Barrio Malawi - Malawi Travel Guides

Africa's Golden Pond

jon — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 06:35:02 -0400

"Africa's Golden Pond"... That's what the Guardian calls lake Malawi in their latest travel feature.

The article highlights just how special the geography of Malawi really is. The author somehow managed to find accomodation for $100-$200 USD per night, but believe me, you can find paradise on the shores of lake malawi for about $15 USD per night.

Visitors who want to come see what we mean are all "most welcome here".

Gmail over Low Bandwidth Connections

jon — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:11:09 -0400

I have noticed that the Gmail folks have made improvements to their web interface for people connecting over low bandwidth or unreliable internet connections. They now display a message that says something like: "your connection is too slow, click HERE to view your mail using standard HTML view." This is great, but sometimes still, its not enough.

Here are two tricks we use to access Gmail from Malawi:

Get Mozilla Thunderbrid and use Gmail's POP capabilities to access your mail.
Also instead of going to http://www.gmail.com try going to http://m.gmail.com. This is the mobile version of gmail intended for cellphones and PDAs. It is very simple interface without unnecessary pictures or text and also works great on your desktop when you are on an unreliable internet connections

Webmail suggestions for Malawi

jon — Wed, 17 May 2006 02:35:19 -0400

Just before moving to Malawi Marissa and I changed our email adresses from YahooMail to Google's Gmail accounts. I was pulled away from yahoo buy some great new features that Gmail offered and I was worried that Yahoo's beta interface for webmail would not work well on older computers in Malawi.

Since arriving in Malawi however, I have found that my Gmail account is not suited for connecting over the overworked internet connections currently in place here in Malawi. In fact I am almost never able to access my email via Gmail's web interface (so we use POP access instead) during the daytime peak hours for internet usage. At night, when few other users are online, Gmail works fine.

Most time when I try to login to gmail from Malawi I see the following message:
"Loading...

This seems to be taking longer than usual. Your session may have been interupted. If your account doesn't appear in the next few seconds refresh this page in your browser."

Refreshing never helps. I have submitted the problem to Google tech support, and the say that they are looking into it.

Interestingly, YahooMail web interface seems to be more reliable than Gmail during busy times. More often than not, I am able to access my yahoo mail even if the internet connection is being used heavily or is working very slowly. It seems the best bet for those traveling to places in the world where internet connectivity is spotty (look mom, I am speaking British!!), is to obtain two separate email accounts with different providers. Its hard to determine which one will work best until you are in country, but at least this way you will have two shots at reading your email.

Someday, somewhere, someone traveling to Malawi may find this information helpful.

Buying a car in Malawi

jon — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 06:32:25 -0500

We bought a car today! And so we say good buy to the mini-busses for a while. Buying a car in Malawi was an entertaining experiment and a wonderful insight into the economy here. In all the process took about one week from when agreed to buy the car. Everything here is done in cash, so it made things the transaction a little tricky. We were able to wire money from the US to our recently opened Malawian bank account. It took about 4 days for the transaction to take. We then wrote a check to ourselves for an amount equal to about a foot and a half tall stack of bills in Malawian Kwacha. The largest bill in Malawi is 500 Kwacha (this is about $4.50). If you can imagine buying a car with a stack of five-dollar bills you will quickly be able to visualize the chunk of change we were carrying with us. So we loaded our chunk into a backpack and a friend of ours drove us to the office of the owner of the car. The office is in a rougher end of Lilongwe, a place where you really wouldnt even want to walk around with as little as $10 in your pocket (hey, we really needed wheels). There we traded the stack for the car you see here... a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Here are somethings to keep in mind the next time you want to buy a car in Malawi:

If you are speaking about a car with someone on the phone, be sure to ask if the car is a “runner”. Cars in Malawi come as “runners” and “non-runners”. Just because a car is for sale, do not expect it to run or have an engine.
When reading classified adds for cars, the term “lady driven” essentially means lightly driven. Chances are the car you are looking at was driven only on paved roads.
Check that the registration tags are all in place and up to date. There should be three or four of them from the various auto agencies of Malawi on the left hand side of the windshield. Nearly every road block in Malawi checks your tags.
Verify with your employer whether you are eligible for “duty free status” or not. Basically there are two car markets in Malawi the duty paid and duty unpaid markets. No one seems to really know what the law is, but some employees of certain organizations receive duty free status for their time in Malawi. Employees with duty free status are able to buy cars that do not have their duty paid. Duty in Malawi is about 100% of the value of the car, so you do not want to discover that you need to pay duty after you buy one. If you have duty free status, the cars you will be able to buy will be significantly cheaper, but might be harder to sell because you need sell to another person with duty free status. Duty paid cars are more expensive, but can be sold to a wider range of people.
Cars in Malawi need to have strips of red and white reflective tape on the bumpers. Red on the back and white on the front. They check for this frequently at the countries many road blocks.
Cars in Malawi are also required to carry two reflective triangles with them at all times, make sure the car you are buying comes with them. I have already been asked twice to show my triangles at multiple road blocks.
Check that the car has a good spare tire and a jack. Often if the owner has taken the car to a mechanic the jack “disappears”. The owner might now even be aware of this.
Check exchange rates carefully for your method of payment. Differences of just one or two kwacha can make a huge difference in your price. Wiring in dollars to and from foreign bank accounts might be a good option. When buying from a local, be prepared to pay cash. Bring a large backpack and an even larger bodyguard with you to carry your foot and a half tall stack of cash from the bank to the sale.