Some 500 km north of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city, lies the largest of the country’s national parks at 3200 km² (1250 mile2), taking up most of the Nyika Plateau, a vast panorama of rolling hills and sweeping valleys. It is also the highest at an average of 2,000m which is a major climatic and ecological factor—cooler and wetter, covered by a carpet of lush grasslands, succulent shrubs and seasonal explosions of natural flowers with the widest variety of orchids, clumps of broad-leaf montane and Juniperus forests mainly in the lower grounds—an environment without equal in Africa, climatically akin to Scotland and a renowned Centre of Plant Diversity. Such is the ecology that supports some 100 mammalian species including 21 game animals and the highest density of leopard. In its grand design, nature surely must have intended this microcosm to serve as the perfect amphitheatre for mankind’s appreciation of the refrain “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful: The Lord God made them all”:
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