MALAWI.

Like treacle running down your chin, Malawi is sweet and languid. It's a country where you would be well suited to slip it down a gear or two and take up dawdling as a pastime. A place where there is always time to stop and chat to a stranger in the street (and how easy that is). A place where "one more for the road" begins to sound like a broken Jimmy Buffett track. One of your enduring memories from your travels through Malawi will be of those big, beaming smiles that meet you so often day to day, Malawians are friendly and love to chat and even more, love to share a joke.

And it's a beautiful landscape, exciting in its diversity, the world outside the window is a wonderful display. Golden sandy beaches next to cool, still waters dominates the tourists' mind, but it's also the tall grassed expanses of Elephant Marsh, the endless green rolling veld of Nyika National Park with it's frosty mornings or the dramatic sheer cliffs of Mt. Mulange towering above the order of tea estates that delights. The journeys along the nations' highways are rich experiences. From dusty bus stops beseiged by hawkers in wayward towns, to lush hillsides disected by blacktop and bursting with villages, banana groves and all manner of livestock scratching out an existence under coffee bush and yam. Traditional village life is everywhere, vibrant and noisy and all of it washed in a humid purple, blue haze that sits heavily on the horizon and fires at sunset  into something spectacular, something very much like the soil, orange and red. It's a
beautiful place, Malawi. I like it.

And you can do things here, loads of things; scuba dive, rockclimb, sea kayak, horseride, sail, fish, see fantastic live bands, visit a witchdoctor, abseil, help build a school, hike in the mountains, the list goes on and on. It's a wonderful place for a holiday for the adventurous but not so adventurous that you can't get to a place and be looked after, eat well and meet other travellers.

Malawi. It's cherry. Primo. Cooda my friend.