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Most of us can do silly voices - the whole Rory Bremner impersonation thing. My "wow'nd the wagg'ed wock, the wagg'ed wascal wan" works just fine. I get as far as 'wock' and everybody - well, my kinder friends, or at least the drunker ones - are already giggling. "Oh, yeah, Jonathan Woss," they gasp, "...excellent."

And you're probably the same. I bet your Tommy Cooper, your John Lennon or your Tony Blair take-off is 'excellent,' too. Everybody knows exactly who you're doing. But, in the African dawn, we just couldn't get the impersonation - or, more accurately, the 'im-animal-ation' - thing right. Gill put her coffee aside, threw her head back and gave vent to a wild gargling and retching sound. "It was a bit like that," she looked round at us all, defiantly, "though, maybe a bit deeper."

Actually, 'it' had been nothing at all like 'that.' I knew because I’d been woken the previous night, my first in Malawi, by the same sound Gill had heard near to her and Michael's cabin. Slipping out from under the mosquito net I’d walked out onto my veranda and stared into the surrounding darkness. We'd arrived at Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve earlier that day and I’d listened obediently to David Foot of Nyika Safaris, our host and our guide, as he explained camp rules. "Don't wander around after dark, and if you're going from here..." we were under the high thatched roof of the open dining 'room,' at the time, "...to your cabin in the dark then use your torch because elephants and buffalo will come up into the camp and you won't see them...not until it's too late."

So, I was awake but the night had fallen back to near silence. Insect noises. A rustle of leaves. My feet on the floorboards. Then a deep reverberation - not particularly loud, though - as if somebody was sawing their way through a plank of wood, right next to my cabin. And at breakfast, I was trying to recreate that sound. I tried for a deep, stop-start rumbling from my chest. David was unimpressed. "You almost sound like a lion, but lion's very unlikely here," he was tucking into his bacon and scrambled eggs, "Probably you heard a baboon, or an elephant. In fact, from the noise you're making, it's bloody difficult to know what you heard."

Once breakfasted we set off to walk along the shore of Lake Vwaza. Crispin the game scout cradled his M-16 rifle. Vasco the guide hefted a pair of binoculars. Though seven of us had come to Malawi to ride horses high up on Nyika Plateau, we were starting our trip on foot in the lowlands of the Vwaza reserve. This was our chance to see hippo, elephant, kudu and hundreds of bird species before heading up to the totally different fauna and landscape of the Nyika heights.

That first night, over drinks around the campfire, we had watched as a group of elephants had drifted past the camp in the dark. Totally silent and no more than the blackest of shapes in a blackness silhouetted against the less black waters of the lake, there was all the excitement of Africa in the elephants' ghostly movement. Now, in the daylight, we were coming across less mysterious signs of their passing. Balls of dung, like strawy footballs, in lines along the path and footprints, each no more than the faintest pressing of a few faint wrinkles into the dust as if a heavy but soft sack of grain had been plumped down for a moment.

In walking the bush with David, I soon realised that the elephant and other 'big' species were merely the most visible part of Africa - the 'LARGE PRINT' version of the smaller fauna. So, whereas even Alan, a keen ornithologist, dismissed whole drab and sparrowlike species as LBJs - 'little brown jobs,' David's genius lay in firing up our interest in even the smallest of creatures with his enthusiasm and knowledge. "My favourite bird ever on earth...," he'd explode as his Zeiss's caught some scrap of feathery rareness trying to sneak past without being spotted, "...did you see it? Look, in there." All of us - Diana, Gonda, Jeanne, Alan, Michael, Gill and I - would swing round to stare into the indicated tangle of leaves and twigs and then would suddenly feel the thrill of spotting the jeweller's colours of an orange breasted bushshrike, or a plum coloured starling. Or even an LBF.

Not that the bigger mammals lost their attraction, though. As we stepped from the bush back into the camp after that first morning's walk, Vasco suddenly bent over, looked around, stooped again and then beckoned us over "Here! Lion prints. Two of them, last night - they stopped at the back of the cabins." Gill and I caught each others eyes, looked across at David and immediately Bremner-ed deep, coughing gargles at him.

