Mt. Mulanje, Malawi

Mt. Mulanje is an enormous hunk of granite that sits in the southern end of Malawi. It is actually a monadnock, which is an isolated hill or rock that rises abruptly from a virtually level surrounding plane. The Mulanje monadnock was formed from various tectonic and volcanic processes underground and then is slowly exposed over time as wind and water erodes away the loose dirt and rock that used to surround. Because of this, Mulanje sits very much so juxtaposed to the lowlands and tea plantations that surround it.

In order to get to Mt Mulanje, Chris, Courtney, Brianne and I had to cross from Chipata in Zambia and then either ride a bus or hire a car to take the four of us and our stuff the 8 or so hours through Blantyre and eventually to Mulanje Town. We crossed the border with a plan - to get to Lilongwe and then figure out travels further south by bus. We got a junky looking taxi (first being told $100 and then getting it for $40) to Lilongwe, however, just outside of the border crossing where we had picked the taxi up he pulled over and instructed us to get into another car, this one a Nissan station wagon that looked sort of like a Volvo X90, quite an upgrade from our original taxi.

The taxi was owned by a Malawian couple who lived in Lilongwe although they had gone to school in Ireland and were moving to Botswana because he had a job teaching at a college. Our driver was intrigued by our adventure and offered to drive us to Blantyre (6 hours) to help us get to Mulanje as quickly as possible. We thankfully agreed and eventually convinced him to take us all the way to Mulanje Town, where we could start our Mulanje journey the very next morning. Fairly immediately, our driver ran over a chicken (why did the chicken cross the road?) and got his first ‘ticket,’ which was really just a bribe to the officer at the road check because our driver’s wife wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

Slight tangent on African driving: driving in Africa is a consuming task. I feel like in America we can easily hold a conversation while driving or even (though we shouldn’t) text or eat something or do our make-up. In Africa, the highways are shared, not like ‘share the road’ with road bikers, but shared with people driving, walking, riding bikes loaded with stuff, riding ox carts and they’re also shared with chickens, goats, cattle, dogs and wild animals like gazelles or sometime elephants. The driver must therefore actually pay attention as they accelerate, weave, slow, stop, wait at checkpoints, go over endless speed bumps and try not to collide with anything on the road. I don’t think that driverless cars are going to be a reality here anytime soon.

We arrived safely to Mulanje Town and checked into the Mulanje view hotel. The hotel came with our own army of ants (to carry away anything left on the floor they could turn into energy) and featured a cockroach or two but for $6 a night for a double we couldn’t complain.
The next morning we slowly made our way through all the sales pitches for Mulanje destinations we weren’t interested in and guides we didn’t want to hire, all to try and get sleeping pads that didn’t exist and we didn’t end up needing. Finally, we made it to the forest service station and booked our trip. The kind woman who made note of where we intended to stay and collected the small fee for using their hut system did, however, strongly recommend that we hire a guide from a list that she had and we were very glad we did.

Wesley is a 16 year old Malawian mountain goat, well, a human really, but a human with mountain goat like uphill mountain scaling abilities. Wesley valiantly lead us to through the first 7km of steep climbing to our first nights stay at the Chombe hut overlooking Chombe Peak.

Chombe Peak is steep on two sides and has a traversable ridge on the other two, forming a sort of backbone of granite. From our deck at the hut we had an incredible view of the East face of Chombe Peak where we settled in to watch the sunset and didn’t move off of until the next morning. The four of us shared some fantastic conversation and reveled in the unbelievable natural beauty that surrounded us. It felt novel on many levels - because we were all in Africa, because we were in a setting we had expected to be in in Africa and because we were in a new country no had yet been to - and we relished and lived in the new feeling of old, solid friendships.

Being in the middle of Africa thousands of feet up on a huge hunk of granite was a very surreal experience. The climate was somewhat familiar to the Colorado Rockies in the summertime, but the swings were much smaller and the temperatures held pretty high during the evening. The vegetation was a mix of high altitude and jungle type vegetation, with some low grasses as well as some very broad leafed plants. Because Malawi receives quite a bit of rain, there are creeks and little rivers everywhere and on our last day, as we were preparing to leave the Chisepo Hut, the skies opened up and it rained hard for an hour.

