Magic in Malawi
Responsible for the world’s biggest elephant translocation, Malawi is shaping up to be 2018’s hottest new safari destination, says SARAH MARSHALL
AS TALL as a one-storey building and heavier than a pick-up truck, our African giants should be easy to find. But right now, the newest residents of Malawi’s Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve are proving harder to locate than a proverbial needle in a haystack – or an elephant in miombo woodland, in this case.
Brought here as part of a successful two-stage translocation shifting 500 elephants from elsewhere in the country – the biggest and most ambitious project of its kind to date – the animals are, unsurprisingly, a little unsettled.
“They are much calmer now,” insists Emmanuel, an assured twenty-something guide who boasts a lifetime of experience growing up in the forest, and claims his only toys were origami butterflies made from the leaves of a camel’s foot tree. “They don’t charge at us anymore... well, not as much.”
When, after two days of fruitless searching, we do eventually spy an ashen-grey trunk tangled within the forest’s spindly arboreal limbs, the sight is uplifting; the outline of a mother and calf etched effortlessly into their surroundings. The youngster is one of several newborns bringing the population to 600, but begging the question – where are the other 598?
BRINGING A PARK BACK TO LIFE
STRETCHING 1,800sq km across the centre of the country, Nkhotakota is sprawling with few access points. But under the management of African Parks, acclaimed for regenerating wildlife areas across the continent, there are plans to complete a 700sq km solar-powered fence enclosing an elephant sanctuary, and to build new roads.
Malawi, like many African countries, is realising the potential for tourism by restocking parks and reserves denuded of wildlife through poaching and community conflict. Although less advanced than neighbouring safari big-hitters Tanzania and Zambia, it’s also less crowded, and in an age where over-tourism is a growing concern, it’s a conservation success story in the making.
“For now, this is a wilderness lodge,” explains Bentry Kalanga, a big man with an even bigger smile and the co-owner of Tongole, a comfortable lodge deep in the forest on a bend in the Bua river.
Long-term resident herds occasionally come to frolic in the shallow, Nesquik-coloured water – including ‘short trunk’, a local celebrity easily identifiable by his unusual proboscis clipped in half by a snare.
Largely though, the attractions are avian, and we spot several species on an early morning canoe trip along the Bua. A trumpeter hornbill could easily be mistaken for a bawling baby and a water thickknee crescendos and crashes like a battery draining its juice.
“There’s a myth that if you kill a hamerkop, your house will be struck by lightning,” muses Emmanuel as he paddles past the flat-headed bird resting on a fever tree. “They say it has a third eye which can see into your soul. People are afraid, so they leave the birds alone. We need stories like that to protect our animals.”
HOME TO ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST LAKES
ALTHOUGH planes can be chartered to an airstrip at Tongole, we travel by road to one of this small country’s biggest attractions, Lake Malawi, just 40km away.
The journey itself is a swift introduction to local agricultural life. Young girls in torn, puff-sleeved satin dresses peddle uneasily on cumbersome, rattling bicycles, riding over sun-scorched soil exploding with chilli-red flame trees and swollen baobabs. Every encounter involves a wave – sometimes two-handed – and