Lonely Planet Malawi
Travel Report
Lilongwe to Livingstonia
The MV Ilala
Zomba & Blantyre
Trekking on Mt Mulanje
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Travel Notes
Zomba
Blantyre
Photos
Livingstonia
Lake Malawi & the MV Ilala
Blantyre & Mt Mulanje
Soundbites
Livingstonia Choir 1
Livingstonia Choir 2
Lake Malawi at Night
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Travel notes from Zomba
Hi Everyone,
I didn't spend long in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. It is the smallest capital city I have visited so far on this trip and at times you would never have guessed that you were in a city. It is not very built up, with a lot of empty space and trees between the buildings. The commercial district in the Old Town is no more than an intersection. I met up with Graeme at a hostel in the city as we had arranged after he dropped me off at Chipata a few days earlier. The next day we drove north out of the city towards the Viphya Plateau; this was the mountain route as the road along the lakeshore was impassable because of a washed out bridge. At Kasangu we picked up a couple of Australian girls hitchhiking who we had met the night before in Lilongwe. The four of us spent the next three days travelling together to the northern shores of Lake Malawi.
The first night we camped at the Kasito Lodge on the Viphya Plateau surrounded by pine forests. The lodge was beautiful and we spent our evening sitting on rocking chairs around a log fire in the lounge. I felt that I was staying in an alpine lodge and kept expecting to see a ski slope outside the lodge; it didn't feel as though we were in the heart of Africa. From Viphya we continued north and down the escarpment of the Great Rift Valley (again!) and camped for the night on the shores of Lake Malawi by the town of Chitimba. It was a full moon over the lake and we sat on the beach for the night around a fire toasting marshmallows with a Dutch couple, the only other people camping at this beach.
We drove up to Livingstonia, an old missionary town 25km back up the Great Rift Valley escarpment. The road was the most challenging I have travelled along so far on this trip and would be impassable without a four-wheel drive. Livingstonia is a fascinating little town, almost like a small part of Scotland transplanted to the centre of Africa, with red brick houses, clock tower, village shop and a large church with a stain glass window of Livingstone, a gift to the church in 1952. It was a very quiet and restful place with hardly any traffic and the friendliest people I have met so far on this trip. We stayed the weekend and on Sunday went to church, just for the experience; I recorded a couple of sound bites of the African choir that I'll upload onto the website when I get home. I said goodbye to the Australian girls and Graeme who dropped me off at the port in Chilumba from where I planned to take the ship, the MV Ilala, down the length of Lake Malawi to Monkey Bay. I had arranged to meet Graeme again in Monkey Bay to drive south to do some trekking on Mt Mulanje.
I boarded the Ilala at 20.00 on Sunday evening; she departed at 02.00 while I was asleep in my cabin. The Ilala is a newer ship than the Liemba that I had previously sailed on down Lake Tanganyika; she was built by Yarrow in Glasgow and reassembled near Monkey Bay and launched in June 1951. She is the second ship to bear this name on the lake. The original SS Ilala was operated by the Livingstonia Mission and began passenger services in October 1875 and continued until 1922 when she reportedly sunk. The new Ilala is a replacement for the Viphya that tragically sunk on the lake during a storm in 1947 on her fourth voyage with the loss of 145 lives; this was the worst shipping disaster on the lake.
On route we stopped for eight hours at Nkata Bay where I went ashore to explore the town. All the local lads were trying to sell me some Malawian Gold (the national Crop!), but instead I tried to score a couple of ounces of Blue Stilton. There is not much of a black market in cheese here, in fact there's hardly any cheese at all; after a couple of hours the dealers realised that Blue Stilton was in fact cheese and not an exotic herb and left me in peace. On the way down the lake we crossed over to the island of Likoma and then called in at two ports in Mozambique before crossing back to Malawi. It was a very relaxing voyage watching the lake slip by up until the last day; it was very rough and suddenly I could understand how a ship could sink on this lake during a storm. We were sailing under blue skies but the ship was being tossed about like a child's toy. I was finally seasick, if you can get seasick on a lake, and threw up over the deck. Unfortunately the wind blew my vomit back in to the economy class deck below me splattering a few locals; revenge at last for the kid who vomited over me on a bus in Tanzania.
Finally, an hour early at 13.00 on Wednesday, we arrived in Monkey Bay where I waited for Graeme to drive through and pick me up. We drove down the next day to Zomba and camped for a night on the Zomba Plateau. It is a very picturesque plateau with pine plantations, patches of indigenous forest, grassland, rocky mountain peaks, lakes and waterfalls. The whole plateau felt very alpine in contrast to the deforested plains below. The contrasts in Malawi are never ending for a country so small. One minute you can be relaxing on a hot, sandy beach on the lake shore, the next you could drive up into the cool, forested mountains. There are some good forestry tracks around the plateau and we drove and walked to the peaks, the highest being Malumbe Peak (2085m), and the viewpoints looking out over the escarpment and across the plains and lake below.
That night on the plateau something bit my foot. By the following morning my toe that had taken the bite swelled up nastily and I could hardly walk anymore. I have had it checked out by a doctor to make sure it wasn't anything dangerous that bit me; it wasn't, probably just an angry spider. I'll now be spending some time in Blantyre, 70km to the south, waiting for the swelling and pain to go from my toe before I can go trekking on Mt Mulanje.
Regards,
Geoff.
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