We conquer Mulange Mountain!

Tonight I should really be tackling a large pile of marking, but I am not going to! I am going to write about the weekend and a trip up to the plateau on Mulange mountain. I have visited Mulange town and the waterfall about a quarter of the way up the mountain several times before. When I first arrived I thought how good it would be to be able to go up to the plateau, but there is no proper road and the only way to get there is Shank's pony so I thought I was too old and overweight to drag myself all that way up! (Roughly 2000m) Eighteen months later and four stone lighter here I am! It feels pretty good, despite the aching legs and mosquito bites!

Francoise, Kirren, David, Alan and I set off early on Sunday morning from Blantyre and managed to get the 70Km or so to the mountain by about 9.00am despite trouble with the car again. This seems to be a bit of a feature of volunteers trips away from Blantyre! As you drive towards Mulange the huge lump of granite looms ahead of you. It is known as the island in the sky because often the clouds are well below the level of the top of the mountain so it looks as though the peaks are floating in the sky. Sunday was one of those days so we stopped by the side of the road to take photographs. We had rung ahead to book ourselves a local guide and a couple of porters and to arrange for accommodation in one of the huts on the plateau. When we arrived at the information place in the town they were expecting us and were able to tell us the name of our guide. We arranged to meet him at Likubula Lodge, at the bottom of the ascent, but when we got there he was nowhere to be found and the office knew nothing of our booking. Malawian organization!! It took a while to sort it all out, but eventually we discovered the first guide had been called away to take a family member to hospital. A replacement was found. Next, one of the porters was called away to another family crisis and had to be replaced by his brother, but eventually at about 11 o'clock, the hottest part of the day, the party was complete and we set off. Emanuel the guide, Henderson and Alex the porters and the five of us volunteers. The first part of the walk, to the waterfall was familiar. It seemed harder work than I remembered because of the heat. After about an hour we arrived at the falls and were very glad to stop for Kirren's excellent egg salad sandwiches skillfully packed into a biscuit tin, and a swim in the pool at the waterfall. Well the others swam, I just sat in the water. I am still pretty scared of water and the currents are quite strong here, and the pool reputed to be 60m deep which is an awful lot of very cold water beneath one! We stayed there until nearly two and then set off in an upward direction. I was by no means confident that I was going to make it. The sun was beating down. My rucksack was quite heavy enough, and my back underneath it was running with sweat. I was reminded that before I came to Africa I had no idea how much it stings when sweat runs into your eyes, I never exerted myself enough to find out! The path was alternately gentle upward incline and steep scramble at first but as we went on the gentle bits got less and the scrambles longer and steeper. There were a number of streams to be crossed and we had to jump from stone to stone sometimes over quite fast flowing water. I would never have managed it without the helping hands of the guide and porters who leapt about like mountain goats despite the heavy loads. They insisted on taking my rucksack away from me so that Alex had two to carry, but it didn't seem to slow him down at all! The steep bits were a bit like rough staircases. I concentrated on one step at a time and managed to drag myself up, but in the heat I seriously doubted my ability to see it through to the top. Fortunately as the day went on the sun dropped in the sky and we were in shade for some of the time. There is quite a lot of woodland on the ascent and this helped a lot. We had to stop for regular rests and the estimated three hour climb probably took us five hours of walking time but eventually we made it to the top and onto the plateau. Here the landscape changed. The aspect became much more open. The vegetation changed completely, and although still a bit up-and-down the path was much more level and manageable. Francoise had brought her walking sticks and very kindly loaned one to me. It made such a difference.

As we emerged from the wooded climb on to the plateau the sun was quite low in the sky and the golden light came in sideways. The colours were fabulous. Most notable there were grasses that looked as though they began life with creamy green inflorescences but each had been dipped into a glass of old Burgundy absorbing different amounts of the red wine and moving gently in the breeze to form a rippling sea of colour. I lost all idea of distance really but we must have walked a couple of kilometers across the plateau before we reached the hut just as the sun was setting. I was so glad that we did not have to walk in the dark. When we arrived there were perhaps ten people in a hut equipped for about fifteen. We managed to bag a few mattresses and set ourselves up on the corner of the khonde. Throughout the evening more and more walkers seemed to arrive, unfortunately many of these latecomers were members of the Mountaineering Society and they have priority for mattresses so we had to give them up. I thought I wouldn't sleep if I was cold, so without anything to go underneath me I moved indoors to the room with a fire. Kirren and I ended up sleeping on a sort of a shelf a couple of feet wide as the floor seemed pretty cold. I think it was a good move, but it was very hard and uncomfortable! We shared the room with a group of volunteers from a German NGO who are placed all over the country but meet up every now and again for social weekends. They had been walking on the plateau for a couple of days. The other three preferred to stay on the khonde, feeling that it was worth being cold to sleep under the stars, but I could not agree! The stars were fabulous though. It was so dark up there. No electricity, and more stars than I have ever seen anywhere else. We cooked supper of pasta, creamed sweetcorn and baked beans on an open fire and with a bit of David's extra hot chilli sauce it was delicious! David was a star; far more practiced at organizing food outdoors in pitch darkness than any of the rest of us!

In the morning we were up early and on the road again. David, Alan and Emanuel to climb the peak before coming down again, and Kirren, Francoise and I to come slowly down the skyline path with Alex and Henderson, taking our time, admiring the views and in my case taking photos of the views and the flowers. At the bottom we swam in the Likubula pools before setting off to wait for the men in the handy pizza restaurant in Mulange town. What a great way to spend a Bank Holiday!

When we had almost got back to the beginning we emerged from a path onto the road through the forest to find about ten women, each with a huge bundle of wood, stopped on the road. Apparently a Government Official was charging them MK20 each to use the road to carry their bundles of wood from the forest to their homes. Our guides said if they did not pay they would have to leave their wood behind. He said that sometimes the officials confiscate the pangas and axes until the tax is paid and this means that the livelihood of these women is taken away. We found MK200 and gave it to Alex who went and negotiated with the official on behalf of the women. I recognize that this is a complicated situation, but I don't understand how, if harvesting the wood is illegal, the Government can charge a tax for carrying it down the road.