Well its been a bloody long time since I've done this and sice I've last written here I have crossed a boarder, had a few journeys which fit in both the comical and 'blimy that was nice' category as well as doing a three day beast of a trek. So all in all I think it is best that I break my blog down as the last posts have been a bit below par.

Zanzibar to Mbeya

Well shortly after writting my last entry we took the over night ferry from Zanzibar bazk to Dar Es Salaam. This journey now has its own place in the comical journeys list but at the time it looked like it could possibly go in the 'sh*t I'm about to die' list or the 'sycronised vomiting' list. When we boarded the catamaran there was an initial rush of joy. Air con, matresses on the floor and comments such as 'haha this is the nicest place we have stayed for weeks.' Unfortunately anyone who has taken a catamaran knows that such joy is short lived if the sea becomes choppy. I was snoozing quite happily finding the roll of the boat relatively soothing until I was woken from my dreams by Marte's sweaty hand on my arm with the age old classic, 'Pete, you awake?'

PETE'Well I am now'
MARTE'The sea's really rough'
PETE(silence)
MARTE 'And its raining really hard'
PETE (more silence)

I'm not quite sure what I was meant to do about the weather given that I didn't have space for God like powers my back pack. So I was now awake and I luckily too could think of my slow death as the boat rocked and rolled with the ocean. I did console myself that I probably could survive at least a few hours being the sea was the Indian Ocean on not the English Channel. But my death soon became second in my mind as what could only be described as a synphony of vomiting started. All around us people were parting with their dinners, lunches and breakfasts. One poor lady must have been wretching and vomiting for a good four five hours with breaks of only a few minutes between each attack of sea sickness. There was even one rather comical moment when about four, maybe even fiven people, vomited in perfect syncronisation. What can you do but take a few deep breaths, hope it doesn't happen to you and turn up the discman.

So we stayed the day/night in Dar before we got a train to Mbeya which is near the boarder with Malawi. It was the first train journey of our trip and a truely delightful one as well. The line was chinese built and chugged its way through mountains, jungle and Tanzanian countryside. Train is easily the best way to travel long distances. We had bunks to sleep in, staff to come in and offer you lunch and dinner and was a really nice and comfortable way to travel. The journey took a little over 24 hours, with a few more hours waiting for I'm not sure what at the station but I'd take it any day over sitting in the same seat for 12 hours on a bus. In Mbeya we stayed the night at a releatively nice place with a TV in our room which allowed some late night watching of the Tyra Banks show and Milan v Barca semi final. Although it was tempting to stay another night and indulge in some TV action whilst I tried to kick my cold we moved on to Malawi.

Mbeya to Vwaza
Malawi is totally different to the countries we have been to so far on this trip. Its a lot poorer, a lot less developed, things somehow take even longer to do but the one thing it still has is really nice people. We hopped on a few minibuses and shared taxis and found ourselves in Malawi. Thankfully neither of us needed a visa and kicked on to Chitimba beach on Lake Malawi. Malawi is really popular with overland trucks which are kind of like long tours which people take who don't want to travel independently. I've nothing against this, until I got to Chitimba. We had had a lond days travelling and the last thing you want to see when you are travel weary, got the sinuses fully of snot is three overland trucks parked at the front of your camp site. Given that the next one was a 5 km walk away we just couldn't be bothered to walk anywhere else. I don't care about people getting pissed up when they are in Africa; it is great fun after all. But to see thirty people in wigs downing shots at five in the afternoon I could have closed my eyes and I would have been in Playa de Americas, Tenerife. The thing that really annoyed me is that these people get back on their big bus and go to another campsite somewhere else on the lake and do the same again. Why come all the way to Africa to do this? Go to Spain! They don't meet any African's, don't eat any of the local food and certainly don't realise they are in one of the ten poorest countries in the world. I am sure not all the companies are bad but I was in a pretty bad mood when I got there with killer cold (colds ARE worse for men) and they just made my mood worse. Anyway.....

So after a night camping on the beach we moved on pretty sharpish in the morning. Where we were staying was not a town or anything, just a patch of sand, so we didn't know what our chances of getting transport was like on the main road. After twenty minutes of seeing only a couple of very full looking mini buses. A white car came glistening up the road so I pushed Marte out in to the road and to look as pretty as possible and bugger me it worked. Our saviour was Father Jim a Catholic Canadian missionary who was going exactly the same place we were, Muzuzu. I have never been so happy to spend four hours with an elderly Priest and he was the nicest of blokes. He was even friends with the Canadian peace activist released with Norman Kember from Iraq and we has a very pleasant jounrney in his little Toyota Starlet. Father Jim was a true star.

