Wanna see the real city? Hang with a local.
My friend Michelle and I were exchanging dollars for stacks of kwacha in a black market currency swap in the back of a van, after dark, in a parking lot behind a building that was closed for the night.
We’d just landed in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, after about 35 hours of travel from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. to Rome to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) to the Congo to Malawi. I could barely keep my head up, but Michelle was hyper alert (that Girl Scout mom training at the ready).
We’d met the driver of the van, Luzu (in the photo above), a few hours earlier at the airport. But he wasn’t a total stranger — he’d been a trusted and dedicated guide and friend for a doctor who spends a few months in Malawi every year. He’d been assigned to pick us up and make sure we could get some cash before heading out of the city to join said doctor for our two-week tour of humanitarian projects throughout the country.
Michelle and I look back on that late-night van scenario with a “what were we thinking?” head slap — it’s the kind of scene from a campy horror movie where the whole audience is screaming at the woman who is stupidly walking toward the mysterious noise in the cellar.
But we were in great hands. Luzu knew this transaction was actually safer and cheaper than going to an ATM at that hour. He knew where to go. He knew who would give us a fair deal.
Locals Know
“Hang with locals” is something that’s easier said than done, right? That’s great advice if you know someone in town (or know someone who knows someone in town). But what if you don’t?
Check out this brilliant new service that matches travelers with locals to show them around: Lokafy
The founder describes it this way:
“I realize that it is the people that made the difference between a place that I simply passed through and one that stayed imprinted in my memory. It was people that brought the place to life.”
I found Lokafy by way of this article on CityLab (my favorite source of news): In Search of ‘Authentic’ City Tour Guides
I haven’t yet used the service, but I love the idea.
It’s common in many countries for locals to proactively offer their services as guides as soon as you arrive in town. They know how to spot the tourists, and they’ve built an entire informal industry around it. I always loved it — I’m happy to pay someone to show me neighborhoods I never would have found (or been brave enough to venture into) on my own.
Lokafy sounds like a way to bring that kind of ad hoc tour guide match-making into places where you don’t typically have people offering up their local expertise as soon as you get off the train (like, say, New York City).
As for my time in Malawi, it would not have been the same without Luzu as friend, driver, guide, explainer of all things mysterious to this westerner (like mice-on-a-stick). Some of my favorite moments were sitting in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield, with Luzu on my right telling me stories about his country.
