Morning of Failure, Lake of Stars

Last weekend the gang went to Malawi's big music festival, Lake of Stars. We planned to leave on Friday morning at 10 but woke to find that one of our two cars didn't start. Our battery wouldn't charge, so after getting the car started with another battery we drove the Rav4 around for a bit to charge the problematic battery. We packed up the cars and drove off to get some last minute supplies. Ice proved to be elusive. This should have been foreseen as it was the weekend of a huge music festival and the day after a public holiday. After about a half an hour of looking we found some. After proudly emptying the ice into our cooler packed with festival beverages and ready to hit the road the Rav4 once again wouldn't start. After performing the same battery switcharoo trick and getting permission to take the guest house car in place of the Rav4 (being one UNC Project's cars, it's not supposed to go out of Lilongwe) we returned home to find that it wasn't there. It was about 2 PM when the guest house car was back in our possession and packed. Off we went, with Charles, Becca, Karissa and I in the guest house car. The weather was perfect, Os Mutantes was blasting, and we were about 20 km out of Lilongwe when we passed a truck pulled over to the side of the road. As we neared the end of the truck a goat ran out into the road and became quickly acquainted with the grill of our car at about 80 km/hr. This was a pretty fat goat and it ended up taking out the radiator and fan and bending the inner frame enough to prevent the hood from latching. Needless to say we all made it to the festival by Friday evening, and we didn't even have to pay for the goat.

I've never been to Bonaroo or Burning Man or what have you, but I was expecting a multi-day, beach front music festival to be pretty rowdy. The crowd was actually pretty tame. I could have just missed some golden moments but I saw very few drunken shenanigans. It helped that the camping grounds were a good half mile from the music stages. On the other hand it was in the 90s the entire weekend, so it felt like a 2-3,000 person group activity to beat hangovers in the blazing sun each morning.

I finally got to try Chibuku Shake Shake (see picture above), a traditional Malawian drink made from fermented maize that has all the desirable qualities of an alcoholic beverage: warm, chunky and served in a cardboard carton. Now I have been known to be somewhat of a connoisseur of nasty dranks (such as whiskey + ensure or maddog 20/20) but I could barely get through more than half of this stuff. It pretty much tastes like paper mache water, chunks and all. I can see why it's reccomended retail price is Mk 27, about 15 cents.

The music at the festival was certainly a mixed bag. Way way too much crappy pop/techno artists and DJs from the UK, but there was some great Malawian music I hadn't heard before, nor will probably get a chance to see live again. Edgar & Davis were particularly good.

How was your weekend?