Ekari Writes

Happy Easter from The Inside! A lot of firsts in the world including the first Easter in most of our lifetimes where the whole world will be spending it indoors. Rather than get massive FOMO about not being able to go anywhere, I would like to spend the time practicing my descriptions as I have done in previous posts .  This time I will be describing the view from Zomba mountain, the key tourist feature of the former capital of Malawi. Zomba has protected forestry, which gives it a feel that's closer to nature than the other towns in Malawi. The trees are allowed to grow to massive breadth and height, giving a feel that humans are very much visitors in a natural world.  When you get to the top of the mountain, there is quite a sight to behold. A View from the Top of the World The first thing you notice is how the landscape suddenly unfurls like the most high-definition live Google map image you have ever seen. Emperor's View is the very seat of the world - ...

A couple of weeks ago, I did an exercise to practice my description writing skills in a post called  Practice Writing Descriptions for Fiction . In that post, I described a beach at Nkhata Bay, and today  I will be describing an urban setting in this post, specifically the city of Blantyre from an aerial perspective... From Splash Restaurant at Amaryllis Hotel   Seated on the brightly coloured cozy deck furniture, there is a sense of serenity, like you're floating above the city. There's at least a 200 degree view of the heart of the banking district, all the multiple storied buildings are in this span of land. You can see how the city is in a wide bowl, whose edges are the mountains and hills on the horizon. They sit like silent guardians surrounding the citizens. Grey clouds roll over lazily, refusing to commit to either raining or not. The balcony itself has a pool which wraps itself around the corner of the building. If you take a dip in the pool, it would f...

The rolling hills of the African Rift Valley Whenever I travel around Malawi I see these breathtaking landscapes which spark my imagination. The rainy season is my favourite time, since I adore the natural blues and greens - you see plenty of those when you're travelling as far up as the northern region.  I took the opportunity to work on the areas of my fiction writing I have always wanted to improve: descriptions. I get excited writing plots, characters, and action, but what suffers in the end is my settings and descriptions that immerse readers into the place the character is located. So why not use real settings for practice? So here goes: Nkhata Bay, Northern Region ~~~ Nkhata Bay had its own energy; unlike Mzuzu, Lilongwe, or Blantyre, something about the northern lakeside town gave the feeling of a holiday frozen in time. Although the season was not quite right for a holiday, with overcast skies that oscillated between pouring rains and breaks of b...