22 Jan

22 January 2011

Our last night at Aguia Negra was very short as Johan and Ralph were up and gone by 4am, we got up to see them off and then started packing and we left at 5am with the sky just getting light and the clouds starting to clear.  We were heading north hoping to get as far as Tete some 900km away.  As we got onto the main road, we could see the thunder clouds building and before 6am we were in very heavy torrential rain, we thought it was going to be a small patch of light rain so we did not put on our dry suits!  How wrong we were, we eventually got out of the rain at about 10.30 and we had been wet to our underwear for that entire time!!   We had stopped and put on warmer clothes as this was the first time that we had been cool during our trip and it was great to be cool but not great to be wet all the time.

Northern Mozambique is very developed once you get past Chimoio with one village after the other, making our trip very slow.  The scenery was fantastic, lush tropical growth and all the rivers running.  The roads were reasonable, some patches of new road and some of the old pot holed sections, these sections were really bad with traffic swopping over onto the wrong side of the road.  There were plenty of big trucks heading for Zimbabwe and Malawi most of them driving at incrediable speeds.  My bike was running low on petrol in a small village about 90km from Tete and we stopped to try and find a filling station, nothing there and so we were reduced to buying fuel out of containers at an inflated price!  (See pics)

We arrived in Tete about an hour before sunset, which we thought would be fine for putting up our tent and sorting out something to eat.  The bridge over the Zambezi is being repaired and traffic only goes one way for half an hour at a time, we managed to get the time right by pure luck and after lots of pushing and shoving to get onto the bridge we were over fairly quickly.  The signs for a camping site directed us onto the road running next to the Zambezi, we were on this road which got worse and worse with huge pools of raw sewerage and my favorite sand, I just kept thinking what a lovely smell and sight I would be if I managed to fall off into this mess.  (Smokey Joe I managed to negotiate all this on sand and mud and did not fall off once!!)  Once we got to the camping site we realized that it was definitely not operational and the locals pointed us down the road to a big house at the end of the road.  We arrived there dusty, exhausted and I am sure a bit smelly from the sewerage which we probably put our feet into.  Granny Monika came out of the house, took one look at us and told us that she runs a fine establishment and it is not cheap!!  I think that she took pity on us (me especially) and offered us a reduced rate!  What a wonderful stay we had, once we had had a shower and washed the dust and smell off we looked more or less respectable. Villa von Habsburg was one of the highlights of our trip so far and we definitely made a friend with Granny Monika!  Thank you Monika. 

After a very good breakfast at Villa von Habsburg we set off for the next village, we rode through the village and tried to avoid Sewerage Road and landed up in some of the poorest areas with really bad roads and filth and rubbish laying all over the place.  We needed to re-fuel again and found a very small filling station and without local knowledge (thanks to John Jones) we would have driven past this without finding it, we now headed for the border between Mozambique and Malawi.  Getting out of Mozambique was a pleasant experience with the officials extremely friendly and helpful, this was not the case on the Malawian side, immigration was a breeze and then the customs started, first they wanted us to fill in a form and they would only deal with the fixers so I had a fixer with the worst case of halitosis I have ever had the bad luck to experience helping me, and we had to work on African time, two Fantas, a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits consumed by the customs officials before the very tedious task of filling in the form could start and then out to the auto teller and then into the bank to deposit the import duty and then back to the customs (an hour and a half later and USD10 to each fixer) we managed to get out of the border post.  We had to pay KT10 000 for third party for both bikes which Larry purchased while waiting for me to complete the process.  We were now ready for our trip to Cape Maclear on Lake Malawi.  Driving through Malawi it is just wall to wall people, lots of small villages and police road blocks (very friendly and just let us through) and the roads are really good. We were told that there would be no problem with fuel in Malawi, but found that many of the filling stations have no fuel.  My bike was running low on fuel about 30km from Cape Maclear so we decided to head for Monkey Bay, a detour of about 10km to refuel only to find that they had no fuel so we decided to push on and when I ran out to siphon some from Larry’s bike, once we turned off the road onto the gravel / sand we found a filling station which had fuel and my bike took 15,99 liters and it has a 16l tank!!  The road was really terrible with lots of corrugations and a little bit of soft sand.  We arrived at Fat Monkey camping site just as it was getting dark, just enough light to put up our tent and get set for the night.  Camping is really cheap here, costs about R20 per person per night.  We will be staying here for about 3 nights, weather is great not so hot and camp nice and lots of things that we can do around here and we can get our laundry done as well!! And we have internet that works!!!!

S