We waited for the rains to subside, but because the formations are so tight and the creeks are undamned, the swell from the rains was already very, very noticeable in the creek we had to cross to continue on. What was a small creek we all thoughtlessly jumped over had been, in a matter of an hour, transformed into a broad, fast moving river with white water about 40 or so feet wide. Not without dissention, Chris, Wesley and I found a way to get across that involved handing our bags to Wesley, who fearlessly jumped to the other side and took his shoes off so he could stand in the torrent, and strategically positioning ourselves so crossers could have balance and make it across without getting too wet. It was an exhilarating way to start our long hike down.

We didn’t get to see Lake Malawi, which is where everyone tells you to go if you’re going to Malawi, but after our Mulanje trip we weren’t wishing we had seen the lake - we were more than impressed with what this giant piece of granite had to offer.

Safarimas, South Luangwa, Zambia

I’m a recovering Grinch who’s married to a Christmas enthusiast. It’s been wonderful seeing Brianne’s joy during Christmas and it’s something that’s becoming contagious. Still, it was a bit harder for Brianne to be away from family for Christmas than it was for me. What made it easier still was being with the Nicoletti’s who are family to us and who went out of their way to make the day special and fun. We decided to stayed at Track and Trail safari lodge Christmas Eve/Eve, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which is along the banks of the Luangwa river where you can watch crocodiles and hippos vie for space on the crowded, muddy banks.

I’d never been on Safari before and, to be honest, I was slightly hesitant about it. I’d heard stories of zoo-like safari experiences and it all sounded quite contrived. However, when we arrived the atmosphere, even at our accommodation, was wild. We were camped on the edge of the Luangwa river, which was really the African river of my imagination. Full of sediment, slowly moving, wide and shallow the South Luangwa river was home to hippos, bush bucks, alligators and others all right down from where we ate our dinner. The camp hosted an outcast hippo in a small pond about 200 feet from where we camped the first night (up on a 20 foot platform, thankfully). And every meal was a bit of a battle as monkeys would swoop in with stealth and speed to take unguarded food items right off of your plate, right in front of you.

On Christmas eve we took a morning drive into South Luangwa National Park in an old Land Rover that had been converted to comfortably sit nine safari goers in stadium style seating (fortunately, it was just the four of us). The diversity of species in the African bush is totally crazy. While on safari I couldn’t help but think of the incredible power of evolution at work as I saw creatures living in their respective niches. There were many different birds that all had different mating and pairing behaviours, there we tons of Antelope (in fact, a safari enthusiast and Chris' boss at IDE referred to the sighting of a bushbuck, impala or other antelope as “AFA,” or “Another ‘Effing’ Antelope) gently grazing on the myriad grasses, plants and trees, and then there were elephants, hippos, lions, leopards and other evolutionary giants that were all tenuously supported by the ecosystems in place.

Watching an elephant slowly walk across a great grassland is something that really makes you think about how fragile our world is. It makes you think about how fantastic all these different species are that exist so that such a large creature can be sustained. It makes you think about how elephants aren’t really that different than humans; their eyes look just like ours,they give birth to infants that are incredibly dependent on their mother for life, it takes about 18 years to raise a baby until it’s ready to head out on it’s own, and elephants can live to be 80 years old. As I watched this extremely large, female African Elephant in the habitat she had evolved to suit, gracefully, methodically and intentionally walking across the Savanna, I saw that it was good. I saw that it was incredible. I saw that so many tiny changes had happened over millions of years so that this elephant could exist in present form, and it took my breath away.

So that’s my main take on safaris. I think for a westerner like myself who’s only ever seen animals so large as elephants and cats so large as lions in the zoo it’s so shocking and so beautiful that you can’t help but to dissolve into a writhing puddle of enthusiastic mysticism.

But, there’s another, exciting and thrill seeking type side that I’d be remiss not to talk about, which occurred on our last night's drive. It was Christmas night, actually, and we had had a wonderful day with a self guided safari drive in the morning (where we accidentally came upon a family of elephants with young who flapped their ears and test charged our Nissan truck while Chris was frantically trying to get the truck into reverse and Brianne rolled her window up as if a thin piece of glass is going to make any difference if a four ton elephant decides she doesn’t really appreciate your proximity) and enjoyed an afternoon sharing gifts and being family. Our guide showed up at 4p to take us out to enjoy the last two hours of daylight and the first two hours of night in the park. As the sun began to set, we discovered a pride of female lions - three juveniles and two adults - and the adults were about to start their hunt.

