I rode
out of Mozambique and into Malawi (this
border cost me about $60) and I was blown along by the wind.
Id have to say that in general the riding here in southern Africa has been very windy. Not as windy as Patagonia South America but not that far off... There have in general been about five days of the week with strong winds, one day with light winds and one day of calm for every week... And of the strong wind days Id say four out of five have been some version of head-wind! Its been rather uncomfortable riding due just to the wind on several days. But, for the last few days the wind has been from behind and progress (and fuel efficiency) has been easy :)...
But there has been a bit of a price to pay in that my little tent is rather porous to fine dust and the entire inner is a mesh screen (good for hot conditions) which has meant that when I camp on dusty ground and the wind picks up... well I get rather dirty. And a couple of nights ago we had a real wind storm and in the morning I was literally scooping handfuls of dust out of the tent! OK, so I got as much dust off my stuff as I packed up and rode on, but the next night I had my first session of solid rain combined with the wind... and again, my little tent is OK at the rain but with the wind as well... Needless to say by morning the remaining dust on my stuff combined with the rain and I was laying there in a rather muddy mess... Fortunately I got to a nice destination by early afternoon and the sun came out and I set about getting everything back to some semblance of cleanliness :)
Other immediate thoughts about Malawi while I was riding in the delightful first tail-wind were: While the number of people about the place seemed
to stay about the same the affluence definitely increased immediately… That’s not
to say they are wealthy here (far from it) but the road quality went up and the
quality of the little huts along the way-side also went up drastically… In
Mozambique the locals seemed to have a preference for square huts, while the
huts in Zimbabwe were definitely circular. The walls in Zimbabwe tended to be
made mostly of mud pressed into/onto a frame of canes, and that seemed to be
the same for Mozambique although quite a few were back to being just houses of
sticks and grass like they were in the Caprivi area. But as soon as I got into
Malawi there was a rapid increase in the use of corrugated irn for roofing and
soon after, most of the huts became far more solid and were built out of
locally fired bricks (probably just barely vitrified to the point of not dissolving
in the rain!)
But Id
also have to say that Malawi has the same deforestation problem as Mozambique
except that it looks like the process was more or less completed about 10 years
ago… All that seems to be left of the place is a low grade scrubby regrowth
with lots of local farm plots scattered about the place.
Malawi is
also a relief to me in that most of the locals speak pretty fluent English but
that only sort of helps since there are still virtually no “shops” and
everything is being sold off the side of the road… It means my diet is pretty
greasy and of questionable “provenance”! Im also having a hard time finding
places to stay at night so Ive been “camping wild” for three nights in a row…
In its self quite challenging since finding somewhere that wont be disturbed by
the seemingly ever present
locals was quite tricky.
A couple
of other things of note are that fuel is very expensive here at over US$2 per
litre, and while the people are still very poor, there seems to have been some sort
of good infrastructure program in place because every little village along the
road has a very nice sturdy and simple to use water pump… It helps the locals
not have to walk for 5-10 Km each day carrying a 15l bucket of water on their
heads… well actually its only ever the women that are doing that… The guys are usually
wheeling their bicycle which is loaded up with about 20Kg of firewood or a bag
or two of grain from the farm.
Its harvest season at the moment and the people
are busy everywhere picking cotton and winnowing rice and corn or taking big
bags of yams to market. The main road through every town is completely covered
with the husks of the corn cobs that are grilled for people to buy at the
markets (one of my staple food supplies at the moment.
