Livingstonia (Wednesday)

We awoke to find the view from our tent at the edge of a cliff (we were warned when we were shown our site and setting the tent up in the dark). 2 steps out the door was ok but 3 and you’d have a bit of a free fall. Amazing vista of the lake and the valley and mountains to the north. Leisurely awakening before walking in the historic village of Livingstonia. It is a mission station like Nkhoma (also with a hospital) that was started at Cape Maclear (very south of the lake) but was moved to higher altitude due to malaria. A nice walk through fields and gardens to the very top (5k from where we were staying). We saw the Stone House where Dr Robert Laws lived when starting/running the mission, the church with its stained glass of Dr Livingstone (complete with medicine box at his feet). On the walk back down we stopped at Manchewe waterfall (125m high into the Rift Valey Escarpment) that also has great views of the valley and lake. There are caves behind the falls where people used to hide from slavers as that was a large problem in Malawi as chiefs would even sell their own people into slavery. (a major reason the missions were started—to bring in commerce of a different commodity and stop slavery). Spent the afternoon recovering from our holiday in hammocks on the cliff edge. After dinner we sat around a campfire with 4 french people, 3 south Africans, 1 canadian and 1 australian telling stories, making friends, and listening to the guitar—one of the French guys has been playing for 12 years and is amazing at classical and gypsy jazz…