Mount Mulanje, Malawi

“Don’t Go There”

– Che’Chewa translation for Sipitwa Peak, Mount Mulanje

Following our canoe trip up Lake Malawi, we took a long 12 hour bus trip to the southern city of Blantyre, reputedly the country’s most pleasant, to visit with two lovely friends met during our Egypt travels – Tina, an ex-pat British teacher, and her son Thomas. They quickly come to rue the day they met us as we settled into their home for a 5 day orgy of resting, eating and cleaning before setting off for a climb of the country’s highest mountain, Mulanje.

The long delay in leaving Blantyre had me excited to be on the road again. So I was forgiving of our cab driver’s lateness (only half an hour plus an additional ten minutes to gas up once he got us) and tolerant of the mini-bus driver’s strenuous efforts to wedge an obscene number of passengers into the vehicle before setting off on the 1.5 hour drive for Chitikala at the base of the massif.

It was simply a lovely drive. Leaving behind the hills of Blantyre, is the nicest looking African city we’ve yet seen in our travels, we entered a beautiful stretch of country marked with tea estates and pine forests. Against the backdrop of rolling grey bouldered mountains, stiff-backed women picked tea in well-ordered green fields, placing the leaves in large woven baskets strapped to their backs.

Slices of Malawi life went by the window as we rattled down the winding two-lane highway. A herd of cows sauntered by the pumps of a small town gas station. A little boy bicycled down the road with a 4ft long pig butchered and balanced over his back tire. A Saturday market, selling everything from electronics to headscarves stretched 2 km along the highway, merchants sitting beneath giant camoflauged golf umbrellas with their merchandise spread out on groundsheets or hanging from trees behind them. At rest stops, I snacked on hard-boiled eggs bought from the vendors that mobbed the bus, passed on an offer of fricazeed chicken feet, and watched the whole show, happy as I could possible be.

Mulanje soon appeared, its massive base 70 km around and rearing up to a plateau that leveled out at more than 1000 meters above the surrounding plains. Peaks on the plateau jutted even higher and gave the whole mountain, as Janine put it, the look of a giant cake with strawberries on top.

At the park gate, we paid fees and hired a quiet but diligent young porter to freight our gear on the stiff 3 hour climb to Chambe hut.

Grunting up the steep red earth track, we were entertained and periodically awestruck by Malawi loggers, bringing bundles of 18 ft long fresh cedar planks down the mountain balanced on their heads. The weight of this green wood is astonishing. I later tried to shove two of these planks across our cabin’s floor and nearly give myself a hernia. The men carry these loads for around 500 kwacha ($3.50) per trip. A round trip takes between 4 and 6 hours. Paricularly strong men may take even heavier planks for 700 kwacha or make two trips a day. It’s backbreaking work.

The ascent is beautiful more for the views backwards than forwards.Mulanje’s accessible slopes have been heavily logged. Stumps of yellow cedar, cypress and pine litter the bare slopes. The mountain owes its size not to tectonic shifts, but to obdurancy. Mulanje is simply made from sterner materials than the surrounding land, which has eroded away with time, leaving Mulanje with a pretty nice view of the countryside.

Now we enjoyed it too – a pleasing patchwork of farms and smaller mountains, with the highlands of Mozambique forming the eastern horizon.

We reached the plateau of the massif and spent the last hour of our walk strolling through tall young pines in story book yellow sunshine. Chambe hut lay at the feet of the peak of the same name, a long, curving wall rising 700 meters above the plateau in a dark granite bell curve.

The hut can sleep more than 15 people. But when we arrive on its deck in the evening twilight, there is only one other occupant.

Fleur is not exactly your standard issue camper. Or, if she is, I’ve most certainly been camping in the wrong places. Tall, blonde and sitting with a cup of tea amongst a small stack of fashion magazines, her expressive face lights up when she sees us trudging up to the hut door. “Yay! Campers!” she shouts with a delightful Dutch accent, clapping her hands with glee. “I was worried that I would be all alone!”

Janine and I were soon impressed with Fleur for reasons beyond her natural beauty. A 22 year old medical student, she had just finished a foreign exchange semester in Malawi and was now seeing a bit of the region before heading home. With no outdoor experience, no climbing partner and no hesitation she had come to Mulanje and intended to climb Chambe peak tomorrow.

Although it’s not the tallest on the mountain, Chambe has a reputation for being tough and not for the faint of heart. But Fleur seems to have as much pluck as she has personality. Every story, whether hers or ours, seems to end with with her smiling, laughing or exclaiming charmingly, “oh sheet!” We can’t help thinking that we’ve met a younger euro incarnation of my mother, right down to her obsession with the colour pink.

“I just love pink,” Fleur says with a laugh and a shrug, putting away her her pink plastic tea cup in her pink plastic bowl after dinner. Then she says thoughtfully, “But I don’t have too much pink with me now.”

