Lake of Stars

It turns out that music festivals at beach resorts are fairly ideal. What do you do in the morning? Take a swim, lounge on the beach and read, maybe play a game of chess on a giant outdoor board. And once the music kicks in there is a long evening of sitting and dancing in soft sand, Carlsberg Green or Malawi Gin and Tonic balanced nearby. Our car-mates for the trip, the previously mentioned Daniel (agronomist) and Finn (fiddler), along with Lucy (Daniel and Finn’s new roommate – an Australian who just happened to live in Currier House before graduating ’02 at Harvard and is here doing HIV/AIDS research for her Ph.D.) are lovely company. And it is fun to get out of the city and explore more of this beautiful country. Of course a play-by-play of the full 72 hours will bore you to tears, so I’ll stick to observations, themes and highlights like…

…ants. Rather than pay for a hotel room, we decide to camp at the festival. Overall this works out great. It’s a nice campground with decent facilities and our tent and homemade sheet-weight sleeping bag system is nicely functional. There’s just one minor, teensey-weensie problem…or rather hundreds of thousands of them. The campground is one giant ant pile! After a rough first night – lots of ant friends in the tent trying to get to our ripening bananas as well as thumping dance music from the festival until 4:30am – we do a massive and coordinated morning ant attack, stow the food in the car, and move the zippers to a more strategically placed closure position. Night two sees only a small infestation of ants that come in with our now-dry towels and with the help of our trusty headlamp and the Malawian version of Spare Change news, we manage to kill them off. Too bad we return home to a herd of the little guys in our kitchen!

Contrast is everywhere. We drive through the hot, dry Malawian bush for more than four hours to get to the Lake of Stars music festival in Mangochi. When we arrive, a thin strip of palm trees and more lush vegetation fed by the lake makes it feel like we could be on a tropical beach anywhere in the world. Walk outside the resort gates and you’re back to a land of fetid drainage pools and dry scrub. At $60US per ticket, the festival costs as much as our housekeeper makes in a month, meaning that only the wealthiest Malawians are able to attend. Just outside the gates there is a pop-up market filled with tchokies and food vendors selling chambo (local fish), grilled corn, boiled eggs, and roasted chicken. Small boys ask every mizungu for empty water bottles, and locals settle in on the public beach to listen to the music from across the fence.

And then there was the “old married people” factor. Most of the expats here seem to fall into an “middle aged with kids” or a “young and single/significant other is continents away” category. We’re clearly somewhere in the middle. At the festival, we showed our age by hitting the sack at midnight each evening without boozing heavily. Perhaps even more indicative, in the morning I am glad for feeling well-rested while our compatriots who stayed to the end of the live music at 3:30 blearily down cups of coffee in an attempt to wake up.

In the end, we’re home sun-tired and feeling a little gross after a weekend of greasy festival-vendor food, but glad we went to the trouble of securing tickets and a ride. Check out pictures of the journey here.