Our driver that night, JJ, was a seasoned safari guide who had been working in the park for 25 years and who carried the quiet assurance of someone highly capable in their job. Somehow, JJ new just the place the 2 lioness would likely emerge to find an unfortunate impala for the pride to eat. We waited on the outskirts of an open, grassy area teaming with Impala and saw our hunters emerge from the bush. What happened next was really a scene out of Jurassic Park or a Planet Earth feature, but instead of watching the action on a television, you are some feet away in an open air Toyota. We watched and chased the lions, using red light to try to minimize the distraction, as they worked in unison to weed out the injured or young impala that they would try to make their dinner. At several points, the lions came right up behind us, close enough that we could have whispered to them. We watched the scene unfold for 30 or so minutes (I actually don’t really know how long we were watching because for the entirety of this thing I was 100% completely enthralled with what we were seeing) until our wise guide, JJ, decided it better that the lionesses be left alone to seal the deal with the next impala to misjudge the lions speed and power.

Thinking surely this could get no better, we began to return to the park entrance when JJ spotted a leopard who herself had begun hunting. I’ll never forget watching this leopard slowly and methodically weave through giant hippos, almost using them as barriers to hide her presence from the unsuspecting impala. We only watched for a brief period, I think because leopards are more sensitive to safari vehicle presence or because we had already been out too long because of our lioness chase, until we began to head back for park entrance. And, to continue with the Jurassic-Park-Is-This-Real feeling, our last encounter came as JJ was taking a turn at speed and a giant hippo reared it’s big ugly face right in our path. Earlier that night JJ was telling us that he is most afraid of hippos, because once hippos feel threatened, they’ll work to extinguish that threat until it’s gone. Luckily, this hippo decided a retreat back into the bush wiser than an assault on our safari vehicle.

When we returned back to Track and Trail the adrenaline was pumping and we all felt like high fiving each other and digesting what he had just seen. The coolest part was that JJ was equally enthusiastic and even said that nights like that one were the ones that kept his enthusiasm for his job.

Livingstone, Zambia

We had made plans with Chris and Courtney to spend several weeks together seeing their home in Lusaka, visiting different places in Zambia and Malawi and spending our last week together in Zanzibar. Seeing Chris and Courtney, their lives in Africa, and, for some reason, the initial greeting, which was set to take place in Livingstone, had been at the forefront of our minds as we planned our trip with them and as Brianne and I spent our first week in Cape Town. It’s really incredible that we now can fly around the world and meet up with someone as if it were just a short distance, but the distance between you is still felt and I think it was the disconnect that really made the perplexity of seeing them at a backpacker Hostel named Jollyboys really play over and over again in our minds.

As is the case with almost every situation that gets played over in your mind time and time again, it’s never quite as you imagined. First off, Chris and Courtney’s (un)faithful vehicle broke down just 100 kilometers into their 500+ kilometer journey from Lusaka. This vehicle has actually caused them quite a bit of grief since they arrived in Zambia. They bought it from Chris’ boss and it hasn’t really ever properly worked. What’s more, their Nissan Terrano II had spent countless weeks and dollars at the mechanic’s with exactly zero notable progress. I think Chris and Court felt some of that anticipation of actually being together in a new place half a world away from where our friendships have been forged and having their car eat it the day they were coming to meet us was not so great.

Still, they were able to find someone who would shuttle them to Livingstone and stay the weekend so he could shuttle the four of us back to Lusaka and at about 4p, four hours later than they had hoped to arrive, Chris and Courtney walked through the gates of Jollyboys Backpackers. And as things tend not to work in the way that you envisioned, Brianne was in the shower and I was typing furiously away trying to take advantage of the decent internet connection as Chris and Court walked through the gates. I think we all felt relieved to be together and excited about what the rest of the trip held in store for us: the adventures, the memories and just being together, experiencing a new place, adding more to our deep rooted friendships.

