After breakfast, you will visit a traditional outdoor market for an immersive and interactive cooking challenge. After dividing into smaller groups, each with a guide and local currency, you’ll walk the market, observe what’s available, then collaboratively create an American recipe with your teammates. You’ll buy the ingredients from the vendors. No supplementing from back home! On Day #3, you’ll use these ingredients to teach students at Jacaranda School your recipe. 

After the outdoor market experience, your group will head to Satemwa Tea Estate (a family owned farm), for a delicious lunch of farm fresh food —surrounded by 2,000 acres of tea. After lunch, you’ll receive a full sensory experience in the tea fields and cupping room to taste various teas and learn how they are made. The property is perhaps the most exclusive in the country and their tea is in Michelin starred restaurants in the U.K.

After breakfast, you’ll experience an incredible school for orphans and vulnerable children. Jacaranda Foundation and Marie da Silva have accomplished spectacular things for Malawi’s children. You’ll receive a tour of the school, which is a special treat, since random tourists aren’t allowed this level of access.

Two culinary activities here. First, the students will teach you, hands on, how to prepare a number of traditional Malawian recipes. When the children at Jacaranda see how excited you are to learn about their indigenous traditions, it will certainly be a powerful moment! It will be a new experience when they hear that Americans have crossed the earth to learn from them—boosting their pride of locally accessible food.

Part two is your turn to shine — you’ll teach the students how to make American recipes from the food which was purchased in the market on Day #2. There will be a kitchen.

Midmorning, you’ll head north, up the escarpment, past Blantyre, the Zomba Plateau, and 6,800’ Mount Malosa. When you reach Liwonde National Park, you’ll enter the main gate and observe wildlife in forested woodlands and wide open savanna-like plains before reaching Mvuu Camp. 

Dominated by the sluggish Shire River and its lush fringing vegetation, this national park evokes every romantic notion of wild Africa, especially at night, when the air resonates with the uninhibited chirruping of frogs and grunting of hippos. It offers the best wildlife viewing and birdwatching in Malawi, and its aesthetic merits – this is the quintessential African river scene – elevate it to being one of Africa’s truly great game reserves. 

Liwonde is home to Malawi’s largest elephant, black rhino, cheetah and herbivore populations. Your itinerary each day will vary—depending on the movement of wildlife in the park—but two daily activities are included. This includes a boat safari, and late-afternoon/evening game drive.

Your cooking workshops at Mvuu Camp will include bread baking inside the national park and another activity.

Mvuu is perfectly sited alongside the Shire River and is family owned. The camp lies in an immense group of baobab trees, facing a reed bed on the opposite side of the river. Borassus palm forests and fever trees rise above the greenery. 

Dr. David Livingstone camped here 160 years ago. Local wildlife including birds, vervet monkeys, and warthogs mingle throughout the safari during the day and nocturnal hippo venture onto the grounds at night to graze on the grass. An impressive thatched dining room and bar offer spectacular views over the river. 

Mvuu Camp is not camping as you know it. You’ll have a canvas and stone cottage with beds, no sleeping on the ground. Everyone will have hot and cold running water, flush toilets, showers, and intermittent electricity. 

After four nights at Mvuu Camp, you’ll head south to the old colonial capital of Zomba. A paved road zigzags through the hills and up to the top. Your home the next two nights is Ku Chawe Inn. Situated on the rim of the forested Zomba Plateau, surrounded by a gorgeous landscape and terraced gardens, your room will have panoramic views. While gazing at the distant horizon from top of the plateau, Queen Elizabeth said, “It offers the best view in the whole of the British Empire.”

On this last full day in Malawi, Jordan Downbush, a Canadian Missionary who has lived in Malawi over twenty years, will be your guide to cast iron cooking. This activity will occur in a forest reserve and not a national park, so no big cats or elephants to think about while tending the fire! 

After breakfast, and perhaps a swim in Ku Chawe’s heated pool, you’ll pack up and head south to Chileka International Airport in Blantyre for your flight home.