Day 0. Wed 9th August

The flight out

My previous trips to Africa have always involved a safari with Barefoot Safaris, followed by a couple of weeks doing this and that for Project African Wilderness either at Ken's home in Lilongwe, or at Mwabvi Wildlife Reserve down south in Malawi's Nsanje district, but this time I am all alone. No safari, no Ken (he is out on safari himself until the beginning of September), even Oscar Ntocha, the PAW employee hired by Ken and living down at Mwabvi, has been called away to drive for a Barefoot Safari.
The official reason for the trip is to be the Malawi half of a joint Malawi/UK education project in conjunction with the Groundwork Trust. Jon and Lorraine are the PAW representatives in charge of the UK side, and we had a meeting last night to finalise what I was supposed to be doing. The plan is to talk to children at the schools around Bangula (the nearest town to Mwabvi) about the project, and about their lives in general, and answer any questions about the UK, and then to get them to draw some pictures on the general theme of wildlife and the environment. Simultaneously Jon and Lorraine will be doing the same thing in the UK, and then we will swap the materials over the internet, so that each group of kids can look at what the other group have done. Then finally I will bring the pictures back to the UK and they will be used to make a calendar or booklet that can be sold as merchandise for PAW. It's an interesting idea in theory, but I am foreseeing several pitfalls. For one thing, it is currently school holidays, both in England and Malawi. Also, I'm not sure whether internet communications in Malawi will be up to the job. Still, it will be interesting, hopefully fun, and I will be able to renew some old contacts and make some new ones.
The trip is conveniently timed to coincide with the Lake Of Stars festival, a music festival on the banks of Lake Malawi that was started three years ago by some guys from Liverpool and in Malawi (the Malawi side is actually Harry, who runs Harry's Bar in Lilongwe, but I don't discover that until much later).
My new tent

Bearing in mind my accommodation last year, when I had nothing but a mosquito net, I decided to splash out on a new tent and sleeping bag for the adventure. At under 1kg the Terra Nova Argon 800 is the second lightest tent on the market, and the tent and sleeping bag together take up less room than my old sleeping bag on its own. I may or may not need it at Mwabvi (there's always the Aska Motel), but I shall certainly need it at the Lake Of Stars festival, as rooms at the Chinteche Inn cost around $120 per night, and anyway have been all booked up since about March.
It's a peculiar design, with the door at the side, and is extremely small (about coffin sized), but I've practised putting it up and down in the back garden, and it seems fairly straightforward.

I have a 25kg weight limit, which I am rapidly approaching. Jon has given me a load of stuff for the education project, Gaynor has plied me with gifts for Ken including a bag of ground coffee (don't they grow that in Mzuzu?) and a book on the Atkins diet that she has promised to Max at Lengwe, plus I have to take my laptop. And I'm not camping without my air bed! Oh well, maybe I can just leave out the clothes!

The flight out is via Frankfurt and Johannesburg, rather than the usual Amsterdam, Nairobi, but it is actually quicker as the stops are much shorter (those 8 hour waits in Nairobi are depressing). Sadly I lose my swiss army knife to the zealous security guards at Manchester airport (I stupidly moved my toiletry bag to my day sack at the last minute, forgetting that that was where I'd stashed the knife). I meet two nice girls called Gemma and Donna who are also travelling to Malawi. They are heading for Blantyre so I recommend Doogles as the place to stay - I expect I'll see them there, everybody sees everybody at Doogles.
Apart from losing my knife everything goes smoothly - until I get to Lilongwe!

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