I’ve come to Malawi on an art safari. My friends are painting the tea-pickers right now, and I really should be with them. But last night Mt Mulanje glowed blood-red in the sunset, looked irresistible in fact, and so here I am instead, scrambling through steaming-hot rainforest at 1500 metres.

The sound of trickling water lightens the oppressive gloom. My temples throb as I tug at creepers, pulling myself up the steep, ice smooth mud path. Ahead of me my guide, Tom, moves easily, bounding forward barefoot. He flicks through a magazine casually as he goes, stopping momentarily to turn and point over my shoulder: “Look, Lujeri lodge, tea fields.” 

I turn around but there’s only a primeval green wall, a sliver of horizon and…what? A dirty, ragged white shirt, it looked like, flitting across the path just below me. 

“Hello?” I shout. No answer. The undergrowth is dense and untouched on both sides of the track. I carry on but within seconds I see, out of the corner of my eye, it again. There’s somebody following us, I’m certain. I go back to inspect the path, calling to Tom as I descend, but there’s absolutely no sign of any human life. Within seconds the forest seems to close in on me, and suddenly my boiling-hot head is freezing cold. Then a terrible pain hits the back of my neck, and I’m so dizzy that Tom has to steady my arm.

“You have food?” he asks nervously. I nod, tell him there’s an apple in my pack. He bites into it, chews slightly, spits the flesh into the foliage and pulls at my arm to move quickly upwards.

“I can’t, I can’t move,” I pant. “I’ve got to rest.”

“No, no,” Tom stammers, “Not here.” I ignore him and lean back against a fallen tree. A lizard slinks across my boot and butterflies circle my sweaty arms. They become blurry ghosts as I fall into a hazy stupor.

I’m dragged back to reality by soldier ants sinking their jaws into my ankles. They swarm over me before I can react, their sharp pinpricks spreading to my groin, belly, and back. I drop my pack, tear off my drenched shirt and swipe clumsily at them. They’re strong, it takes two or three tugs to remove each one, and even then some of their heads stay embedded in my skin.

“I tell you,” Tom says, scraping them from my back, “Now keep moving…”

The sun glitters on a wet, silver rock face that cascades out of the treetops. We suck moisture from the mossy surface and then skirt its immense flank, climbing three rotting wood ladders and shallow roughly-cut steps leading to a plateau above the Ruo Falls. From there, through the mist that’s evaporating from the forest canopy, I can see Lujeri, the lodge I started out from six hours ago, a gleaming white pinpoint among pea green tea fields. 

“The apple,” Tom shouts above the roar of the falls, “I spit it as offering for spirits.”

“What? What spirits?”

“The ones you just see and feel.”

“But I didn’t feel anything…”

“You do,” he says, “The cold, the pain…they still strong here, on Mulanje…” He goes on to explain about a Dutch lady who went missing on this very mountain. The army searched for her, as did a Dutch rescue team. The locals told them that they just had to make an offering to the spirits, like the apple, or any sign of respect, and she’d be safe. But the foreigners laughed at this, and subsequently their month-long search turned up nothing, not even a body. She’s still missing, three years on.

Ignoring the worn path to the Madzeka hut we climb a few hundred metres onwards to an un-named peak left of the falls. The forest seems to have cleansed me, like a filter, and as I look over Mozambique and Malawi at the green serrated horizon I’ve a feeling of being more detached than ever from ‘down there’. White-necked crows circle the thermals and ‘caw’ at us. They look like I feel. Untainted. Complete.

We scramble back down, eventually, running fast over slippery mud to try to stay upright, through the forest and on into the villages. We’ve returned to the realm of people, and although they’re as decent as people can be, the world still looked far better to me when there were fewer of us about. The villages smell warm, as places do when humans gather together, a wood smoke tinge, roasting cobs, the smothering heat of the day still trapped by the buildings. We skid past babies sitting alone before mud huts, staring wide eyed at us, and older kids who scatter in fear, their cries of “wazungu!” (“white person!”) shattering the peace of the banana groves.

I leave Tom at his village and cross a derelict wooden suspension bridge into Lujeri tea estate.

