Day 23 Iringa Rivervalley Campsite

Spent the morning at Tan Swiss Campsite, not intentionally but by the time we had done the car checks, worked out routes to the next few campsites and changed a tyre the morning had gone.  The tyre changing was yet another saga in itself – the bottle jack is really too big so causes huge problems when we need to jack the vehicle up and changing a flat only to find that the spare is also flat doesn’t go down too well!  With knock on that we now also had to find a garage in Iringa to get the punctures fixed. 

The journey to Iringa was expected to take 3 hours but the traffic was terrible again so it took more like 4.5 hours.  The scenery was stunning though, rolling mountains for mile after mile.  Interestingly on the TV news last night (after Richard Hammond) that there had been photos of bush fires and we now found ourselves travelling through swaths of burnt out bush with fires still raging in places.  Got stopped again for speeding but this time Ian managed to charm his way out of a fine – actually I think he bamboozled the cop by showing him the speed on the GPS. 

In Iringa, (with planning and foresight or just blind luck!!) we managed to find a supermarket next to the bank ATM having driven the wrong way down a one way street and parked up.  Luckily the parking attendant (yes they have parking wardens hear as well) warned us about the one way road before we caused any more havoc and then asked us for TSh 1500 for parking. We managed to find a Garage that did puncture repairs – 5000 TSh for each repair plus 70,000 TSh for two inner tubes (from a shop on the other side of the road). The whole thing was fascinating: 1^st tyre garage–shop–garage; 2^nd tyre garage–shop–garage; in the UK we would just have got two new tyres.

Drove back up the road to Iringa Rivervalley campsite – a lovely spot by the river.  The bulk of their business appears to come from people having Swahali lessons but the atmosphere was more like a hippie commune.  We had a lovely evening and were able to cook a decent meal as we actually had fresh meat and vegetables – the only day for a while that we would have such a luxury as the fridge is still broken.