Day 10 – Mbeya to Livingstonia: Twenty-Two Hairpins

We left the Beaco at half past six with a packed breakfast and a driver called Tumaini, who told us it means Hope. Hope took us as far as the border.

The border at Songwe is the most broken-down crossing I have seen, apart from one. Dusty shacks, long stretches of dirt track you cover on foot, everything provisional. It took us close to ninety minutes. Standing in it, I thought of the only worse one I know, Morocco to Algeria, in 1994, when I was in my twenties and wanted to cross from Marrakech to Tunis by train; the Algerians held me for forty-eight hours and sent me back into Morocco, and the land border closed for good later that year. Songwe was nothing like that. Crossing on foot was slow but pleasant and safe, the only real nuisance the men wanting to change money, dozens of them, more persistent than Simba on the beach in Zanzibar.

On the Malawi side, Gift was waiting, exactly where he had said he would be. Gift is a driver from Livingstonia, recommended by the Mushroom Farm, and he would take us the rest of the way. He travelled with a friend beside him, Emmanuel, also from Livingstonia, an art student who wants to become a guide.

The road ran south through northern Malawi. Small villages, and at every inhabited place along the main road a crowd of little markets, wooden trestle tables not quite steady on their legs. I remember almost no conventional shops along the route, just the market tables, one town after another. We stopped at Karonga to sort a SIM card and change money. The SIM was Airtel, the Indian company that has close to a monopoly here and in most of the African countries, and it is not only for calls and internet but for payments; mobile money is how a great deal moves in Malawi. Handing over cash and loading the SIM was laborious, but we got there.

We ate lunch with Gift. We had asked him for somewhere local that would not take too long, because the Tazara delay had cost us our second night up at the Mushroom Farm and we wanted time to see Livingstonia before dark. Over the food he taught us how to eat nsima, Malawi’s version of the maize porridge we had been meeting all the way down: you press off a small piece, work it into a ball in your hand, and dip it into the sauce. I had ordered nsima with roast chicken, and he told me I had got it wrong, because roast chicken gives you no sauce, and made me dip my nsima into his beef stew instead. It was the kind of correction you get from someone who has decided to look after you.

The fuel, Gift explained, was the main reason his transfer cost what it did. Petrol and diesel in Malawi are expensive, and the price runs through everything, including the hundred and sixty-five dollars we were paying him. It was a lot, and once he laid it out, it made sense.

The first sight of Lake Malawi came near Chitimba, and it stopped me. I knew it was a lake. It did not look like one. The space was too big for the word, more like a sea, the far shore simply not there.

At Chitimba the road ends, in effect, and the mountain begins. Gift could not drive us up; the escarpment is reachable only by motorbike taxi or a serious four-by-four, and today he had an ordinary car, so he and Emmanuel would take the long way round by road while we went up the direct way. He left the two of us at the foot of the Gorode Road, the dirt track of twenty-two tight hairpin bends cut into the escarpment by missionaries and locals at the end of the nineteenth century, climbing around six hundred metres from the lakeshore to the village.

I have been on rollercoasters less frightening. Each of us rode behind a driver on a boda-boda, and the two drivers were boys, steering up that surface in plastic flip-flops. Every metre, the bikes threatened to slide out or tip. Twice, with my eighty kilos on the back, the bike could not make the grade and stopped, and I got off and walked the steep parts while the boy wrestled it up. Ahead of me I could see Lorena, rigid with terror, willing the ordeal to end. Gift had told the boys to go slowly and to stop now and then so we could take in the view. They went straight up, fast, for forty minutes without pausing once, and we saw very little of the valley falling away to the lake, being far more concerned with staying alive.

At the top is Livingstonia, and the fact that it is up there at all is the point. It was founded in 1894 by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Free Church of Scotland, named for David Livingstone, and they built it high on the Khondowe plateau only after earlier settlements down by the lake had been devastated by malaria. They came up here for air that would not kill them, and stayed.

The boys ran us round the village before the light went. The mission church, stone, with a stained-glass window showing Livingstone at a Malawian version of the Sea of Galilee. The Overtoun Institute, still a working school. And Manchewe Falls, dropping around a hundred and twenty-five metres into the valley. What Emmanuel had been telling me in the car came back up here. His great-grandfather, he said, had carried bricks and machinery up this escarpment on his head, back when the town was being built. The north of Malawi, poor as it looks, has long had a strong tradition of education, sending teachers and educated people out to the rest of the country; the south has the commercial capital and the tea and the fertile land, but, as he put it, “the north has the minds.” He was proud of it, and he had a right to be.

Gift and Emmanuel were not up yet, still coming round the long way, so we waited for them at a small restaurant place, Mama Fiskani, while the last of the light lay over the plateau.

The Mushroom Farm sits on the edge of the escarpment just below the village, and we reached it in the evening after roughly nine hours on the road. The welcome was warm. Our room was the Cob House, built of earth and straw, with a wide veranda hanging out over the valley; the whole drop fell away to Lake Malawi far below, the water catching the last light and then going dark. We had asked them to hold dinner for us, and we ate it all together at a long table on the terrace: rice, vegetables, mashed potato, and a beef pie. There is a bar built for exactly this, for sitting with a drink while the light goes off the lake, and after nine hours and twenty-two hairpins we sat in it.

We had given up a night here to the train. We would have only one.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

The Mushroom Farm Eco-Lodge, on the escarpment just below Livingstonia. https://www.themushroomfarmmalawi.com/
What I paid: $80 per night for the Cob House, an earth-and-straw room with a veranda over the valley and the lake.
My take: A long-standing fixture on the backpacker circuit, and you can see why: the setting, on the lip of the escarpment above Lake Malawi, is extraordinary, and the bar is built for sundowners. Dinner is shared at a long table on the terrace. Because of the Tazara delay, we had only one night here and wished for two.

Where I ate

Local restaurant on the road, with Gift: nsima with roast chicken, and a lesson from Gift in how to eat it. Around $35 for four of us, next to nothing.
Mama Fiskani, a small local restaurant place in Livingstonia, where we waited for Gift and Emmanuel after the village tour.
The Mushroom Farm, shared dinner on the terrace: rice, vegetables, mashed potato and a beef pie, 30,000 MWK.

What I visited

Livingstonia (mission village, founded 1894), high on the Khondowe plateau: the stone mission church with its Livingstone stained-glass window, the Overtoun Institute (still a school), and Manchewe Falls (around 125 metres). We saw it in the late afternoon, taken round by the boda-boda drivers before sunset. No entry fees; the church asks only for a donation.

Getting there

Mbeya to the Songwe border: private transfer with a driver (Tumaini), booked through the Beaco in Mbeya, leaving 06:30 with a packed breakfast. $70.
Songwe border crossing: on foot, around 90 minutes, rough and provisional but safe. Expect many money-changers; agree nothing in a hurry.
Border to Livingstonia, via Karonga and Chitimba, with Gift: $165, a price driven mainly by Malawi’s high fuel costs. Gift can be reached through the Mushroom Farm. His ordinary car cannot climb the escarpment.
Chitimba up to Livingstonia: the Gorode Road, 22 hairpins, around 600 metres of climb, by boda-boda (motorbike taxi), about 40 minutes, 20,000 MWK per bike. Thrilling and rough; the bikes struggle with a heavy passenger on the steepest bends. The alternative is a robust four-by-four or walking.