Africa & Middle East > Malawi > Nyika National Park > Livingstonia > Tribal > Articles > Livingstonia Walk

I’m never quite sure about guns. Good things? Bad things? I suppose, really, that it all depends on where you are in relation to where the particular gun whose moral value you’re debating at the time is actually pointing. If it’s a pistol with its barrel halfway up your left nostril, whilst some hoodlum removes your wallet, your Walkman and your trainers, then guns in general will probably seem like a bad thing. But if you’re hungry enough and have just watched somebody take the first step towards turning a rabbit into stew, then the case for guns might look pretty good. Unless you’re a Flopsy, Mopsy or Peter, yourself, that is.

At first, then, I wasn’t sure what I felt about Lameck Luhanga’s M-16 automatic rifle. As a game scout in Malawi’s Nyika Plateau National Park, much of Lameck’s work was patrolling for poachers - guys well known for shooting back if caught in the act of knocking off an eland or two. I could see that hefting a gun was part of the job. But whilst he was acting as my guide I was less sure what the point of the rifle was. It seemed highly unlikely that anybody was going to ‘poach’ me. And the Nyika’s fauna, though rich in leopard, hyena, elephant and jackal, is mainly benign, shy and retiring.

It was only when we hit the steeper slopes on our first morning’s walk that I worked out that the M-16’s primary function, on this trip, at least, was as a walking-stick. Lameck used its barrel to push aside thorny briars and employed its length to steady himself when crossing log bridges. He leant on it, hands crossed over its muzzle, when taking a breather. On easier stretches he’d hang it from his neck and drape one arm over the stock and stick a finger of the other hand into the .56mm mouth of the barrel. I rather began to wish I was carrying a walking-rifle myself.

Lameck and I had set off to walk the Livingstonia, a trail that straight-lines from 1,800 meters up on the Nyika plateau right down to the shores of Lake Malawi, some 50 kilometers away. The Livingstonia is a full African adventure that one can fit into a mere week, with the mere 2-hours time difference means negligible jetlag when you stagger into work suntanned, fit and be-storied. Most importantly six days of walking the Livingstonia route provides a full Malawian experience. The route offers everything from high plateau landscapes, big game viewing, some challenging walking, a night of wild camping, a night spent in a remote village, a night in the missionary station of Livingstonia, and a night of real colonial comfort.

I’d actually got the comfort part sorted out from the very beginning. The night before setting off on the Livingstonia I was ensconced in the Chelinda Lodge, a relaxed but luxurious haven in the centre of the Nyika plateau. What I had got wrong, though, was my timing; rather than having six days stretching ahead of me to complete the walk and catch my flight back to Europe, I’d got distracted by elephants and zebras over the previous days and, so, actually had… well…somewhere under four days left to get down from the plateau, on foot, and then catch my flight. I was going to have to make up time with some very keen stepping out. In compensation for coming privations I reveled in my last night of ease in the lodge. I took long hot showers, flopped in front of my room’s blazing log fire to read through a pile of wildlife guides from the bedside library, took seconds at dinner, downed glasses of wine, and stayed up late in immoderate talk.

Early – oh the horror – the next morning I tucked into a full fry-up breakfast. Departure time was drawing near. Last cup of coffee still in hand, I shrugged on my small, canvas rucksack. I had a sleeping bag, a plate and mug, change of clothes, water-bottle, some onions, coffee powder, a notebook and a camera. Lameck was already outside. His rucksack held a light tent, cooking pot, a bag of maize meal and another bag of tiny, dried fish.

We walked off into a landscape that could have been Exmoor or even the South Downs. Bracken brushed our knees. Hills rolled under our feet. Clouds scudded across the sky, and a stiff wind whistled mournfully across the gun-barrel. But where Exmoor might have produced a few rabbits, or a fox or maybe a sprint of deer, here the wildlife was African. We’d barely got across the first hill before Lameck pointed out a line of eland trailing up a far slope. I spotted the warthog for myself, and we both chorused ‘Reedbuck’ together as two bounded off through the long grass. I didn’t even see the coppery bulk of the snake until I’d already passed within half a meter of its draught-excluder bulk. Lameck had, though, and from several feet behind me, as he took some satisfaction in pointing out. Lameck also had an impressive knowledge of shit. Within an hour’s walking he’d pointed out leopard doo-doo “…see, full of duiker hair,” jackal crap, hyena dung “…white with calcium from bones,” and, a real collector’s item, aardvark pooh.

