Dedza District

I managed to get a good night's sleep and felt so much better for it. The warm shower also helped to lift my low mood of the previous day. However, the rain was still pouring down unabated. The scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast was warming and protective against the cold morning air. The amount of rain on this trip has been extreme and has given the journey a looming backdrop of a world in weather chaos with enormous forest fires raging across a drought ridden Australia at the same time. Having seen so many wonders of nature, I couldn't help but wonder how much if this will survive the ever increasing human population careering headlong towards catastrophic climate change. Will the children of today ever get the chance to see lions in the wild?
We headed out into a cool, grey, murky and misty morning more reminiscent of winter in England than Africa. We then passed through a fascinating area of high bouldered peaks which looked all the more dramatic and atmospheric in the misty grey gloom. We reached the Mozambique border just after an attempted extortion from the corrupt local traffic police. It took a long time to get through the border due the overbearing bureaucracy that is a consistent feature of officialdom in East Africa. We finally set off from the border after three and a half hours of waiting. We began our journey in Mozambique with a heavily cultivated area of maize fields with stunning bouldwred hills and mountains behind. We stopped for a toilet break and lots of young boys herding cattle chased across the fields to meet us. When they got near, Often our driver, mock chased them away which they found a funny game but were also genuinely a bit scared of us. Very few white tourists travel through Mozambique so the people find us even more if a novelty and can be even scared. We had a fun interaction with the boys who chased the truck for a hundred metres until we picked up speed. We had lots of nice waves and thumbs up from the local people living by the roadside. One mother and children started waving in rhythm with us and began to dance. The people looked quintessentially African with broad faces and very dark complexion - quite a different look than the people in Malawi. The houses were often traditional, thatched, mud-brick round houses. This felt more like an old Africa, apart from the odd transmitter and power lines giving away the use of more modern technologies. The people did not ask for money like in other East African countries as they weren't used to western tourists. We travelled through some large valleys with more dark, distant mountains standing tall amidst storm clouds gathering around their peaks. The clouds fell low creating horizontal bands of light and darker shades. A large rainbow appeared arcing across the mountains and we crossed the wide expanse of the great river Zambezi which we would meet again at Victoria falls. The truck drove on into the evening, passing a populated area with people sat around enormous baobab trees which became prominent in this part of the country. The sky coloured deep oranges and reds, and an impossibly huge African sun dipped under the clouds and slowly fell behind distant mountain silhouettes leaving a bright orange trim on the mountain tops. Soon after we turned off the road onto a gritty, sandy scrubland area where we would make our bush camp for the evening. We cooked fajitas for our dinner as the dark descended. The cloud thinned so that we could see the first quarter half moon's milky light and a few scattered stars in a big sky stretching out above the trees. There was a cool breeze outside the tents and a few of us sat out in the darkness and talked about the challenges and exertions of this type of overland travel, but inside it was very hot and humid which meant that it took a long time to go to sleep.Read more