Day 28 Chitemba Campsite, Malawi

Last morning in Tanzania, left the campsite at 9 am to get to the border in reasonable time.  The scenery was beautiful mountain ranges and the banana fields were taken over by huge tea plantations over the last 50 km.  The border crossing was surprisingly smooth - we managed to side step all the hawkers trying to get us to change money and border agents selling car insurance and we were through and into Malawi within an hour.

Days 28: Lake Malawi, North Malawi
Days 29-30: Nyika Plateau
Days 31-32: Lake Malawi, Central Malawi
Days 33-35: Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve
Days 36-40: Mumbo Island
Days 41-42: Liwonde National Park
Days 43-45: Zombo Plateau and Huntington House
Days 46-47: Lilongwe

Our immediate impression of Malawi was that it is a much poorer country than Tanzania, the roads were seriously potholed and the Chinese influence that has brought the motorcycle to Tanzania has not reached Malawi yet with the push bike being the main means of transport.  However, finding food stores and banks seemed much easier in the first town we stopped in, Karonga – hopefully this will be the case throughout our stay.

We decided to stop at a different campsite to the one we had originally planned to go to (original Thunduzi, new campsite Chitembe), and amusingly both the Spanish couple we had met in Ruaha and the German’s who had been at last night’s campsite both made the same choice – we are expecting to cross paths again before the trip has ended.

We were glad that we had cooked all the meat yesterday as we were able to quickly reheat our beef in red wine and for once had eaten and washed up by 5.30 pm (turned out it was 4.30 as we hadn’t changed our watches crossing the border) so we can actually have a relaxing evening walking along the Lake Malawi beach and even perhaps a beer in the bar!  The moonrise was spectacular – it was a full moon and it was dark red when it rose changing to orange as it got higher in the sky.