She says this apparently not noticing that she’s wearing a pink shirt.

Same for her hair band. Her socks are pink. Ditto for her ipod, camera, cell phone holder and water bottle.

I point this out to her and Fleur takes a minute to look at the items listed. Then she looks back at us and laughs. “Sheet!”

In the morning, Janine and I try to convince Fleur to change her plans and come on with us to Sapitwa hut, where the peak is higher than Chambe but supposedly easier. But that will add an extra day to her schedule and she is eager to complete her trek and move on to Mozambique. “If it is too hard, I will just come back down,” she assures us, standing outside the hut under a brilliant blue morning sky, a pink hooded sweatshirt wrapped around her waist.

We look up at the steep sided peak and stifle any concerns with a smile at our new friend. “Hey Fleur!” I notice suddenly and say in a complementary tone. with sudden surprise, “Your hat is blue!”

“Yes,” she says, running her hand across the brim of the navy New York Yankees ball cap affectionately. “My boyfriend gave me his hat to wear before I left Holland. I have a matching one. It’s pink.”

“Oh shit Fleur,” we say laughing. “Be careful up there.”

And then with a hug and a last wave, she’s gone and we are left hoping that the mountain, and the world in general, will be nice to her.

Two days later, we got a text message from Fleur. The mountain was too hard and after 10 minutes she came and headed for Mozambique.

***

Through the rest of the day, we made the easy hike from Chambe hut to Chisepo hut, treated to lovely views of rugged cliff faces, sprawling vistas and the most beautiful array of wildflowers I’ve seen anywhere – Red Hot Pokers, Yellow Everlasting, blue Forget Me Nots, white Proteas, scarlet Pointsettieas and small lemon and mauve blossoms resembling snap dragons and lady slippers, just to name a few. With such scenery great and small, the three hour walk goes by quickly and we’re soon at the Chisepo hut drinking tea boiled in a black iron kettle over a crackling fire. Outside, the sun is setting behind a range of rounded peaks that could occupy a climber for many happy days. The plateau of Mulanje drops off steeply to the plain via a steep set of cliffs that resemble an elephant’s head. Mulanje may be deforested, but it remains beautiful.

By 7 a.m. the next morning, after a restless night plagued by obnoxiously noisy rats, we were ascending the mountain behind the cabin.

At the first rest stop, I pointed breathlessly to the highest of several likely looking summits rising above us and asked our porter if it was Sapitwa. “Oh no,” he chuckled.

That seemed like a bad sign.

We tramped steadily upwards on a single deep track, occassionally looking up to peer at the tall, grey points that surrounded us.

Accompanying us were two more ubiquitous Peace Corp volunteers, Diana and Kate, as well as their guide, with whom Diana chatted merrily in the Che’Chewa language.

The cliff face before us sloped at an ever increasing angle. Only its sandpaper-like surface allowed us to keep our grip. After an hour and a half, this surface changed to a boulder strewn rubble field. The rocks ranged in size from armchair to station wagon and were jumbled together in a haphazard way that made for many precarious scrambles over, hops between and slithers under. At one particularly heart-thumping jump over a chasm between two of these giant stony marbles, Diana’s guide told us that “Sapitwa” means “Don’t Go There” or “Don’t Come Back” in Che’Chewa. The reputation is supported by recent tragic events. Two years ago, a solo dutch climber was lost on this climb and her body never found. “They even used dogs,” says the guide looking down into the crevasse as if searching for signs of a boot or backpack. “But nothing…”

We had gotten an early start today in order to have the best chance at a clear summit view. Mulanje typically gets cloudy weather in the afternoons at this time of year. But the cooperating clear sky brings with it increasingly oppressive heat as the morning ages. By mid-morning, my day pack straps and hat band are sweated through and I silently urge on the cloud banks that start growing in the western sky.

The peak is remarkably elusive and we’re almost at the summit before our guide happily points to it. It was the first high point of land about which I hadn’t asked him if it was the top. But there it is – a final blocky slope across one last valley choked with dense thickets and more erratically placed boulders.

Seeing the end, we pant with renewed energy across the rocks and through the bushes. The final few minutes after the valley and before the top are the most exhilerating. The boulders are immense, the spaces between forming deep pits or narrow tunnels which must be navigated with care to avoid a limb breaking fall at worst or a curse filled head scrape at least.

But the summit, as summits seem to do, erases all complaints and minor scalp wounds by giving us a magnificent panoram of everything from the great Lake to the southwestern borders . A simple, rusting metal pole marks the highest point in Malawi. No words, no flag; just metal in cement. There’s something a little disappointing in this, but also something fitting. The starkness seems appropriate in a country where humility remains a virtue and even the higest and best would be loathe to boast.

Jason