The-Accountant-Jul-Aug-2017

TRAVEL
A DELIGHTFUL LAKE
RETREAT IN THE WARM
HEART OF AFRICA
By Clive Mutiso, clivemutiso@gmail.com
Africa’s beautiful lakes have
never been properly promoted
as tourist destinations and
perhaps the most neglected
of them all is Lake Malawi, a
superb destination in the very heart of the
continent. Although the lake is bordered
by both Tanzania and Mozambique to the
East, the easiest way to reach it is from
the west, through the Malawian capital of
Lilongwe.
Readily accessible by air from Nairobi,
Lilongwe is one of smaller cities of Africa,
thrust into prominence in 1974 by the
decisionof Malawi’s founding president,
Hastings Kamuzu Banda, to defy history
and economics and move the country’s
capital by decree from Zomba in the
southern Shire Highlands. Since then,
Lilongwe has grown to a population
of more than a million people, and is
the largest urban centre in the country,
although Blantyre, which comes a close
second, is the major centre of finance,
commerce and industry, and is older than
Nairobi, Harare, or Johannesburg.
Lilongwe’s principal ethnic group
are the friendly Chewa people and one
of the most striking things about their
culture are the close similarities between
their language, Chechewa, and the
Kikamba language of Kenya, with much
of the vocabulary of one language being
replicated in the other, with the same
grammatical structure and intonation
of speech. For a Bantu speaker from any
part of Africa, Malawi is an easy place
to feel at home. Like any country in the
world, Malawi must have some rude or
unfriendly people, but it would take a
real effort to find even one of them. The
welcome starts at Kamuzu International
Airport and dominates the spirit of the
country.
Lilongwe is a well laid-out city,
with wide avenues and plenty of green
spaces. Although there is a wide choice
of accommodation to suit all pockets,
the Capital Hotel has been the best
value in the city for as long as anyone
can remember and, with its old-world
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