Travel and Tourism in Malawi

Liwonde National Park and the Lower Shire

Liwonde National Park sits in the Upper Shire Valley, where the Shire River flows out of Lake Malawi's southern end and begins its journey southward toward the Zambezi. The park covers approximately 548 square kilometers of ecologically rich savanna, riparian woodland, and palm-fringed riverbanks, and it is organized around the Shire River in a way that makes the river itself the defining experience of visiting. A boat safari down the Shire, moving quietly through channels where hippos submerge and surface just meters from your craft and crocodiles slide off sandbanks into the water at your approach and elephants come down to drink in the late afternoon light, is among the finest wildlife experiences available anywhere in Africa.

African Parks took over management of Liwonde National Park in 2015, the same year it began managing Nkhotakota, and the transformation that has occurred since then represents one of the most compelling conservation success stories on the continent. When African Parks arrived, the park had been severely depleted by poaching and inadequate management. Elephants survived in reasonable numbers but were chronically stressed and in conflict with surrounding communities whose agricultural fields were regularly raided. Other large mammals were scarce. Predators had been almost completely eliminated.

The rewilding program that African Parks undertook at Liwonde has proceeded in systematic stages. Anti-poaching operations were intensified dramatically, community engagement programs were launched to bring local villages into the conservation economy through employment and revenue sharing, and a major reintroduction program began. Seven lions were introduced in 2018, the first lions to live in Liwonde in decades. The pride has established itself and reproduced. A group of black rhinos, one of the rarest and most endangered large mammals in Africa, was reintroduced, giving Malawi its first wild black rhinoceros population in many years. Cheetahs have been reintroduced. Wild dogs, one of Africa's most endangered carnivores, have been established in the park.

The elephant situation at Liwonde had, by the time African Parks arrived, become one of the central challenges. The park had a large elephant population relative to its size, leading to habitat degradation and constant conflict with farmers in surrounding communities. The solution was the 500 Elephants translocation program mentioned earlier in connection with Nkhotakota: moving half of Liwonde's elephant population to the larger Nkhotakota reserve, relieving pressure on Liwonde's ecosystem while rewilding Nkhotakota. The elephants that remain in Liwonde are healthier, less stressed, and the vegetation that had been heavily browsed and damaged has begun to recover.

Mvuu Camp, the main tourist accommodation within Liwonde National Park, is situated on the bank of the Shire River in the heart of the park. The camp's name, mvuu, is the Chichewa word for hippopotamus, and the choice of name gives an accurate indication of what visitors can expect to find outside their tent or chalet windows. Hippos are present in extraordinary numbers in the Shire River at Liwonde, concentrated in pools and channels near the camp where they spend the daylight hours submerged or wallowing, their eyes and ears and nostrils just above the water surface, emerging at night to graze on the riverbanks. It is routine at Mvuu to fall asleep to the sound of hippos grunting and chomping grass just outside the camp fence, and the nighttime sounds of a bush camp on the Shire are one of those experiences that travelers remember for the rest of their lives.

Game drives, walking safaris, and boat safaris are all available from Mvuu and from a growing number of additional camps and lodges that have opened in and around the park. The boat safari, typically running for three to four hours along the river channels of the park, is the signature activity. It offers encounters with hippos, crocodiles, and elephants in a way that is simply not replicated by vehicle-based observation, and the bird life along the Shire is extraordinary, with over 400 species recorded in the park including fish eagles, kingfishers of multiple species, herons and egrets, African skimmers, storks, and the striking Bohm's bee-eater.

Majete Wildlife Reserve, approximately 70 kilometers southwest of Liwonde and also managed by African Parks, has undergone an equally remarkable transformation. Majete was severely poached through the 1980s and 1990s and was essentially empty of large wildlife by the time African Parks took over management in 2003, making it one of their first managed reserves in Malawi and one of their earliest African success stories. Today, Majete holds the Big Five: lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and rhinoceros, making it the only place in Malawi where all five can be found. The reserve covers approximately 700 square kilometers of rugged hilly terrain along the Shire River south of the Liwonde National Park and offers a different aesthetic from the flat river plains of Liwonde: more rugged, more dramatic topography, with granite outcrops and dense woodland making wildlife spotting more challenging but sightings correspondingly more exciting.

The connection between Liwonde and Majete through the corridor of the Shire River valley has been a priority for conservationists envisioning a linked wildlife landscape across a significant portion of southern Malawi. The development of community-managed buffer zones around both reserves, combined with the growth of tourism infrastructure, has created a model of conservation-and-community integration that has attracted study delegations and conservation professionals from across Africa.

The community aspect of conservation in the Liwonde area deserves specific attention because it represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to align the interests of local people with the requirements of wildlife protection. African Parks has established formal Community Park Committees that give villages adjacent to the reserve a voice in management decisions and a share in the economic benefits generated by tourism. Community scouts, recruited from among local young men and women, are trained and employed as anti-poaching and community liaison workers. A portion of each visitor's park fees flows directly to community projects including schools, clinics, and water infrastructure. The result is a gradual shift in the relationship between wildlife and local people from one of competition and conflict, in which wild animals were perceived as competitors for agricultural land and as protein for poachers, to one of coexistence and even advocacy, where the people of surrounding villages understand that the wildlife in the reserve is an economic asset that benefits their community directly.

Walking safaris are available in and around Liwonde and represent a qualitatively different encounter with the African bush from the vehicle-based game drive that dominates wildlife tourism elsewhere. Moving on foot, with an armed and highly experienced guide, through the woodland and riverine vegetation of the park, the sensory experience is transformed. You hear things before you see them: the alarm call of an impala warning of a predator somewhere upwind, the crashing retreat of an elephant that detected your scent, the sudden silence that precedes an encounter with something large. Walking safaris are not just for the fearless or the physically exceptional, but they do require a willingness to be genuinely present in an environment where human beings are not automatically at the top of the food chain, and the heightened alertness that this awareness induces is one of the most viscerally memorable states available to a traveler anywhere.