On our last day in the Vwaza we went to an afternoon of song and dance in the local community of Kapyolambaui. Women in bright wrap-around chitenjas hymned a welcome to us, while a local spirit dancer - a red-eyed, Jagger-esque strutter in a head-dress of exotic feathers - kicked and pouted his way to the sound of thrumming drums. Arriving back to the calm of camp we set off in the jeep for an evening game spotting drive, and our second pachyderm moment. Driving around a corner we were, suddenly, unexpectedly, amongst elephant. Seven of them. Females and young.

The largest cow was a tetchy and ample-proportioned beast with a down-turned tusk, and, it would seem, a dislike of jeeps disturbing her evening browse. Or, quite possibly, just a dislike of everything. She was thrashing a bunch of grass across her knee to knock the earth off it, just as David stopped the jeep. She slowly put her foot to the ground. I could clearly see the elephant's expression. Pure Lady Bracknell in 'The Importance of Being Ernest.' "A jeep!" she trumpeted, "a JEeee'eeeEEP!" and trundled into a stately but horrifyingly swift trot towards us, trunk raised like a truncheon and ears flapping. For some reason images of sardine cans and Swiss Army knives filled my mind.

Then, less than a baboon's leap away from us, the elephant stopped dead. Giving us a last 'look,' she flounced round and stalked off with an air of contented bad temper as if she was a narky woman who'd just successfully argued a cash refund on a faulty kettle she'd returned to a department store. Realising that I’d been far more worried than seemed to have been necessary I tried sounding as if elephants ran at me every day. "For a mock charge," I gasped at David, "that seemed pretty half-hearted." David looked at me as if he'd finally established that I really was an idiot. "No, no," his voice was steady, "for a mock charge that was very full-hearted." From everybody else there was stunned silence as we watched as the group of elephants, peaceful now, browsed their way on through the trees and off into the dusk.

The climb up to the Nyika Plateau, the next morning, was an ascension to another world. As the jeep ground its way up the red dirt track we left behind the heat and the tangled bush of the lowlands. Climbing higher the last of the villages dropped away behind us. Still climbing, the brachystegia woodland thinned around us, from a thick, matted gloom to a mere scribble of trees and then faded away altogether. At nearly 2,000 metres altitude the grasslands of the plateau rolled on before us until they dropped off into Zambia.

It's popular to compare the Nyika highlands to Scotland's heights. Or to Exmoor. Or to the South Downs. And there are bits like all of them. Benign and curvaceous landscapes fuzzed by bracken, verdant undulating hills, or slopes of golden grasses running to the horizon. But they're like Europe's prehistoric landscape, as it was before the coming of mankind. Up on the plateau we were entering a primeval country, almost untouched by humans, seemingly floating high above and separate from the rest of Africa.

Untouched by humans? Really? Well, almost. There are a few rock paintings dating from hunter-gatherers living on the plateau some 3,000 years ago. Later a few Bantu tribesmen dared the heights - nyika means 'wilderness' - to smelt iron and hunt game. For a short period clans of the Phoka tribe even established small villages on the very edge of the plateau to escape the rampaging Ngoni peoples below. And in the late 1940s, the British planted a pine forest at Chelinda, whilst in the following decades a campsite, a scatter of cabins and, most recently, a luxury lodge were built in the shadows of these trees. And that, bar the burnings of poachers' fires and a couple of dirt tracks etched across the plateau's flatter stretches, is pretty much all that humans have ever done to the Nyika.

With most of the plateau's 3,000 square kilometres only accessible to travellers on foot or hoof, David Foot bought his first horses up onto the plateau in 1993 to run camping safaris. Then, seven years later he and his wife, Robyn, took over the running of the newly built Chelinda Lodge. We pulled up at the lodge just in time for lunch. To merely produce a sardine sandwich up on the Nyika, where the nearest shops are many, many hours of off-road driving away, requires a significant amount of forward planning and a fair bit of skill in the kitchen. But Robyn and her staff had produced a high-piled buffet table. It was hard to imagine greater comfort in a remoter place. But the food, the wines, the luxury of our cabins with their log fires, comfy armchairs and huge beds only made the next morning's early start harder.

