Nyika National Park
"I came to Malawi for a lake and found, two thousand metres up, a piece of Scotland that wandered south."
Nobody warns you that Malawi has Highlands. You arrive expecting the lake — and the lake is glorious — but tucked up in the far north of the country is Nyika, the largest national park in Malawi, a high rolling plateau that climbs to over 2,500 metres and looks, to my disbelieving eyes, almost exactly like the Scottish Highlands transplanted to the tropics. Lia, who has Scottish family and an opinion about everything, declared it “the Cairngorms, but with zebra,” and I have not been able to un-see it since.
The Roof of Malawi
The drive up is long and rough, and that remoteness is precisely why so few people make it. But as the road climbs out of the heat and the woodland thins, the air turns cool and resinous with pine and wild flowers, and the landscape opens into an immense sweep of grassy hills rolling away to every horizon. There are no fences, no crowds, and on our first evening we drove for two hours and saw three other vehicles. After the gentle chaos of the lakeshore, the silence up here felt almost ceremonial.
The wildlife is not the big-cat spectacle of the great savanna parks, and that is part of the appeal. Nyika is a place for roan antelope, eland — the largest antelope in the world, improbably graceful for its bulk — reedbuck, and the resident zebra that graze the open hills in numbers. Leopard are here too, the highest density in Central Africa apparently, though they keep to the forest patches and we saw only tracks. What you get instead is the rare luxury of walking. Guided walks are permitted across the plateau, and there is nothing quite like crossing open hill country on foot, the wind in the grass, antelope lifting their heads to watch you pass.
Cold Nights and Orchids
I had not packed for cold, which was an error. At this altitude the nights drop sharply, and we sat after dinner at the lodge wrapped in blankets around a fire while our guide, a quietly funny man named Patrick, explained that Nyika holds more orchid species than anywhere else in Central Africa — over two hundred of them, carpeting the hills through the rains. He talked about the plateau the way other guides talk about lions, with a real and slightly stubborn pride that I found completely endearing.
In the morning a thick mist sat in the valleys, burning off slowly as the sun rose, and we walked out to a viewpoint where the land fell away in fold after fold of green. A small herd of zebra crossed below us, unhurried. It was, by some distance, the most surprising landscape of our whole time in Malawi — a country I had filed under “lake” and that turned out to have an entire alpine world hidden in its northern corner.
When to go: May to October for the dry season, clear skies and the best wildlife viewing; bring genuinely warm clothes for the nights. The rains from December to April bring the wildflowers and orchids but make the roads punishing. Either way, allow for a long, slow journey to get here — it is the price of having it almost to yourself.