After climbing Mt. Mulanje over the weekend I no longer doubt that Chichewa has 13 words for "mud" and none for "switchback." Mulanje is not a typical mountain - it's more of a giant granite mesa that juts up from the surrounding tea estates. There are over 76 peaks on top of this plateau, but getting up to the plateau requires more than a bit of effort and covering almost 2,000 vertical feet in less than 2 miles. Just when you think you're doing well, your porters will pass you literally running up the mountain in bare feet (or if they feel the need to protect themselves, flip-flops).
Once you finish the climb (after stopping every 20 minutes or so to catch your breath and enjoy the view out into Mozambique) you find yourself on a large plateau with some gently rolling hills. The landscape shares a strange affinity with some areas of Scotland, and this effect was heightened by the misty weather that rolled in every afternoon (we managed to visit during a chiperonde, which is a fancy word for cold, wet air blowing in from Mozambique that settles over Southern Malawi for days at a time). The mountain itself is an interesting place - local legend maintains that it is home to evil spirits (the name of the highest peak, Sapitwa, translates to "Don't go there.") and there are no permanent settlements on the plateau, but there are large tracts of Mulanje Cedar that the forestry department allows the locals to harvest.
We camped overnight in a hut which thankfully had a nice fireplace (temperatures dropped to below freezing soon after the sun went down) and woke up early the next morning to climb Namasile (pictured at the top), the second highest peak on the massif (and therefore in all of Malawi). The trail up the peak followed a stream bed over some rolling hills for about 30 minutes until we began the ascent - another hour of fairly uneventful steep slopes. Then we lost the trail. It happened at a large boulder that was totally overgrown with moss and trees (a very Indiana Jones-esque moment, especially when we found leopard scat in the cave we eventually had to crawl through). Apart from this small detour, the rest of the climb was uneventful and we made it to the summit just as the clouds rolled in and obscured our view of just about everything. Interestingly, the first thing our guide did was to bang a rock against a metal sign to scare the spirits away (although he claimed later that the myths were all lies told to impress the visiting white people). We made it down fairly quickly, camped overnight again, and then started down the plateau the next morning, which was certainly easier than it was going up. Once we made it down, we drove around the mountain and had lunch at, of all things, a Malawian-run Italian restaurant. Pizza and beer have never tasted so good.
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