Mosi-oa-Tunya, also called Victoria Falls, was the reason we chose to meet in Livingstone. This is really the main reason many tourists come to Zambia and I think the reason many come to Africa at all. At 108 Meters tall and 1.7 kilometers wide, Mosi-oa-Tunya is the largest waterfall in the world. During the wet season, some 250,000 cubic feet per second of water flow over it’s edge, shooting mist hundreds of feet skyward so thick you can’t see more than 20 feet in front of you. Brianne and I waited to see the falls with Chris and Courtney, even though we were there 24 hours ahead of them. The best vantage was the knife’s edge, which is an edge of rock and dirt carved by past locations of the falls (I’ll explain more later). From the knife’s edge, the Zambezi river flowed over the edge at eye level and you could watch about a quarter of the 1.7 kilometer fall and the water plunge all 108 meters to the pools below.

We also made our way to the Devil’s Pool. I was first made aware of the existence of the Devil’s pool via Casey Neistat, who’s a filmmaker from New York City and who made a video about him and his kid swimming to the very edge of the world’s largest waterfall. We booked our trusty guide who promised we wouldn’t be swept to our deaths and headed for the falls. To get there, you need to traverse the top of the Zambezi just before it plunges into the Batoka Gorge to the point basically dead center in the river, Zimbabwe on the west side and Zambia on the east.

The pool sits just outside of the main current, but where water is still plummeting constantly over the edge, and it’s possible to sit in it because the pool is deep right up to the edge where there is a sort of wall that contains you in the pool, stopping you from going over the edge with the water. Sitting on the edge of the falls, besides dizzy, you feel the raw power of the water, you understand how this river had slowly but surely carved the Batoka Gorge below and you understand the raw power of rivers and erosion and geology - and it’s inspiring.

The next day, we decided to raft below the falls on the Zambezi River. We’d heard from some of Chris’ friends from Lusaka that the rafting here was top notch and not to be missed. It took a bit of convincing to get Brianne and Courtney to forget the crushing waves we had seen the day before on a hike down into the Batoka Gorge and to jump into a raft to try and go over/through those same waves, but in the end they were enthusiastic participants. There were 20 something rapids, about 10 of which were class V, which is a fairly enormous rapid.

The day started with lots of anticipation and even some anxiety. It took us 4 tries to get out of the giant eddie the rafts had been placed in and over the first large rapid, called the Boiling Pot. However, the anxiety soon turned into laughter, high fiving and shouting with enthusiasm as we crashed through one gigantic wave or hole or fall after the other. Our stoic guide Melvin took great care of us and we were the only raft not to flip the whole day (although I fell out and took a swim on what Melvin said was the worst possible rapid to have to swim). I’ll be honest, rafting in Colorado or Montana or any of the other places I’ve rafted isn’t usually about the kind of roller coaster thrill that I think many are after when they get into their rubber river chariot, however, the waves, holes, eddies, cliffs and pools of the Lower Zambezi provide more than a suitable serving of adrenaline inducing smashes and drops to perfectly compliment to surreal natural beauty of the Batoka Gorge.

The Batoka Gorge was a wonder in itself. The canyon has been carved, over millennia, by Mosi-oa-Tunya actually slowly migrating upstream. The walls of the canyon, which meander snakelike over it’s length, are actually former fall locations; each bend and cliff where the falls used to make their plunge downwards. There are some places in the canyon where the water is 200 meters deep, and places where, in high water, there are holes so large they can swallow entire rafts (rafting trips don’t happen during this time). It’s rivers are teeming with fish and it’s banks with crocodiles. By itself it would’ve been well worth a day in a boat just to see it.

After all our fun and adventure was over in Livingstone we jumped in the car with our driver, Denny, who had stayed in Livingstone waiting to take us on our return trip to Lusaka. We were full of life because we were all together in this new and exciting place and full of anticipation for what the rest of our time would hold.

Photo Situation

Brianne has been busy capturing pictures and even some video throughout our trip, however, finding internet reliable enough for her to offload them onto my computer so she can put them onto Google Drive so she can edit them on her iPad so she can upload them to Blogspot so she can publish them, has been challenging. It’s feeling more and more like the majority of the pictures will come when we get back the first week of February.