Mount Mulanje makes its own weather: a mass of granite standing alone on flat ground, rising almost sheer from the tea plains of southern Malawi to 3,002 metres. It wrings more than twice as much rain out of the air as the plains below. That rain feeds nine rivers off the mountain, including the water a million people in Blantyre drink. It is also why the foothills are carpeted in tea, descended from some of the first grown commercially outside Asia, planted here in the late 1800s. The Mulanje cedar grows wild on this massif and nowhere else, and a century of logging and fire made it the first tree in Africa declared commercially extinct. Most walks start at the Likhubula gate and take you a day through forest and rock to the plateau at around 2,000 metres, a full kilometre above the plain.
Up there the going is gentle: rolling grassland between bare domes, faint paths and stream valleys linking one peak to the next. The streams slide over bare slabs into cold, clear pools, and after hours of climbing you get into one. From the Chambe basin the plateau's edge rears up as a single sweep of rock over 1,700 metres high, the longest unbroken wall in Africa, split in two by a shelf of jungle. Routes up the full face take several days, part climbing and part hacking through vegetation. Plain wooden huts are spread across the plateau, each with a fireplace, and at dawn you step out of one onto a world floating above a sea of cloud. Sapitwa is the last climb, up boulder-choked slopes into a trackless maze of granite, and its name means don't go there. Several trekkers have vanished in those boulder fields, and no guide will take you up alone. The summit is a place of spirits, approached with small offerings. When cold mist smothers the top, the blame goes to Napolo, a great serpent said to travel underground between Mulanje and the mountain next door, dragging storms along behind it.