We’d leave the lodge in the sunshine of a beautiful day, driving the 2 hours to Machame gate of Kili National Park in the bus loaded to the gunwales with equipment and porters. Once there, it’s all business. The porters start unloading and dividing up the equipment and bags, hurrying over to an ancient scale
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The Tan Swiss lodge would be very good to us. We stayed so long, we started to feel like part of the family, chatting up a storm with the owner who assured us that being pulled over and fined for imaginary offenses was just ‘par for the course’ here in Tanzania. He’d been fined three
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Driving out of the big city of Mbeya took about an hour and a half, all the while avoiding tuc-tucs and motorbikes that insisted upon passing on the left. Trucks blocked up the roads and these little pests would just weave their way through any gap they deemed large enough to fit through. But after
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Chitimba Camp is pretty much the last place to stay north along the lake. So we decided to cycle out toward the border with Tanzania as far as we could go. This would reduce the cycling distance to the border on ‘crossing’ day. But with the first tail wind on our journey, we positively flew
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After a scrummy brekkie of egg and bacon (bacon … we hadn’t seen bacon in a while) we headed out to start the day’s cycling in the direction of Makuzi Beach, 60 odd k’s away. We’d been looking forward to Makuzi since we entered Malawi so you can imagine our shock and horror when we
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So we stayed at Chembe Eagle’s Nest another day, and I rested, but Suzann wouldn’t allow me to cycle until my resting heart rate was satisfactory, in her professional opinion. Hence, it would be her out front on the bike, heading for Senga Bay. Despite the fact that we left quite early from Chembe, she
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… and there it came to pass … the runs finally caught up with us … Still thinking that we’d take some time out to take a catamaran trip out to the island in the reserve to snorkel amongst the chiclids, we sat down to a meal at the lodge. The wind was up but
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Dedza Pottery Lodge was a great place to stay and we had a good, restful night. Packing up the sky looked purple and bruised, the clouds heavily pregnant with the first rains. A local camper told us the weather forecast had predicted showers from 11am. That would give us a few hours to cycle dry,
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… so we never did get to cycle much of a ‘symbolic’ distance on the Great East Road even though the condition of the road did improve from the Luangwa bridge toward Chipata. The reason for this is simply … distance. Chipata is still over 300km from the Luangwa bridge and with the increasing number
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