I met Mike after two long-haul flights and before my first proper meal of the day, a difficult interval for an introduction. After touching down at Chileka International in Blantyre, the other passengers and I had politely been asked to wait for our pick-ups outside, as the airport was closing for the day. Mike approached me as I rested on the steps and the staff began locking the front doors with bicycle chains. ‘Mwachoma bwanji, friend!’ He shouted ‘good evening’ in Chichewa with the benevolent confidence of a statement, not a question. He wore Crayola-yellow chinos with an Obama 2008 presidential campaign T-shirt, exposing neat patches of hair under his arms. Welcoming me with several handshakes, high-fives and embraces, he let out a lively chuckle as he spotted the open suitcase of a fellow traveller, exposing a stash of comforts from the UK, including a stockpile of Twinings Tea. ‘Ah, my friend! If you have brought this tea for a taste of home, then this is your home!’ Mike chucked my rucksack into his van and spent the two hour journey to my accommodation pointing out the endless tea plantations stretching across the landscape, which was also littered with the odd tobacco estate and Carlsberg brewery here and there. When we reached the Kara O'Mula Country Lodge at the foot of Mount Mulanje it was dark, but Mike promised me that the sights tomorrow would be striking. And he wasn’t wrong – starting with his outfit: Mike arrived after breakfast wearing a Ferrari red Cuban collar shirt, adorned with rainbow-coloured love-hearts, each featuring a smiling former president Bingu wa Mutharika. ‘You like?’ Mike laughed, ‘Yes, I’m the best dressed man in Africa!’ The local market he took me to that day was even more chaotic than his shirt. I followed Mike as we shuffled between jittery goats and bicycles and brushed past schoolgirls in their starchy teal pinafores. We strolled behind a woman carrying a sisal basket of mangoes on her head, and I saw the twitch of her baby flexing his legs under her wrapped Chitenge. Nobody seemed to mind the rambunctious soundtrack of the market: boomboxes yards apart featuring everything from Dolly Parton to 2Baba trying to out-sing each other. Back in the quiet of the van cruising along the Robert Mugabe Highway, I inquired if Mike’s partiality for loudness extended beyond his taste in fashion. ‘Me?’ He smiled. ‘Where I grew up, the loudest thing we ever heard was thunder. It took me a while to even get used to church bells…’ The busy days and Mike’s busy outfits came and went; for a dip at the dazzling Likhubula Falls he sported a ‘Keep Austin Weird’ tie-dye T-Shirt, and for church on Sunday he donned a snazzy dinner jacket with a patriotic black, red and green necktie. On my final evening, Mike arrived to my hotel for a moon-watching party in his most understated look yet, a mauve shirt. The sun rented a space low beneath the marshmallowy clouds, just above a horizon of eucalyptus trees from which vervet monkeys spotted my camera and posed accordingly. With a bellyful of nsima and chambo served with a pumpkin and cassava leaves relish (a scrumptious fish dish I was forbidden to leave without tasting), Mike promised the icing on the cake would not only be the homemade banana Chigumu cake dessert, but the surprise that was to come. He headed to the car park, giving me a moment to listen to the tiny darting lizard feet under my chair, and appreciate the moon’s unwillingness to be photographed. Mike reappeared grinning with pride, wearing a parakeet green sports jersey of some kind. ‘My friend, I told you I’m the best dressed man in Africa!’ On closer inspection, the crest revealed it was a GAA football shirt for Ballinora club, a tiny rural townland in Cork I had never heard of and had to look up once home in Ireland. But the gesture was remarkable: I didn’t ask how or where he got it, we just cheered with our Fanta Pineapples and laughed the night away, both so inordinately thrilled with a garment, as foreign to me as it was to him.