Day 182: Chitimiba to Livingstonia

Just as we wanted to get out of the tent it started to rain. We couldn’t believe that the rain even caught us in Malawi, we’ve thus had rain in every single country we visited on this trip, except South Africa. The rain got harder so we just stayed in the tent watching Netflix until after 10:00.

Today we only had 12km to go, so we could take our time to pack up and to sort few things out. The water bottle on the roof had algea growing in so we had to clean that out as well.

At 12:14 we were finally ready to leave and tackled the arduous pass up to Livingstonia. By zooming in on the map below one can see the sharp hairpin corners, all 18 of them. We went from 480m to 1184m over just 10km. In the end it wasn’t as difficult as some people who went before us claimed it to be. We didn’t even engage low range and it was much less stressful than the Sun Valley circle route we did in the Richtersveld in the beginning of our trip. The road, however, definitely requires high clearance vehicles and probably 4×4 as well.

We drove passed the Mushroom farm and headed for Lukwe camp, the more expensive, but quiter option. The views from the restaurant are simply amazing.

We wanted to order a Fillet from them, but decided we needed more time to think it over as it costs R170. We thus went for a walk to their organic gardens.

Caro was in love with it and just wanted to head home, buy a house and start her own gardens. All the toilets around the restaurant and campsite are compost toilets so visitors contribute to the nutriet rich compost used in the garden.

From the garden we continued to walk along a footpath and eventually got to the main road and then to the Machemwe Falls. We paid the 500 MKW entrance and view the falls from the ‘official’ viewpoint which is a rubble site. The waterfall was probably a little bit impressive if it wasn’t for the other 100s of waterfalls we’ve already seen on this trip.

Back at the campsite we set up camp and ate pineapple and passion fruits for lunch. Hugo took an afternoon nap before we went to the restaurant and decided to treat ourselves to the fillet steak. As usual things however didn’t work out as we planned as they needed 3 hours notice when ordering a steak, which we didn’t know. Why didn’t they say something at lunch when we looked at the menu? Something like: “Here’s the meat options, but remember it takes 3 hours to prepare.”

We thus had the left-over beans and rice from last night again for dinner. We went to bed before 21:00.