Explore Malawi's highlands national parks and the shimmering shores of Lake Malawi on this 10 day journey blending wildlife safaris lakeside relaxation and warm cultural encounters across the heart of southern Africa.
Malawi: Huntingdon House
🚗 Getting There: Back Through Zomba and South of Blantyre
We’ll be honest, by this stage of the Malawi trip we’d got rather used to the GPS having a few funny ideas of its own, taking us down tracks that looked more suited to a goat than a hire car. So it was something of a pleasant surprise when, on the journey to Huntingdon House, the wretched thing actually behaved itself and took us straight there without any of its usual nonsense. The route doubled back through Zomba, Malawi’s old colonial capital, and then continued south past Blantyre, the country’s commercial hub, named rather charmingly after David Livingstone’s birthplace in Scotland. All told it took us about three hours from Liwonde National Park, trundling along roads that ranged from perfectly decent tarmac to the sort of surface that rattled the fillings in our teeth. We didn’t mind one bit, mind you, because every mile took us deeper into the Shire Highlands, with their rolling green hills and that lovely cool air that comes as such a relief after the heat of the lower-lying game parks. We knew we were getting close when the road began climbing and the bush gave way to neat rows of tea bushes stretching off in every direction.
🏡 A Proper Bit of History: The Kay Family and the Satemwa Estate
Huntingdon House turned out to be the old family home of the Kay family, who, remarkably, still run the Satemwa tea estate on which it stands to this very day. The story goes back over a century, to 1923, when a young Scotsman by the name of Maclean Kay turned up in what was then the British protectorate of Nyasaland. He’d come from Malaya, where he’d been growing rubber since 1910, having originally emigrated from Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland. He’d bought the land, which was known locally as Satemwa, from a chap called Timunke, and it had been one of the original 74 certificates of claim registered back in 1892 with Sir Alfred Sharpe, who was then the British Consul General stationed down at Chinde on the mouth of the Zambezi. Maclean’s first agricultural venture wasn’t tea at all, but tobacco, which had been the traditional crop grown on that land since the turn of the century. It wasn’t until 1924 that he planted his first nursery of tea bushes, and by 1926 he’d established his first proper field of Camellia sinensis, part of which is apparently kept to this day as a sort of living museum and still happens to be one of the highest-yielding fields on the whole estate. In 1928 he went further still, introducing the first Assamica variety of tea seed into the Nyasaland tea industry, brought all the way over from India. Then, when the Great Depression hit in 1929 and sucked the life out of economies the world over, Maclean had to go and find work on another tea plantation nearby, called Mianga, just to keep the family afloat. It was while working there that he met and married Flora Jean Moffat-Baiely in 1929, and the couple went on to have three children together. It wasn’t until 1934 that the family finally moved back to Satemwa for good, by which point the original house had burnt down and had to be rebuilt from scratch, emerging as the very Huntingdon House we’d be staying in. Built in the late 1920s, the house has been passed down through three generations of the Cathcart Kay family ever since, with Maclean’s grandson Alexander now at the helm and a great-grandson reportedly waiting in the wings.
🛏️ Arriving at Our Five-Bedroom Slice of Colonial History
These days Huntingdon House operates as a rather lovely five-bedroom boutique hotel, tucked away in the very heart of the working Satemwa tea estate, and getting to it is something of an adventure in itself. It’s a good five miles down an unpaved dirt road just to reach the front door, and the whole way along you pass field after field of tea bushes stretching out to the horizon, the famous hump of Thyolo Mountain rising up behind them. We happened to be visiting outside the main tea-picking season, which generally runs through the rainy months from December to April, so the fields were a good deal quieter than they’d be in peak production, though we did still spot a handful of workers out there with their baskets, picking away at the leaves regardless.
When we finally pulled up outside the house, we found ourselves looking at a single-storey bungalow with the most spectacular lawn out front you could imagine, surrounded by an absolutely immaculately manicured garden full of century-old trees that must have been planted not long after Maclean Kay himself first arrived. Honestly, it was about as quintessentially colonial a scene as you could possibly conjure up, right down to a proper croquet set laid out on the grass, mallets and hoops and all, as though someone might wander out at any moment in a Panama hat for a quick game before lunch. The whole place practically had us reaching for our pith helmets and ordering a gin and tonic.
The inside of the house was every bit as elegant as the outside had promised, decorated throughout with what we took to be largely original furnishings, giving it all a real air of old-fashioned gentility and refinement. We were shown up to our room, rather grandly named the Chapel Room, on account of it once having served as the family’s private place of worship, and it really was an enormous space, with ceilings a full six metres high and great big doors opening straight out onto our own private patio. The centrepiece of the whole room was a custom-made four-poster bed that practically had a postcode of its own. As for the bathroom, it was genuinely bigger than the entire floor space of our fifth-wheel trailer back home, complete with a vast clawfoot bath and a shower roomy enough for two without anyone having to apologise for elbows. It was, in short, all rather romantic.