We stayed at a nice place back packer friendly place in Muzuzu and got our filling of sausages. It was a nice sleepy town and a good place to stock up before we moved on to the national parks close by. We first went to Vwaza Marsh National Park which was very small park and when we got there, there was a wide eyes Dutch bloke who was jabbering to the staff something about how he had just seen an elephant four metres away when walking round grounds. Needless to say, with elephants roaming freely about there wasn't a whole lot you could do by yourself as you needed an armed ranger to do the walks. Even going to the toilet turned in to a bit of an adventure. But the acomodation was really tastefully done and it is certainly an experience going to sleep to the sound of hippo's. In the morning we took a short two hour walk around the lake and it was nice to be able to see wildlife on foot rather than out the top of a minibus. We walked through herds of impala and troops of baboons as well as a close up look at the hippos. I did have my second bowl loosening moment of our trip when a herd of elephants got a little bit close for my comfort anyway. In Marte's world of 'Illogica' she had previously wanted to go to bed early the night before being scared of basically just the dark. But on seeing a herd of potentially very dangerous and lethal elephants she looked happy as anything as we creeped round a bush to make our retreat. I on the other hand was thinking how small our guides gun suddenly seemed.

Later the same day we took a cultural trip in to a nearby village. For 5 USD each they collected what seemed like every woman in the local villages and treated us to an hour or so of traditional dancing and singing. It was really great to watch and hear especially when Marte was dragged up to join in. What a shame traditional dances in Malawi are mainly for women! We took the option the next day to stay the night in the village and to look around the other villages in the area. What an experience.

I don't know if I enjoyed it, well I'm pretty sure that I didn't, but I guess you should travel to broaden your knowledge and ideas and this certainly helped with poor. I have seen a lot of poverty on this trip so far, especially in the poorer parts of Kampala but life in the countryside in Malawi was, to me at least, pretty desperate. We have been away for four months so it was quite strange that after all that time I got the first culture shock of the trip. When we arrived we took a long walk around all the villages and all I could keep on thinking was 'god, I AM actually really lucky.' The peoples staple food is Nsima, which they eat all over Southern and Eastern Africa. All it is is Maize (sweet corn) flour mixed with water and if they are lucky boiled pumpkin and pumpkin leaves. The hardest thing was; I hate it all. And this is what they eat EVERY day and I could barely force it down my throat. The people worked so so hard just to scrape out any kind of survival. Even the old women bent in two were working in the fields. I could go on and on about all the things I saw but it all seems kind of pointless now but I will never forget it.

So after staying the night in the village we got a lift in the back of the local ambulance to the nearest town, Rumphi, to plan our next move.

Nyika National Park

Once in Rumphi we faced the problem of getting to Nyika National Park as there was no public transport. The main local eatery in town also doubled as a bit of an information hub and we asked one of the waiters about transport to Nyika. He pointed us to a Dutch bloke who turned out to be working for the national parks authority and it turned out he could give us a lift. So we settled down to some delicious BBQ meat and a few cold beers and did our shopping for the immenent trek which we had coming up a Nyika. Our lift was supposed to pick us up at 9 in the morning and then that changed to 2 in the afternoon, we eventually got in his vehicle (which resembled a tank) at aroun 7.30 in the evening to set off for the three hour climb to the national park. He did have a hell of an escuse though. He was in charge of national park security in the north of the country and the previous nights a group of park staff were attacked by Zambian poachers and one was left for dead in the bush so they had been out all day looking for him. Hence Pete and Marte spent the day in a small Malawian town drinking lots of bottles of coke and eating lots of stew. It was probably also the reason the mans car was loaded to the axel with African men dressed in khakis carrying very big guns.

When we finally arrived at Nyika it was dark and cold so it was of course a pleasure to have to pitch our tent. We then spent the night freezing our bits off as we were at a pretty hefty altitude. The temperature certainly felt like we were camping in Cumbria and when we woke up it didn't look too dissimair, apart from the zebra's and the 'keep your food safe becuase hyena's will eat anything sign.' But it was very beautiful and a really refreshing change in both landscape and climate. So along with a very VERY tall Swiss lady we undertook the 50km walk to Livingstonia. The landscape consisted of rolling hills and a really pretty skyline and because of the high altitude my pearl of wisom of 'don't worry about sun cream' led to both Marte and I getting spectacularly burnt and we are now both in the advance stages of having our nice Zanzibar tan peel away. The first day we walked 28 kms which given my sporting prowess over the last five years I did rather well I thought. The second day both Marte and I struggled big time. The problem was that we were walking down hill for a good six hours and it killed my ankles and Martes knees. Whilst Marte has actually had sporting injuries to her knees my sore ankles was generally down to just my lameness and weakness. We spent the night camping in a coffee factory before a tough seven hour walk on the final day. This was hard for another reason again. Because we had decended so much the cool climate was replaced by the tropical sun and it made for tough trekking. I found it hard going I don't mind admiting and sometimes when we would stop for a rest a pair of locals would walk by barefooted who had done in little over a morning what we had taken a whole day to do. No wonder those Kenyan's always do well in the 5000m!

The walk was to Livingstonia which was a missionary town built in the memory of the great Dr Livingstone. The town was super small and bit of a dissapointment, plus the dorm beds were really expensive so we had to camp; again. But it had a okay and had a good museum and it was nice to go to a national park which doesn't get many backpackers. So we got a lift down again the next day with the local ambulance and then hitched a lift back to Muzuzu with two blokes in a mini bus driving all the way to Zambia with lots of motor parts. We then took a bus to Lilongwe where we have been for way too long but I've been a bit ill so hence the delay. We have our visa now for mozambique and because of our slight lazyness here we might change our plans and head straight for Mozambique because time is ticking.

Blimy, finally finished. Hope everyone is well.

Pete