Farewell to Malawi

We spent part of the last day in Tongole watching elephants coming to the river in front of our chalet, bathing and drinking. The young ones were very cute swimming in the river with only their trunks above water like periscopes. They were a good distance away for me to watch and enjoy. We also had a canoe down the crocodile river at sunset which was excellent.

 Not all roughing it, a bit of luxury


. The only guests were us and a couple from Argentina so largely had the place to ourselves. Poaching still continues in Malawi and one morning we heard shots close to the lodge and it took the rangers an hour to respond as they insisted on finishing their breakfast first. In collusion or afraid - anybody's guess.

From the wilderness area we headed to Makuzi beach for 2 nights.

It is a beautiful location in a bay with wooded hills around and little thatched umbrellas but we are really not beach people so decided, despite the 38 heat, to have a walk to some missionary graves. Many missionaries died of malaria mostly in their twenties, until the mission moved to Livingstonia. Swimming was a little tempting but belhazia is not so we avoided that too. We had a long chat to the manager, he had suffered malaria eight times in the four years he has been there, glad we have the pills.

We then headed north again and climbed to over 7000 feet and the Nyika plateau. The journey up to it was stunning but unfortunately for us the Land Rover was in 'limp home mode', which meant it had about 25% power at best, so it took ages, uphills were first gear in low box most of the time. It was a relay problem and Colin sorted it whilst there, well we thought he had.

The Nyika plateau is stunning, resembling the North Yorkshire moors around Bowes Moor on the A66 to the Lakes with the fells in the background but with pockets of thick woodland and boggy areas. It has the animals of Africa, zebra, warthog, serval, leopard, civit, eland, reedbuck, bushbuck and roan antelope but looking very incongruous in a European scenery. Apart from the animals there are over 400 bird species and 200 orchids (12 endemic to this region) which are just starting to bloom. It is superb.

We also had our own cook and chalet attendant so were completely looked after, a lovely log fire to come back to after the game drives and a 3 course dinner served to us. For some reason they thought it was my birthday and made a delicious chocolate cake.

Had a practise at fly fishing in one of the small dams and really enjoyed it. The only other visitor there was a young Norwegian who had been studying in Malawi and decided as he hadn't a car to explore the area he would walk across the hills to Livingstonia, a journey of 2 night canping on the way. He had expected only an armed guard as in Malawi you cannot walk in the wilderness without one. On the morning of his departure there were 6 people accompnying him, the armed guard with a fully automatic rifle M16 and the others acting as porters for the tents, the sleeping bags, the food, the water, the metal folding chairs and the shower !! It resembled Livingstone going off on one of his expeditions and if we hadn't been travelling 237 miles that day to the Tanzanian border we would have stayed to take photos.


The journey down from the plateau was fantastic, the scenery was breath-taking We descended almost 7000 feet and gained stunning views across Lake Malawi. The last two thousand feet is dealt with in little over two miles of hairpin bends, some strewn with broken down lorries that had failed to make the climb.


}