A rainstorm breaks as I pass the hut of an old lady. Bent over double after years of hard labour she welcomes me in with bright blue eyes and proceeds to sing through the downpour. When the rain eases a guy offers me a lift to my lodge on his motorbike and we speed away between the bumpy tea fields, squinting our eyes against the bugs that smash into our foreheads as we go.

At the lodge the others on my safari are still keenly painting the tea pickers. They call for me to join them. A week ago I drew like a two year old. But they’ve encouraged me since then, helped me to realise that you don’t really see a landscape until you paint it, and now I can notice many colours, shapes and textures that have previously been hidden from me. I’ve hardly picked up my camera since I held that first brush. It feels fake now I’ve started to paint, like driving through a country after you’ve walked across it. Alright if you’re short of time, but nearly not as satisfying as the real thing.

The road to Zomba is littered with police roadblocks. At one a pretty, braided girl pushes a wheelchair containing a terribly crippled boy. He offers us a ginger kitten for sale. Instead we buy red mushrooms for dinner. Tradesmen rush from a nearby village, begging to sell us carvings.

“Please buy boss, I need money for medicine,” an albino in a sky blue shirt says, offering us a shiny hippo, “My brother, he dying of malaria.” Shockingly, in Malawi stories like this are true more often than they are graft.

After three hours on the road I’m tired of seeing the faces whiz by. I feel like a king in a land of paupers, and no sane man can stand that for long. I yearn to exchange polite chatter for raw laughter and comfy seats for mud floors.

Yet again I leave my friends to their painting in a village near Zomba Forest Lodge, climb up into the thick forest, and walk the misty plateau for two days. The paths are empty but for the wood-workers. Barefoot women carry three metre long raw logs on their heads and babies on their backs, and men restrain bicycles loaded high with weighty logs, guiding them downhill to town for less than 200 Kwacha (£1) a day. A Rasta woodcutter, his bright smile bursting from the blackest skin, warns me that two lions have been seen on the plateau recently, hassling villagers and killing livestock.

“And take care by the liver,” he says (Malawians pronounce most R’s as L’s), “Be leady when you closs, plenty mamba snakes live there.”

I pass Chingwe’s Hole – an unexplored cave system that used to be a dump for lepers, the dead, and often live criminals in the 1970’s and 80’s – skirt the north edge of the plateau where clear quartz sticks out from the red earth verges, fjord the river – with no sign of mambas thankfully – and rest at Emperor’s View. A heavy mist lifts to reveal Mt Mulanje and the Lower Shire valley, which from here is ridge upon hazy yellow ridge laying back to the southern horizon in ever decreasing paleness.

Samango monkeys holler at me from the safety of the mossy tree-tops. The valley’s lights flicker on. Villages miles apart, lit by just a single bulb, fade away as the mist rolls in once more, heralding a fierce storm that forces me to shelter in the forest. The mud path, battered into smooth submission by millions of bare feet, is a slippery gash, illuminated by the lightening forks that flash at my back. The accompanying thunder battles with drum beats that echo from the surrounding forest and draw me onwards into the darkness.

Shrieks and beats rise to a crescendo as I enter a clearing bordered with creepers and eucalyptus trees to see a figure somersaulting in the shadows. Men wearing grass anklets, skirts and headdresses stamp and jump furiously, their grimaces flashing in the light of paraffin-lamps held by a circle of villagers and my painting friends, for whom this impromptu dance is being performed. The grass clearing morphs into a mud bath as the feet pound. For a minute the clouds part and the stars throw spotlights on the band – rasta men thrashing tom toms, yelling at the moon and the mountain, a drum kit made from cans and car parts, and two guitars fashioned from cooking oil tins and pallet wood. I sit among the drummers, noticing that their drumsticks are literally sticks (they disintegrate regularly as the beats get more frantic - the men go into the forest periodically to break off new pairs) and knowing that after this every gig I see in England will seem phoney by comparison.

Just before midnight the music and shouts die away, leaving only the rhythmic chirp of the cicadas.

“We’re going tomorrow, but we shall return,” says Mary-Anne, a friend who’s been sketching masterpieces all evening by paraffin-light.

“And when you come back,” the villagers chant as they drift into the forest, “We shall be waiting for you.”