We left Mpika with 1330km to reach Dar es Salaam - 330km to the border and 1000km to Dar. We planned to cover at least 800km for the day.40km into the ride we saw a storm gathering ahead of us and we quickly stopped and changed into rain gear and were thoroughly rained on!
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| Playing with a Chameleon at dawn |
Just before we reached the Zambia/Tanzania border in Nakonde we were fast running out of fuel and there was no fuel station in site. We stopped at a village to ask where we could find petrol and were pointed to a little house. To our surprise they had all grades of fuel, from diesel to unleaded to normal high grade fuel all stacked in 25litre barrels. Apparently what happens in these parts of the world is that when the truck drivers run out of cash they sell their fuel to the locals!
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| Filling station - who knows with what, but it kept us going |
Tumi started dishing out chewing gum to the village kids (Thendo was not impressed!! Said something about pathetic of him to appear a UN food security and aid worker). Tumi says: “all I wanted was to give the villagers something to chew on when we left!!”
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| Tumi's cousins, nephews and nieces |
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| Dishing out gum |
We got to the border and as usual we were swamped by the “border entrepreneurs” offering to show us this and that, help us to fill in the forms and sell us whatever currency you might imagine. When we walked into the border office to have our papers stamped, the official was busy with her lunch and Tumi walked straight up to her desk, grabbed the stamp and took matters into his own hands and off we went. (He is crazy!!!)
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| Given that the most powerful person in Africa is an official with a
stamp, we wonder how she felt being temporarily stripped of her power.
The look in Tumi's eyes showed that power, as for a moment he refused to
stamp my papers. |
Then it rained hard, like seriously hard, and we knew we weren’t gonna make our 800km journey. Whilst we were waiting for the rain to let up, we asked a guy how far the nearest town was, to which he answered “100 000km”. Thendo rephrased the question, to which he answered with a straight stern voice, “100 000km!”. We realized we have a long way to go and then we asked another guy when he thought the storm would stop, to which he answered, “around May but maybe April”. WTF!? so we geared up and started on our 100 000km ride with rain for the next 5 months!
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| Looking up to the heavens |
We slept at the next B&B about 35km down the road….
1 comment:
ahhh man. i am in tears laughing so much. 100 000KM!!!!
Where do you make this shhh up?
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