The Stockers' Stories

We are now in the middle of our kids’ school’s 2-week-long Easter break. We haven’t spent much time out of the city since arriving in Malawi, so we decided it was time to break into the US dollars that we brought with us after selling our vehicles back in the States. We spent most of last week in the Northern part of Malawi visiting a couple of National Parks.

We drove four hours from the end of the tarred road into Nyika National Park, stopping only for vomit breaks along the bumpy, muddy, and rutted 60 miles to the Nyika Plateau. The plateau is beautiful, and is so high in altitude that there are no mosquitoes! This was the first time we’ve been able to sleep without mosquito nets since we came to Malawi last year. It was also cold at that altitude, so we very much enjoyed having a fireplace in our chalet.

But the real reason for going to Nyika wasn’t weather, grasslands, or chalets, but animals.The plateau is home to a wide variety of antelope and several other creatures as well, and during the day you’re allowed to freely roam through the park in a vehicle, biking, or walking.

The first animals that we saw were a herd of zebra, which thrilled Jolie.

There were bushbuck in many places, and they allowed us to get fairly close to them before running off into the bush.

Roan were the most impressive antelope that we saw. During a nighttime game drive we also saw eland (sorry, my camera doesn’t work well enough at night to get pictures of them), which are the largest antelope in the world, weighing up to one ton!

Also on the night drive, we saw several owls that allowed us to get very close.

We also got to see a hyena hunting, but I don’t think he appreciated us following him around scaring away all of his prey.