Liwonde National Park

I thought it was about time that I had a week of holiday having been here now for over 4 months, so persuading one of my fellow volunteers to join me, we set of to Liwonde National Park. We were booked into Mvuu camp, which is very beautiful and sited on the shores of the Shire River, in the heart of the national park. To get to it you have a 23km drive through the park, or you can go the shorter way round and drive through 8km of country road (for country road read dirt track) and then get a lift across the river in one of their boats. We tried both approaches, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Mvuu consists of a lodge, fixed tents with proper beds etc and a camping area. We were in the camping area where the water hogs kept us company.

We eventually arrived there after a couple of excursions up the Balaka Road, got our tents up and then proceeded to cook our dinner after the staff very kindly lit the fire for us.

On the Monday morning we took a 2 hour boat trip up the river,

this is Danger our boat driver and tour guide. I just love the Malawian names, although Danger is not necessarily the most inspiring when you are going near hippo's and crocs in a small vessel, but he was lovely and looked after us really well!

On the boat trip we had close encounters with the hippo's, which were numerous but rather camera shy, as everytime we approached them they ducked under the water.

We did manage to see one out of the water though.

We were also fortunate enough to see a small herd of elephants by the side of the river,

the occasional crocodile

and a monitor lizard.

In the afternoon we decided to drive around the park ourselves and came across lots more elephants, what we should have done though was ask what to do if an elephant looks unhappy and starts moving towards you in a threatening manner, do you stay where you are or reverse slowly away in an unthreatening manner. We opted for the reverse slowly away in an unthreatening manner, and stop taking photo's, this appeared to do the trick, well not appeared really as it actually did do the trick, and the elephants turned round and carried on grazing. We were really lucky to see so many different herds of elephants, as I know previous people have only seen evidence that they have been there via large dung piles. Elephants are my favourite large animal and I was very content just sitting there watching them going about their business, many of the herds with young ones of different ages.

Be very grateful that I am not putting up the probably rather unnecessary 200 plus elephant photo's taken, I really must get round to weeding them down a bit, as possibly even I won't want to sit through a slide show of 200 pictures of elephants.

We saw plenty of gazelles and antelope etc. One of the advantages of a digital camera is that you can take absolutely loads of photo's in the hope of getting that really good shot, imagining that you are David Bailey etc, it is also a bit of shock though when you realise that you have a picture of a gazelle with it's head in just ever so slightly a different position 5 times in a row, and none of them particularly well focused, easy decision though then which ones to delete.

Although the park does have zebras and black rhino they were in a separate enclosure which can only be reached on the official game drive and by paying extra money, being cheap skates or rather volunteers who have learnt to be frugal with their money we didn't avail ourselves of this opportunity. Also they do have some lions and leopards but they were not in the areas of the park that we visited despite our best viewing efforts. The following morning we left Mvuu and headed off back down the road to Zomba.