Apart from a few 3,000 year old hunter-gatherer’s cave paintings, the surreally Scandinavian gloom of a British-planted pine plantation, a couple of dirt roads crossing some 3,000 square kilometers of wilderness, the lodge and a few other buildings at Chelinda, the Nyika has never been much affected by humans. It’s a primeval and - because of its altitude - a temperate world. Intimation, perhaps, of what Europe might have been like in the time of the wild ox, the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. Though, up here, it was eland, a herd of elephant that had only recently climbed the steep approaches to the plateau to colonise the heights, and numerous leopard that made up the ‘Neolithic’ fauna.

It was animals, not people that had laid down many of the tracks that we followed. The passing of thousands of hooves and paws had cut the narrow paths so deep into the land that one’s boots shuffled along in their grooves as if we were jogging along an inverted tightrope. Jogging? With two day’s journey to cover in one, we’d upped the speed a bit, and we were at what was normally the first night’s campsite, Phata Stream, by lunchtime. We threw ourselves down on the soft grass and chomped on sandwiches and cakes. Lameck was telling me about his life. His late father had been chief of Mwavitiza village, and Lameck was now second-in-line for the chiefdom. He’d wanted to go to university to study biology but, he made a universal gesture with his fingers and thumbs, “…money, I have to work now to support my family…but maybe I can study later.” Being a game scout and working amongst the wildlife he loved and knew about was the next best thing to going to university. Poaching patrols were the down side of the job. “Not the small poachers with bows and arrows, but the gangs with guns. “Two scouts have been killed by poachers, though that was before we got these guns,” he looked down at the M-16 next to him, “and I have been hit with an axe by a poacher.” He stood up and pulled on his pack. “You know my wife worries very much when I am on patrol because this is a risky job – we can be killed by poachers, snakes, leopards, elephants.” He picked up the gun. We walked on.

Lameck seemingly had some sympathy for the old-style poachers. After a stiff climb we had reached the edge of the escarpment and we could look down as far as the shore of Lake Malawi. We could also see amongst the tangled vegetation and tumbling down almost sheer slopes occasional thin red ribbonings of the path we were following. “They hunt with spears, bows, nets and dogs up on the plateau, and they are very fit men,” we stepped over the edge and began our descent,” when they see us they straightaway run UP the steepest hill and we can’t catch them.” Lameck felt that we should put into practise something he had learnt from the Phoka tribe, also ‘very strong people.’ They, apparently, avowed a bent-kneed trotting jog as the least tiring method of getting down hills. Resignedly I fell in behind Lameck to try the theory out.

Hours later we had blundered our way through thick woodland, skidded over boulders, torn our way through thorns, accelerated down deep cut ‘steps’, and, quite frankly, I was exhausted. Gravity might have been doing most of the work, but I still had ‘sewing machine leg,’ and searing lungs when we stopped for a breather. The only consolation being that Lameck looked like I felt. “There’s the village,” he gasped, “Chakaka, of the Phoka tribe.” We looked down on a few tiny huts far down in a valley that seemed only to deepen the further, and faster, we descended. We set off again at the same manic jog.

It was mid-afternoon when we hit ground-level and made our way to a flat area where the villagers’ cash-crop coffee beans dried on mesh racks. In the 1970s Phoka families had been moved from the expanding Nyika National Park and been given land down here in the valley. They were allowed to enter the park to collect honey, thatching grasses, firewood and termites, as some compensation for losing their traditional hunting lands. Now, in a new initiative, and as further compensation, a rest house for tourists walking the Livingstonia was being built. I was shown the foundations of the building whilst Lameck put up the tent. Or rather, after he admitted that he’d forgotten the fly-sheet, he put up part of the tent.

Bottles of ‘green’ lager in hand, we squeezed around the coffee-bean watchman’s fire under a tiny lean-to. When they’d set me up for the trip, Robyn and David Foot had suggested that I let Lameck cook something local, and traditional, for me. Regretting that I was out of season for two Malawian delicacies - termites and ‘mouse-on-a-stick’ – I prepared myself for the n’sima and fish. It was a labour intensive process requiring the maize flour to be folded bit-by-bit into simmering water until it became a thick paste. But then with a sprinkling of dried, pewter-coloured, wood-chip-sized fish on top, it was ready to scoop up with our fingers. After a second helping I lay back around the fire lulled by Lameck’s telling stories, in Tumbuka, to a small group of friends who’d appeared from out of the dark. Even when speaking tribal languages, the Malawians use English words for time and distances, and I repeatedly heard, “blah de blah de ten-to-nine, de Chelinda blah, de blah Phata …” as Lameck recounted what time we’d left that morning and how far we’d travelled. Each new person hearing the story glanced over at me and then looked closely at my riding boots. These were, admittedly, the least useful part of my walking kit.