Lunch had been laid out for us on a private table out on the house’s veranda, with simply lovely views stretching away across the garden and out over the rolling tea estate beyond, with the green slopes running off towards the haze in the distance. There was nobody else in sight, just the two of us, a starched white tablecloth, and the gentle clink of cutlery as the staff brought everything out course by course. The chef had gone to the trouble of preparing us a wonderful vegan pesto pasta dish, which wasn’t something we’d particularly expected to find on the menu out here in rural Malawi, given how meat-heavy most of the cooking tends to be in this part of the world. It was beautifully done, fresh basil and all, and honestly, the food throughout our entire stay at Huntingdon House turned out to be nothing short of amazing, course after course of it, each one a little better than the last.
After lunch, we settled in properly for what would turn out to be a couple of thoroughly relaxed days, the sort of days where you don’t so much as glance at a watch. Before dinner we made good use of that clawfoot bath, lighting a few candles for good measure, which felt every bit as romantic as it sounds, the steam curling up towards those six-metre ceilings. Dinner itself was served in what would once have been the main living room of the house, decorated in a style that looked to us very much like the 1950s, all heavy wood and faded floral upholstery, with a proper wood fire crackling away merrily in the grate and throwing long shadows up the walls. Once again, we found we’d been given the entire room to ourselves, just the two of us and the staff quietly coming and going with each course. We hadn’t had many chances on this trip to enjoy that sort of private space, just us and the fire and the candlelight, with nobody else’s conversation drifting over from another table, and it really was lovely, the kind of evening you remember long after the holiday photos have faded.
☕ A Lazy Morning and Off to the Tea Tasting
We’d planned for one more relaxed day before pressing on into Zambia, knowing full well it would likely be our last taste of this sort of unhurried colonial pampering for a while. We treated ourselves to what passed, for us, as a proper lie-in, although if we’re honest we still woke up at our usual time of around half past five in the morning, old habits being what they are after years of early starts on the road. Nobody was rushing us out of bed, mind, so we lay there for a good while longer than usual before finally hauling ourselves up. We made our way out to the veranda for breakfast, settling into the same chairs we’d had at lunch the day before, and once again it was simply perfect, the food every bit as amazing as it had been the day before, with proper coffee and a spread that put most hotel breakfasts we’d had on this trip rather firmly in the shade.
We’d signed ourselves up for the tea tasting session at half past ten, and were joined for the occasion by two thoroughly pleasant French ladies, a mother and her daughter, who’d evidently had the same idea and turned up at the appointed hour just as keen as we were. The tasting took place down at the estate’s factory, built originally back in 1937 and still very much earning its keep, which was about a ten-minute walk from the house along a network of dusty unpaved tracks winding between the tea bushes. It made for a very pleasant little stroll in the cool of the morning, passing field after field of tea bushes along the way, the bright green leaves still glistening with overnight dew, with estate workers busy weighing in the freshly picked tea as we wandered past, calling out a friendly greeting as we went, the whole scene looking very much as it must have done eighty or ninety years ago.
🫖 The Factory Tour: Lab Coats, Fourteen Teas and a Bumpy Ride Home
At the factory we were met by one of the supervisors, who escorted us through the factory yard past lorries being loaded and workers going about their business. Karen, ever the curious one, spotted a building rather plainly marked ‘breastfeeding room’ tucked away near the main gate and naturally wanted to know what that was about, given it wasn’t the sort of sign you’d see outside a tea factory back home. It turned out this was where local women bring the babies of mothers who are out working in the tea fields, so that the women can feed their little ones during the working day without having to trek all the way back to their villages and lose valuable picking time, which struck us as a thoughtful and practical bit of social provision for an estate that’s been operating since the 1920s.
