Tanzania2

Nov 15th ; Today was just as stressful as yesterday!!
The only additional stress was that we were invited to watch the South Africa Vs Wales rugby game in the owners house!
Game finished, we went to the restaurant and treated ourself to a seafood platter - WOW
We had crayfish, prawns, fish fillets, calimari and octopus! It was very good.
After a good feed it was off to bed ready to move on in the morning.

Nov 16th ; We regreatable left the paradise and drove in search of the big smoke.
The drive to Dar was good, nothing too bad.
We arrived in plenty of time so stopped at Shoprite for a look around. After getting things we realy did not need we followed the road around the the ferry terminal to catch the ferry across to the south beach area.
It was a very originsed ferry and we were on the next boat to leave and chugging across the ocean in no time.

Patrick had heard of somewhere called Sunrise Beach Resort, so we went looking for that.

Well it turns out that most of Tanzania have heard of Sunrise Beach Resort!!!
It was packed to the rafter with people of every colour and denomination imaginable!!!
Not very happy with the amount of people here we sat and ahd a cold coke and people watched for a bit.

It turns out that everyone comes here over the weekend and buggers off again late sunday afternoon.

By the time we were thinking aboout getting some dinner everyone had gone!

Pleased to be one of the few left, we settled in for the night, ready to fight the hawkers and touts at the harbour tomorrow morning as we tried to get to Zanzibar................

Nov 21st ; Recovered from the Zanzibar trip it was time to leave the big smoke and go South again.
We left Sunrise with the plan of getting to Iringa.
Well how quicly plans can change!!!!! We arrived at the ferry terminal to find a long queue of stationary cars! After waiting for 40mins - this is "Patrick time", it was only 20!! - we turned around and tried to find the lope road to Dar, which avoids the ferry crossing.
The road was not too bad, just a lot of HGV's which were too heavy to go over on the ferry.
We were soon hiting Dar traffic, with lead to Patrick becoming "very rude word man" again! After far to many rude words to even begin to repeat we were through and out the other side fo Dar, heading off southwest to Iringa.

The road, known as the Darzam road, goes through Mikumi National Park and out up into the Southern Highlands. The sceanary was amazing, the car was going well and Patrick was happy.
UNTIL........ we dropped into a valley, the outside temperature rocketed to 38 degrees and then we had to climb out of the other side of the valley. Well, guess what.....??!
The car started to overheat!!!!!!!!!!

That was it, Patrick well and truely flew off of the handle!! HE went MAD. I have seen him pissed off before but this was something else!!
I sat very quietly in the passenger seat whilst Patrick came very close to a nuclear explosion!!

The rest of the drive to Riverside camp, was done in a tense uneasy silence.
We arrived at Riverside just after 6pm. Neither of us could find a reception, so this did not help things! Eventually we found someone who said that reception was closed, but we could camp anywhere we wanted to.
So, finding a spot to camp, the tense silence was broken with a huge argument about nothing!!!!!!!

Argument over, Patrick ran Greg to pick his brains about the car.
Within 5 mins, the argument was forgotten, and we laughing and joking whilst cooking dinner!

Nov 22nd ; The day started with a cup of coffee and a look at the maps to see where we get to today.
Mbaya was only about 180kms from Riverside, so there was a good chance we could get all of the way into Malawi today.

With a rough idea of where we could make it to, we were off, with Gerty talking to us all of the way.

Even stopping in Mbaya for fuel, we still managed to get to the broder by 3pm. The Tanzania side was a breeze and we were through within 10mins.
The Maliwi side took longer but all in all the whole crossing took 30mins!!
Not only had we had a quick crossing, when we entered Malawi, the clocks went back 1 hour to GMT+2 - so we gained an extra hours driving!!
This meant that we could easliy make it to Livingstonia - well Mushroon Farm Lodge 5km's this side of Livingstonia.

With only 10km's to the Lodge, Gerty said that it would still be another 30mins of driving before we arrived! What the heck was she on about, there is no way it can take us 30mins to drive 10km's.
Well, again Gerty proved us wrong, it actually took us 45mins!!!
The road was heart stopping!! It consisted of a dirt track marginally wider than the car, which twisted and turned it way up from 400m to 1200m!!!
Someone had numbered the hair-pin bends too, there was 15 of them with the 10km streach!!

So with the car in low range we inched our way up the loose shingled dirt track to the Lodge.
We arrived at the Lodge, releived to make it in one piece, to find that there was no facilities for roof-top tent camping!!
So, sod the budget, we took a room with a balcony over looking the valley onto the lake.

The side of the room overlooking the valley had no wall, just a mozi net which could be pulled across.
So after a good chat with the owner and a good feed we went to bed with the mozi net open.