – I was only permitted to take MAK 3000 out of the country. I could see my fellow passengers starting to move toward the door. I said “I’ll buy something – anything – where is the shop”. He pointed at a kiosk. I ran in and asked where the T shirts were – they were hanging from the ceiling, all 2 of them. How much was the black one – the gold shirt with the logo for Malawi’s hottest periperi sauce on it? MAK 5000 I was told. R250! $35!! I saw the last few passengers leaving, thrust MAK 5000 in the direction of the grinning shop attendant, muttered something about her mother and made off with the most expensive (and probably one of the least attractive) T shirt I have ever bought. I made the plane. As we trundled down the runway , I laughed at myself. Seasoned traveller, my arse. Got taken for a good ride. As we climbed above the clouds and the temperature came down to something civilized, I got out my book and relaxed. Malawi - been there, done that! Or maybe Blantyre – been there, done that!