Nyika Plateau lifts a vast dome of rolling, honey-coloured grassland more than two kilometres above tropical Africa. It is so cool, open and treeless that visitors keep comparing it to the Scottish Highlands, and it gets cold enough up here for frost. The plateau is a granite mass that erosion has rounded over millions of years into soft ridges running clean to the horizon. Its name means where the water comes from, and it is Malawi's most important catchment, gathering the rain and mist that feed rivers far below. Hidden in the folds of its valleys are pockets of afromontane forest, sealed off from the world and tangled with giant lobelias and more than two hundred kinds of orchid. Eleven of those orchids grow nowhere else on Earth.
The plateau stays unspoilt largely because it is so hard to reach. The only way up is a rough road that climbs the escarpment through red mud to Chelinda, the small settlement at the centre of the park. At dawn, herds of roan and sable antelope, eland and narrow-striped Crawshay's zebra graze across the open hills, and by late afternoon the grass turns to copper in the low sun. Nyika is reputed to hold one of the densest leopard populations in Central Africa, and the leopards do their hunting after dark. You can travel the hills on foot, on horseback or by mountain bike, and fish for trout in the dams. After dark, this high and this far from any town, the sky blazes with stars. The park covers more than 3,000 square kilometres with only Chelinda inside it, so you can walk or drive for hours without meeting another person.