Another Country :-)
Trip Start
May 31, 2006
1
48
68
Trip End
Oct 14, 2006
1st September - 3 months since I departed the UK, sometimes hard to believe it's been that long, other times seems much longer!! This was a long drive day so we left at dawn and traveled West through Tanzania towards the border, at around lunch time the main highway passes through the middle of Mikumi National Park, so we had all the tarpaulins up to do a spot of wildlife spotting...we are certainly improving...Warthog, Elephant, Buffalo, Giraffe, Eagle, Zebra, Baboon and Impala...people got so carried away that they even started calling out when they spotted chickens and turkeys...but generally the consensus was less impressed at those spottings...sorry Greg/Jamie! We arrived at a nice little campsite with local hut like buildings for it's bar, so we passed the evening waiting for dinner to be cooked sitting by little coal burners in the hut...entertaining each other with stories...great fun...then it was an early night after dinner for another early start to get us across the border. Not long into our morning drive I fell asleep and slept soundly until about 8am when all of a sudden we had a blow out of a front tyre, Peter did an amazing job ensuring it came to a safe halt...something I believe is easier said than done with a front tyre and I wouldn't like to have had to in a car...let alone our big green truck. After the tyre was changed we continued the journey seeing a jackknifed lorry down an embankment, but past that point we had a fairly uneventful journey to the border through a nice little town called Tukuyu for supplies. At the Malawi border Dee had a little trouble trying to get in, but in the end with a little sweet talking from him and Ronnie they agreed he could enter and go to a big town on Monday to get his proper visa, so we were on our way and in Malawi. We arrived at Chitimba, on the banks of lake Malawi, with stunning view across the lake, it was quite windy, so the waves were quite large and it didn't look anything like a lake, more like a sea...with beautiful white sands...we chilled in the bar, cleaned out the truck, as it was my truck cleaning duty and passed the time until dinner was ready. Then Peter, myself, Sara and a couple of others sat around the fire until it's embers were fading before heading to bed.