The first part of the tour saw us sat down to watch a ten-minute video explaining the history of the Satemwa tea estate and exactly how the tea makes its way from leaf to packet, complete with some rather grainy old footage of the original plantation in its early days. It is, by any measure, an impressively run operation, and one with a genuinely long pedigree, given the estate has now been growing tea continuously for the best part of a century. During the peak tea production season, which falls in the rainy months from December through to April, the estate employs something like 2,500 people across the fields and the factory floor, working around the clock in shifts to keep up with the volume of leaf coming in. We gathered that almost all of Satemwa’s tea ends up in some of the biggest brands on the supermarket shelf, the sort you’d recognise instantly back home, blended away into teabags that most people drinking them would never imagine had come from a hillside in southern Malawi. Once the film had finished, the four of us were led next door into the tea-tasting room itself, which felt rather more like stepping into a science laboratory than a tea room, all stainless steel surfaces and rows of identical white cups. We were each handed a white lab coat to wear, along with a hair net, which gave the whole affair a slightly comic air none of us could quite take seriously, four grown adults shuffling about looking like extras from a hospital drama. Laid out on the table in front of us were fourteen different types of tea, all produced right there at Satemwa: black tea, green tea, several fruit teas, an oolong, an Earl Grey, and something that did its very best impression of a lapsang souchong, smoky and rather more convincing than we’d expected. We were each given a little cup and a spoon, and worked our way down the line, tasting a mouthful of each in turn, lukewarm as proper tasting tea always is, since boiling hot would scald the palate before you’d got anywhere near the end of the row. There was a spittoon provided too, for anyone who didn’t fancy swallowing a brew that wasn’t quite to their liking, though by the time we got to the last few we were rather past caring. We certainly had our favourites by the end, and one or two we’d happily never taste again, which we gather is rather the whole point of the exercise, learning your own palate one mouthful at a time.
From the tasting room we were taken on through the rest of the factory, following the whole production process from the drying of the leaves through to the cutting, the sorting into different grades, and finally the packing into great big bags ready for shipping off to buyers around the world, a process that has changed remarkably little since the factory was first built back in 1937. Walking through the working parts of the factory was, frankly, a little hair-raising, with belts and blades and great whirring drums everywhere you looked, exposed wiring trailing across the floor and ladders propped up against gantries with no rails to speak of, and we couldn’t help wondering whether the whole operation would have passed muster with the health and safety inspectors back home in Britain, let alone in the rather more litigious United States, where we suspect the whole place would have been shut down inside the hour and someone handed a clipboard full of improvement notices. As it happened, since we were visiting outside the main production season, most of the machinery stood idle, gathering dust until the rains came again and the leaf started flowing through in earnest, though the building itself was still stiflingly airless and surprisingly noisy even at half capacity, which left us wondering what on earth it must be like during the height of summer when everything’s running flat out, the heat from the drying fires presumably making the whole place feel like an oven and the noise of the sorting machines deafening. The last stop on the tour was the quality control room, where samples of every batch are collected, logged by hand in a great thick ledger that looked decades old, the pages soft and curling at the edges, and tasted before being sent off to overseas buyers for their approval ahead of shipping. The samples themselves are kept in old tin cans, not unlike paint tins, for up to three years at a time, stacked in rows along shelves that ran the length of the room, and the whole record-keeping system relies almost entirely on handwritten books rather than any computer, which we gathered is fairly typical practice across much of Africa even now, computers being expensive and unreliable things to maintain out here. Goodness only knows what would happen to a century of records and decades of carefully written tea-tasting notes should there ever be a fire in that one small room, given there wasn’t so much as a backup copy in sight anywhere on the premises. We’d asked so many questions along the way, being naturally nosy types, that we’d put ourselves rather behind schedule, so a truck was duly sent out from the house to collect us and get us back in time for lunch before the kitchen gave up on us entirely. We perched rather precariously on a couple of seats bolted into the open back of the truck, gripping on tightly to the side rails as we bounced and rattled our way back along the unpaved roads to Huntingdon House, tea bushes flashing past on either side and dust billowing up behind us the whole way, the two of us laughing at how undignified we must have looked, two middle-aged tourists clinging on for dear life in the back of a battered old farm truck.
🍰 Afternoon Tea on the Lawn
In the end, we decided to give lunch a miss altogether and opted instead for afternoon tea out on the lawn, which felt about as quintessentially English as it gets, right down to the wicker chairs and the little side table for the teapot. The food we’d been served throughout our stay had already been quite wonderful, so we were genuinely excited to see what they’d come up with for tea, half expecting them to outdo themselves again. The staff had set everything up for us in the shade of one of the estate’s great old trees, well over a century old by the look of its girth, and before long the food began arriving in earnest, plate after plate of it appearing as if from nowhere. We started with a neat little round of sandwiches to whet the appetite, cut into dainty triangles with the crusts off, followed by warm scones with jam and cream, a rich chocolate cake, and a fair few other sweet treats besides that we couldn’t begin to name. And of course, the Satemwa tea itself was poured from a handsome silver teapot, which put Karen instantly in mind of one her husband’s auntie used to own back in England, the sort that gets polished once a year and brought out only for special occasions. By the time we’d finished, we were thoroughly and contentedly stuffed and had to retreat to our room for a proper food coma, flopping onto that enormous four-poster bed without so much as taking our shoes off. It was considerably later in the evening before we’d recovered sufficiently to manage a late dinner.