The next morning, genuinely early and after coffee and rice and a splash in the stream, we set off down the red dirt track. Women in bright coloured wrap-around chitenjas, whose designs included stylized elephants, coffee cups and, more curiously, mobile telephones, were heading off to work with hoes and axes. Giggling girls with buckets balanced on their heads were making their way back from the stream and up the steep hillsides. People seemed to accept it as perfectly normal that a chap with a gun followed by a neon-white fellow in riding boots were marching along the road. The atmosphere on the road was one of easy friendship. Two lads carrying their school’s goal posts on their heads grinned happily at us, whilst a woman, Loyina Mushali, collapsed into giggles when I suggested taking her picture. Perhaps the friendliness was because I’d learnt to speak Tumbuka, or at least Lameck’s ‘simplified Tumbuka for mazungu’ version of the language. Because it seems that if I repeated ‘Yewo’ enough times it covered, apparently, everything from ‘hello, how are you doing?’ to ‘lovely day isn’t it,’ through to ‘anyway, I must be off…so, cheers then.’

You can also use yewo with a bit of gasping to order a beer in any of the village shops. I wanted to go to the one in Thunda that had, ‘You are mostly welcome’, painted on its wall, but it was closed and we had to go next door instead. But even with the beers, our morning’s walk to Livingstonia Mission was becoming a bit of a struggle. The sun rose higher and burnt hotter, our legs ached from the previous day’s Phoka trot, and it was only after further hours of walking and SAS-ing our way across the high, single log bridge that crosses the North Rumphi River that we found ourselves clambering up a steep path towards the shade trees of the mission settlement.

Livingstonia was founded, in 1894, by Free Church Scots in a period of missionary zeal inspired by David Livingstone’s death two decades before. It’s a strange place – half African village and half Godalming circa 1920. Period houses with verandas were dotted amongst the trees; a large church with a stained glass window showing Livingstone doing some converting crowned the hill, there was a technical college, a hospital, and a school. At the two ends of the social spectrum there was a rather raffish market and the ‘Stone House,’ a colonial joy built by the mission’s founder Dr. Laws early in the 20th century, and now a rest house. I was shown to a dark and ecclesiastical room by the earnest manager, Genesis, and after a shower I joined Lameck for a last ‘drink.’ From the veranda we could look 900 meters down to the hazy turquoise waters of Lake Malawi far, far below and my destination for the next day. It was a view that demanded a gin and tonic. But we had to be content with Fanta as to my dismay we were inside the alcohol free ‘mission lines.’ Lameck was returning to the plateau that night, his job done. He had decided against walking back to the Nyika – he was rubbing one knee with a look of pain – and was going to hitch rides around to the far side of the plateau to get back to base. We shook hands as good friends, and he set off. I was gun-less and alone. And being within ‘mission lines’ also couldn’t get a drink.

At the back of the Stone House I kicked up against a pattern of bricks on the ground. In 1959 when colonial rule, in what was then Nyasaland, was coming to an end a British plane dropped a message to the missionaries asking if, in view of some local pro-independence butt-kicking, they needed evacuating. Standing back I could see the message they’d laid out in answer: ‘Ephesians 2:14’ “For He is our peace who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Apparently everybody in Livingstonia, whatever their race, was getting on happily with everybody else. The museum on the end of the Stone House perhaps shows why; Over a century the missionaries not only brought health care, the word of God and some schooling to the area, they also carted in a harmonium, a magic lantern projector and a wind up gramophone with a 78 rpm record of ‘Tula Tula’ by the Crazy Singers. They may not have been great drinkers but they were at least entertaining.

