I think it’s safe to say we’re getting a bit bored of cycling. So we haven’t done an awful lot of it recently…From Binga, we successfully got a pretty awful bus to somewhere called Siabuwa and then cycled on an awful road to Sagov before getting a truly awful bus to Karoi.
When I say awful road, I mean that the surface is rubbish – loose and gravely so hills, both up and down, become challenging. It’s a shame because if we had unlimited time or no finishing point these kind of roads wouldn’t be so frustrating. Unfortunately, as a result of time pressure these roads stop being an interesting, beautiful challenge and become an obstacle. Especially to Nick, who fell off.
There was a particularly frustrating moment when after having toiled up a brutal hill and taken a rest I discovered I’d parked on a thorn and had a flat tyre. Not only this but my spare didn’t fit so I had to repair the tube whilst being a watering hole for all the surrounding flies.
When we haven’t been able to do the required miles, we’ve had to catch up by taking buses which are less comfortable than cycling. Hard to believe, I know, but very true.
That’s how we’ve got to where we are now – Lilongwe, Malawi. Between Binga and here we haven’t cycled more than 100km and have taken four separate buses and one taxi. The cheating parts haven’t been without incident though. The bus to Karoi involved live goats, too many bumps and nearly broken knees. Nick thinks this makes it the worst bus in the world – how naive. For a start it only took six hours…
We cycled from Chipata 20km to the Zambia-Malawi border in record slow time, we’re still not entirely sure why. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve just realised why. We got the bus from Lusaka, Zambia at about 3pm which arrived in Chipata at around 1am. Then we spent an hour disentangling our bikes from the bus before looking for somewhere to camp. We found a nice lawn and some kindly security guards which was great, until they woke us up three hours later at 5.30am saying we had to leave for tax reasons…
What was also annoying was having to disassemble our bike headsets (imagine trying to change the oil and spark plugs of your car at the same time in the pitch black – this is much easier) in order to fit them in the taxi between the border and Lilongwe. When putting it back together though, I did briefly forget what a bike is supposed look like.
We are now residing at Mabuya Camp in Lilongwe and may be delayed another few days by Nick needing an operation on an infected spider bite. It’s never easy.