The Nyika Plateau is a dome of golden grassland lifted more than two kilometres above northern Malawi, on the Zambian border, and it gets cold enough for frost. Almost no park in Africa lets you walk across open country among the animals. This one does, because there are no lions on the plateau, so the days go on foot, on horseback or by bike. At first light the herds spread out across the hills: roan and sable antelope, eland, reedbuck and Crawshay's zebra. That is the highland race, its stripes unusually narrow and tightly packed, running right down the legs with none of the faint shadow stripes zebra carry elsewhere. With no engine running you meet them at eye level, on grassland that rolls to the horizon instead of closing in as bush. The park exists for its water as much as its animals. The rivers of the north rise in these hills, which take a metre of rain a year, and that is why it was pushed out until it covered nearly the whole highland.
Walking the damp hollows with your head down turns the grass into a garden. Disa orchids come up between the tussocks, in the richest concentration of orchid species in south-central Africa. Proteas, red-hot pokers and giant lobelias stand clear above the grass, easy to pick out from a saddle. Folded into the creases of the valleys are dark islands of montane forest, cut off for thousands of years, where the air under old juniper feels centuries away from the sunlit grass outside. Out on the plateau a granite whaleback hides the Fingira rock shelter, used by hunter-gatherers for thousands of years and still marked with faded geometric paintings. The digging turned up stone tools, shell beads and human bones, and DNA from two men buried about 6,000 years ago matched an infant laid in the same shelter thousands of years later. After dark the plateau changes hands. The grass you crossed on foot all day is where the leopard hunt at night.