So we were already running late when we arrived at the stables. Drew Williams, who'd spent 12 years in the Household Cavalry before coming out to the Nyika, allocated us horses with a practised eye. Robert and Emanuel, the local grooms, tightened girths and packed saddlebags. We mounted up and David, in a battered, gap-crowned Akubra hat, took the lead. I was riding Phinga Nvula - 'rainbow' - one of a bunch of well-bred horses that had run wild on a Zimbabwe farm until the whole mob had been brought up to the Nyika by David and broken to the saddle. Phinga retained plenty of independence from her years of freedom, making her an effortless ride. Specifically, she wasn't about to fall into holes hidden under the bracken, wander into a bog or merely trip over her own legs, and so I could give her her head, relax and look across the landscape.

A landscape that gave me a strange feeling. Because I was finding it hard to come to terms with the untouched naturalness of the Nyika. My mind kept trying to see abandoned fields in the Nyika's plains, Stonehenges in its rocks and overgrown orchards in the scrubland. It was one of the most human-free worlds I’d ever experienced. Even the paths we were following had been laid down, not by generations of jogging bipeds but, by the movement of eland, duiker, bushbuck and zebras. "As well as by elephant now," David pointed out, "since a herd moved up onto the plateau a few years back."

It was late in the afternoon when we came down into the camp at Lutete. A row of large, cream canvas tents - a kitchen, a mess marquee and five 'bedrooms' - overlooked a small yellow grassed valley. "It's just like a village fete," Michael announced as we rode the horses to a rope corral, " though without the bouncy castle." A village fete wouldn't have had camp beds with sheets and blankets though, nor, as we found late that night, hot-water bottles. But a fete might conceivably have had the same range of cakes that Joe, the miracle-working camp cook, had conjured up from his wood fire, and laid out on a table. Right next to the Jamesons whiskey, Malawi gin and cooled beer.

As the sun set and the evening chilled we gathered around the log fire with drinks, whilst one by one people slipped off to shower in hot water tumbling from a Heath-Robinson bucket and sprinkler system behind a screen. After dinner talk was a relaxed chewing over the day's ride. Diana was enthralled by the landscape; "I've ridden in Kazakhstan, Finland, South Africa, Mongolia..." the list went on, "....but there's nothing to compare to the scenery here." Alan was singing the praises of his horse Emma; "I couldn't believe her stamina - twenty miles and then a mile gallop." Gill was bullying us to bring the 'bird list' up to date.

The following days of riding drifted away from clock time and, rather, were measured out in stops for Thermos tea, and taking our 'sundowners' around the fire at the new campsites. Or marked by an explosion of blue monkeys through the trees of a small valley, or a long gallop above the western escarpment where the Nyika dropped straight down into Zambia and the smoke from fires far below poured upwards like airy waterfalls. Or counted off in swimming and climbing through the tumbling waters of the Chisanga Gorge. And, always, the horses allowed us to get closer to wildlife than we could have done on foot. So, we drifted close to herds of Crawshay's zebra, and rode past more than a hundred grazing eland, and stood imobile as a group of the rare and nervous roan antelope gave into their curiosity and approached us.

Robert and Emanuel, the two locals, had only seen horses first when they'd started working for David, but had taken to riding with a natural feel for animals and all the enthusiasm of chaps who didn't have to walk around quite so much anymore. In this, they and David and us, were fulfilling a dream that Laurens Van Der Post recounted in his 1949 account Nyika exploration, Venture to the Interior. Unsettled by primeval 'Englishness' of the landscape, he dreamt himself mounted on a black horse in a field of irises and setting off 'at a fast thundering pace across the purple folds of the Nyika' And he added, 'I seemed as content as it is possible to be.'

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