22. Whistle stop through Malawi

It was such a pleasure to enter Malawi at the Milanji border to find miles and miles of beautifully manicured tea plantations. The fresh greenness was such a contrast from the impoverished subsistence farmers in Moz. It is difficult to imagine that in the ‘60s there were more tea plantations on the Moz side. It just shows what havoc 20 years of civil war can cause.

We camped a little way up the slopes of the magnificent Mulanje mountain at an old tea planters colonial house, now a small hotel and campground, unfortunately we couldn’t get the LRs onto the terraced campsite so we had to sleep in the nearby, empty car park. We walked the next morning up to a waterfall, entertained en route by Samango monkeys athletically swinging through the huge trees of this small forest reserve, which is all that remains of the indigenous forests since the tea plantations have swallowed up the rest. We sneaked onto the edge of the plantation and played at being tea pickers for a little while, and managed to gather up enough fresh green tips for a weak cup of an approximation of green tea. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and we now wonder if we should have spent more time exploring the mountain tracks at this cool altitude.

An overnight stop at a mission in Blantyre which has seen busier days, in its heyday the red dust shaded permanent marquee held 5000 worshippers but we shared the whole place with manager Laurie and his mother in law. Here we had some welding done at a local workshop, the final job left unfinished due to persistent power cuts.

Surprisingly no one was killed by the welding machine – at least not whilst we were there!

Liwonde game reserve was small but interesting, the vociferous yet very helpful ranger at the gate   eventually took money from us, we almost had to sign our lives away in triplicate in order to get into the park. We saw huge herds of water buck on the banks of the Shire River which runs out of Lake Malawi to the Zambezi, as well as sable antelope, small groups of impala, bushbuck and kudu. The elephant had visited the camp the previous night , we had to content ourselves with watching 2 herds of about 30 eles barring our way as they demolished a baobab tree close to the road as we left a couple of days later. The birdlife was prolific, we enjoyed lazing about in the camp with binoculars and Roberts (bird book) trying to identify new (to us) species.

Another overnighter at Cape Maclear at the bottom of the beautiful Lake Malawi where we had the beach to ourselves, our only company were the ubiquitous monkeys and  monitor lizards one of which we found dead in the bottom of the rubbish bin. It was very hot and humid, the coolness of the lake gently lapping against the sandy shore looked so inviting, but  since there is a possibility of contracting bilharzia from the water we declined and just stewed on the shore.

 Then up to Lilongwe for running repairs via the Mua Mission that we had visited in 2010, we learned more about the hundreds of Malawian ritual masks that are displayed in the museum there and again marvelled at the skill of the carvers. We ate delicious nsima, meat with a sauce and a green veg like spinach, which we ate with our fingers, Malawi style.

We stayed in Lilongwe for 3 days to restock, buy spares etc then fit them back at the campsite about 10 kms out of town. We managed to talk our way out of a speeding fine, this resulted in the various trips in and out of town taking ages as we maintained the limits of 50kms per hour.

Zambia next.