Likoma: The Island

Likoma is a beautiful island with around 6000 locals and two lodges, each with their own private beach. The staff at Mango Drift, both expat and Malawian were excellent and very friendly. They all made an effort to learn our names and made us feel very much at home.

We quickly settled into the slow pace of island life and past our time playing games, snorkelling and generally lolling around. Christmas day was very different than back home; the expats who ran the resort were South African and so had not heard of many of the usual British traditions. We had come armed with a Christmas pudding and a DIY cracker kit which we shared with the rest of the guests, bemusing and delighting in equal measure. Christmas dinner was local fish, served by candlelight on the beach. Just to make the experience completely surreal I was sat next the American ambassador to Malawi who had flown in for a couple of days holiday.

The resort had a PADI centre attached to it so on one of the days I went out diving, finally making use of the open water course I had done the previous year. Diving in the lake has a lot of plus points over the sea; because it’s fresh water you don’t need any weights and you don’t have to worry about breaking any coral, also because the fish are mostly found in the shallows you can dive to around five metres and spend much longer under water.

The South Africans may have very different approaches to Christmas day than us but when it comes to New Year ’s Eve they’re definitely on the same page! At 4pm they held a beer snorkel relay challenge where we were split into four teams and had to take it in turns to run into the lake, snorkel and dive to find sunken beers, bring them back to the beach and then down them as fast as possible! It was exhausting and vomit inducing but great fun all the same. Sadly as we came last we had the added pain of all downing vodka shots afterwards!

All in all Likoma was great fun and very relaxing if not fairly unconventional. We were all sorry to leave, especially as it meant getting back on that dreaded boat…

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjQcsMH4