Livingstone mountains is a huge chain of mountains connecting the southern highlands with the lake Nyasa. Livingstone was organising expeditions for many years for searching the spring of the Nile exploring the mountains in this region. Traveling with the dalla-dalla the way from Njombe to Ludewa seemed never ending. I asked myself what moved that guy to travel all this way long without knowing what it was looking for.

Most of the country is famous for the trade of slaves who were sold mainly on the coasts. During the XIX century the slaves ware token even in Malawi and Zambia passing through this mountains. Livingstone always reported the brutality of the slavery and but the public opinion never strongly reacted. During the German occupation in the territory from the coast to Songea the harsh treatment to the local populations caused a large revolt (maji-maji) that is sometimes indicated as the beginning of the national feeling in opposition to the repressive colonial politics.

The region is a never ending plantage of tea, pineapples, corn... We haven't seen many villages but rather a continous row of houses and people were cultivating and harvesting most by hand. There were some huge missions that nowadays are mostly abbandoned due to the crisis of vocations in the church.

In Ludewa it was suggested me from a priest to take the motorbike taxi and get to the monastry in Lupingu. It was a strange feeling to leave the dalla-dalla filled with people and jump on a motorbike in the forest with an unknown down on the path of the mountains. The driver was convincing and the roads where fortunately pretty empty and we could continue until the motorbike puntchered (pancha). The motorbike was pushed until a small village where the guy tried to call somebody to fix the wheel. In the meanwhile I was left in the village with a guy drinking fermented bamboo juice and looking at me with red eyes and speaking about sins and redemptions. I started to feel a bit unconfortable in that small room, worried about my bag and the sunset coming. I started naming all the people I new in the organisations in Njombe and some priests I've met. I'm sure nobody had intension to harm but I felt safer showing the phone numbers I had and saying that they were waiting for me.

After a while, a really nice teacher of the secondary school took his motorbike to drive me to Lupingu. On the road was impossible to continue by riding and I've left the driver to continue by food and enjoying the descent to the lake. Once I've seen the lake I realized how much the expeditions of Livingstone would have been payed off by the sight of this lake.