Enraptured by Africa’s wonderful wilderness

Lifestyle –  Falling asleep to the sound of hippos and with crocodiles lying in the long grass, Judy Murphy was smitten by Malawi experience

Beware of the Hippo,’ declared the sign in Mvuu Safari lodge in Malawi’s Liwonde National Park. Given that hippos are renowned for killing humans and that they’d be roaming around our sleeping quarters that night, this was advice worth heeding.

Reaching the lodge in Southern Malawi had involved a short boat trip across the Shire River for which our guides had warned us not to trail our hands in the water. That was because lurking crocodiles were waiting to snap up any available digit. Crocs are also notorious killers. We kept our hands and toes well back!

Mvuu Lodge – which translates as Place of the Hippo – is as different from the West of Ireland as it’s possible to imagine, but falling asleep to the sound of hippos and crickets, while knowing that crocs were lurking in the long grass just metres from your bedroom door, actually had a soothing effect and made for a great night’s slumber. Our accommodation was in thatched stone lodges, which slept two or four people. Each had its own front door and veranda, which offered a river view. There was no internal phone system – if we needed help from reception which was in a separate building, we had a whistle.

Maybe it was the sense of truly being in the wilderness that acted as a sedative, or perhaps it was that we’d spent the afternoon on a jeep safari through one section of this vast wildlife reserve, 580 square kilometres in total, where we’d seen warthogs, various breeds of antelope such as impala and kudu, birds including fish eagles and countless, magnificent baobab trees.

Elephants can be found here too, but not the day of our trip. Our brilliant guides, disappointed on our behalf, offered an additional, free, safari at 6.30am to give us a second chance. Still, no elephants. However, the guides remained hopeful that we’d see them on the river banks as we embarked on a boat safari on the Shire. We saw hippopotamuses, we saw crocodiles, we saw more river eagles, we saw giant termite mounds and we saw the stunning weaver bird – the male weavers turn a vibrant yellow for the mating season before reverting to dull brown. But not an elephant obliged us, to our safari guides’ dismay. Elephants are the big attraction at Mvuu since lions disappeared from the park few years ago – happily there are plans to re-introduce them.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.