The next day I headed down to the Manchewe Falls, Malawi’s highest and positioned at the start of the infamous Gorode road whose twenty hairpin bends twist back and forth across the steeply descending hill face like a Möbius loop. In the Stone House I’d meet up with two volunteer doctors and a volunteer teacher, all from Northern Ireland and all still shattered from their journey in a broken-down Landrover, in the dark and on the end of a tow-rope up the Gorode the night before. A group of students in the technical college had been dragooned by an engineering lecturer into repairing the vehicle, and we had then trundled down to the falls in the just-about roadworthy vehicle.

As we set off to walk to the Manchewe a bunch of small boys surrounded us, thrashing out a quick hierarchy with punches, pushings and pullings, until one, Edward, took the lead. We followed him down a narrow track towards the sound of tumbling waters. There were rocks to scramble over, creepers to swing off and sandy chutes to slide down. We were joined by a bunch of younger children who, with blobs of resin on the ends of 4-meter long canes, were pulling cicadas from out of the trees. Jars of buzzing insects in hand they trailed behind us.

“Hiding cave,” announced Edward as we came round a corner and ducked, in true King Solomon’s Mines fashion, into a deep, dark cave behind a curtain of waterfall that arched over us from high above. “How about swimming,” asked Fiona? Edward and his Lord of the Flies troops led on until we popped out of the bush above a small pool with a Jacuzzi like whirlpool at one end. There were screams and scuffles as boys vaulted into the water, or bombed each other from great heights, or slid down a smooth slide of rock into the foam. One small lad, in his enthusiasm, jumped right through his ragged shorts so they split and rose like a ruff round his neck.

Fiona and I waded in to bob around in the cool water, calling Derek and John in to join us. Young lads lay on shelves of rock contemplating us from above. A woman further upstream washing clothes looked disapprovingly, I thought, at us but then, as we came out to dry ourselves, stepped to the edge, shyly holding her tube dress at the shoulder, and giving a little jump dived in to appear with her chitenja, miraculously, still in place.

Refreshed and clean we walked to the nearby Lukwe Permaculture Camp. We set up camp in an al fresco dining room – a thatched shelter amongst the trees – whilst the simple kitchen swung into action. Established by an English architect living locally, Lukwe boasted a Zen temple-like ‘drop loo’ with ‘the best view of any in Africa,’ and individual double cabins with verandas set out over the swirling drop of the valley that fell to the lake side. I was happily eating a potato cake and salad, and chatting, when, with a sickening lurch, reality entered my brain. Subconsciously I must have been totting up how many hours I needed to complete the walk down to the lake and find transport to Mzuzu some hundred kms away to be in time to catch the small plane that would get me down country to Lilongwe airport for my flight out the next afternoon. My subconscious suddenly came up with a number of hours actually needed – and it was far more than the hours I had left. I gave a strangled yelp, leapt up, threw a handful of kwacha down, pulled on my rucksack and set off down hill. “Two hours if you go very fast,” I’d been told when I asked how long it took to get to the shore-side road. I had an hour and a half before darkness. Bugger.

A foot path cut across the tangents of the road’s hairpin bends, tumbling down the steepest route as surely as a fall of water. I skipped over rocks, swung off tree branches, skidded down long gashes of sand, beat my way through brush and long grass. Locals slowly making their way up hill against the slope stepped back as I sped past them, whilst those going down skidded out of my way of my stampeding weight bearing down on them from behind. It was cinematic action heightened by Technicolor lighting and a soaring soundtrack. Behind me the sun was lighting up the Nyika plateau in a deep red wash, and before me there was the growing sound of drums, whistles, high woops and choruses of song rising from under a stand of shade trees. I shot past the party – catching only a glimpse of bright clothes and lines of dancers.

In Chitimba, on the road, there was little traffic passing, and certainly no buses. “Ah, mazungu, you’ve just missed one matola”, a tailor, busily foot-treadling his sewing-machine, told me, “but there might be another one later.” He paused and thought a bit; “Or, certainly, tomorrow.” His friends nodded agreement with the last part. I re-crossed the road and stuck my thumb out in the dusk. Two pick-ups passed, and then a Tanzanian truck rumbled into sight, slowed a little, picked up speed, and then dropped to walking speed as the passenger door swung open. Two lifts later, I was sitting on sacks of unripe mangos in the back of a smaller, open lorry puttering across the hills to Mzuzu. A cool breeze blew over me. Dry season fires flared up along the road, lighting the darkness. A huddle of other passengers yewo-ed happily whenever they caught my eye in the firelight. I was going to make my flight after all. Though, equally, I didn’t much care if I didn’t.

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