Iringa to Malawi

Monday 24 March to Friday 28 March - five riding days - to a rest day at Chitimba Beach, Malawi.

Leaving Iringa, swollen rivers indicated how much rain had fallen.



On the second day, we reached the halfway point between Cairo and Cape Town (taking into account the gap in Kenya). Rain in the afternoon and/or overnight was the norm for our last four days in Tanzania.


The first overnight out of Iringa was a bush camp on logging roads - looks okay here, but heavy rain overnight made it a quagmire for some people - we were lucky and stayed fairly dry.




We spent Wednesday night at Mbeya, our last overnight in Tanzania. The nearby road junction was a hive of activityand the busses were swarmed by local merchants selling fruits and nuts and biscuits.

We continue to be amazed at the number of young who look after their younger siblings.

Thursday 27 March and start our last day in Tanzania by taking a long steep climb into the hills south of Mbeya, passing corn, cabbage, and potato fields.

It's all hand labour, typically by women.

Usually, though, it is men who transport the goods to market, again mostly by non-mechanized means - a lot of bicycles - we've seen three cases of beer on the back carrier.

The top of the ascent is the town of Tukuyu. The popularity of football was apparent from the Barcelona umbrella in the background.

Leaving Tukuyu was a total change of scenery - now much more tropical in appearance.

We had a long descent and truly spectacular scenery. Lots on banana production...

... and tea plantations...

...where again it was women who worked in the fields...

We continued the descent towards the Malawi border with views of steep hillsides and the north end of Lake Malawi.

Then there was the border crossing into Malawi where the main feature seemed to be the crooks who wanted to change money, and in the absence of any visible bureau de change, were used by many of us to change our remaining Tanzanian shillings, which were about 1200 to the dollar, into Malawi Kwatcha which are about 150 to the dollar. With numbers like that, it's not hard to see the potential for them to shift decimal points as well as all their other sleight-of-hand scams. They're a bunch of crooks and a number of our group were cheated. Fortunately we were not, though they tried.