Planning Your Visit to Huntingdon House
| 📍 Location | Satemwa Tea Estate, Box 6, Thyolo, Malawi |
|---|---|
| 🕖 Opening Times | Open year-round; check-in/check-out by arrangement (it is a private guesthouse, not a sight with fixed hours) |
| 📞 Phone | +265 99 362 9877 / +265 88 259 9717 (WhatsApp preferred) |
| ℹ️ Notes | Built in 1928 as the family home of Maclean Kay, founder of Satemwa Tea Estate; now a 5-suite colonial-style boutique guesthouse run by the Cathcart Kay family. Activities include tea tastings, guided walks, mountain biking, and croquet on the lawn. |
🎟️ Rates
| Room Type | Notes |
|---|---|
| 5 individually decorated suites | Mother’s Room, Father’s Room, The Nursery, Planters’ Suite, The Chapel — rates vary by season, contact for current pricing |
🚗 Getting There
Huntingdon House is roughly a 1.5-hour drive from Chileka International Airport (Blantyre), via the Thyolo tea-growing district. Self-drive, private transfer, or pre-arranged pickup can be organised directly with the lodge — advance booking is recommended given the rural location and variable phone signal.
The Best Time to Visit Huntingdon House
🌤️ Cool and Dry Season (May to August)
This is the most pleasant time to visit Malawi, with sunny days, clear skies and little to no rain. The landscape stays green into May before drying out, and evenings turn properly cold, especially in the highlands and on the Nyika Plateau, where frost is possible. Game viewing improves steadily from June onwards as animals begin gathering near water.
What to pack: layered clothing for warm days and cold nights, a warm fleece or jacket for early morning game drives, a hat and gloves for Nyika, comfortable walking shoes, sun protection and a torch for chilly evenings.
☀️ Hot and Dry Season (September to October)
The bush is now fully dried out and vegetation is thin, making this the best period for spotting wildlife as animals cluster around permanent water sources. October is the hottest and most dramatic month for safaris, right before the rains return. This is also high season, so popular parks are busier and rates rise.
What to pack: lightweight, breathable clothing in neutral colours, a wide-brimmed hat, strong sun cream, plenty of water, sunglasses and a light layer for cool early mornings.
🌧️ Hot and Wet Season (November to March)
Heavy rain, humidity and dramatic thunderstorms define this season, with the heaviest downpours from December to February. Many lakeshore lodges close, and roads can flood, making travel harder. On the upside, the landscape turns lush and vivid, and this is the best period for birdwatching, with many migrant species present.
What to pack: a waterproof jacket and dry bag, quick-drying clothing, sturdy waterproof footwear, insect repellent, a power bank for possible outages and a flexible itinerary.
🌿 Shoulder Season (April)
April bridges the rains and the dry season. Storms ease, temperatures stabilise, and lake lodges begin reopening after the wet months. The scenery is at its greenest and most vibrant, crowds are thinner, and accommodation deals are often easy to find.
What to pack: a light rain jacket, breathable daywear, a warmer layer for evenings, comfortable walking shoes for damp trails and a camera for the lush scenery.
Overall Best Time to Visit
Taking everything into account, May to October is the overall best time to visit Malawi, offering dry weather, comfortable temperatures and strong wildlife viewing throughout. Within that window, July and August are the most reliable months, combining mild conditions, minimal rain and easy road access. Those chasing peak safari drama should aim for September or October, while travellers wanting greener scenery, fewer crowds and better value should consider April or May. Whatever the season, Malawi offers something distinctive, from dramatic storms and blooming orchids in the wet months to clear lake waters and thriving wildlife in the dry ones.
Malawi – Month-by-Month
Visiting Malawi December to March
These are the wettest months, characterized by torrential downpours in the afternoon. Afternoon temperatures are around 29°C/84°F and the humidity is high.
Visiting Malawi in April
Rain is dwindling and so are the temperatures. Daytime temperatures still reach 27°C/81°F but evenings and early mornings can be chilly.
Visiting Malawi in May
This is the end of summer and the rain has stopped. Temperatures are relatively cool, typically 16°C/61°F in the morning and 26°C/79°F in the afternoon. Nighttime temperatures start to drop.
Visiting Malawi in June – August
The average morning temperature is 14°C/57°F. Bring warm clothing for the cold morning game drives in open vehicles. Afternoons will be more pleasant, with temperatures around 25°C/77°F. Nyika Plateau with its high altitude is much colder.
Visiting Malawi in September & October
he heat gradually builds, and the first rains bring relief from very dry conditions. Daytime temperatures will be around 29°C/84°F in September and 31°C/88°F in October, the latter being the hottest month. Peak temperatures can be much higher.
Visiting Malawi in November
This month is unpredictable – the rain starts in the afternoons. Temperatures are between 20°C/68°F in the morning and 31°C/88°F in the afternoon.
More to Explore
