Home » Malawi Botswana » Blantyre, Malawi to Francistown, Botswana (7th August 2002)

�The essential in daring is to know how far too far one can go� � </br>
Jean Cocteau

Blantyre, Malawi to Francistown, Botswana (7th August 2002)

Roundtheworldbybike
2005-11-18 11:30:10

Displayed times (last time: )

I am now comfortably settled at Ziggy�s house, near a diamond mine deep in the Botswanan bush. Ziggy was my accomplice at Oxford as we swam naked across the river, dinner jackets in plastic bags, in an attempt to evade security and break into a college ball. So I am looking forward to plenty of high antics and no cycling for a while.

Back in Malawi I descended for the final time into the Great Rift Valley, 40km of swooping downhill to the hot, mosquito-infested lowlands. For the first time ever I surprise and disappoint myself by being too squeamish to take advantage of an extremely cheap and dinner-party-conversation-enhancing foodstuff: boiled mice on sticks. What a wimp. My increasingly dishevelled appearance has led to me being occasionally greeted as �madam�. So I had a shave and now the confusion seems to have passed.

The infrequently frequented southern Malawi / Mozambique border post was in a sorry state: once smart, efficient buildings are now falling down and abandoned. The cliched, scruffy, unpleasant looking �officer� invented a fictitious �fee� that Arno and I must pay. Smiling politely, we refused to pay. Scowling, he ordered us to pay. Smiling politely, we refused to pay. A game that could have continued for quite some time� We won eventually as he angrily stamped our passports and gestured us to leave.

The road was just a single lane of soft warm sand meandering through small villages of reed huts, ladies pounding maize, sturdy baobab trees and immaculately swept earth in mosaics of rainbow sweeps. Each village pump is a colourful and noisy blossom of skirts and plastic containers and shrieks of hilarity and gossip. Cycling through these scenes I thought of Ryszard Kapuscinski (spelling?!) realising that this was �a world I do not know and perhaps will never understand�.

After the mad crowds of Malawi, Mozambique was relatively empty. It was very easy to find remote campsites, ...