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The story so far
The previous post from our boat trip on Lake Malawi led to numerous emails and text messages from worried parents as well as some people suggesting it all just happened in my imagination after having one beer too many and falling asleep on the sun deck. For our parents, we are still alive and currently at home in Norway with you, eating your food, sleeping in your houses, driving your cars and spending your money, thus, it is time to be worried in an all different way. For the rest of you, I can assure those who doubt what happened that my imagination is rather non-existent after too many beers and that my story is a true story of those events that took place that dreadful night on November the 18th, in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand And Five.

Safari from the train window

Robinbye
2006-01-05 20:54:41

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half-empty water bottles.

on display. About halfway through renaming the various constellations, a truck stopped just behind our bus. A man who had traveled with our bus ran over to talk to the truck driver and I realised I had to be quick to secure a spot myself if the truck driver would take us. He would. We secured the backpacks on the trailer and entered the truck driver's cabin. Helene got the only spare seat, while the other man, his son, and myself sat down behind the seats where a little space existed for sleeping. It turned out the man was going all the way to Karonga --- could we have been luckier? After a couple of hours, the other passenger took his son, gave the truck driver his last, hard-earned cash and left. The driver then took us all the way to our hostel, which turned out to be full for the night. Luckily, he knew about another place and took us there, where there were room for two tired Norwegians, one with a particularly sore bum. When tipping the truck driver generously, his smile went all around his head. He had probably received the equivalent of a month's work and
nearly danced his way over to the truck, although he had lost probably an hour of precious sleep from driving us to the hostels.

The next day we caught a minibus to the border, crossed it without any troubles and got to Mbeya without any throuble.

Train safari: "The journey is the goal."

This is a philosophy I strongly believe in, and was the main reason we chose to travel by boat along Lake Malawi. Rather than cramming into overfull buses, we chose the train as our means of transportation from Mbeya to Dar Es Salaam. Mbeya is a town and transportation centre just north of the border to Malawi. From Dar Es Salaam, lots of buses, trucks and freight trains bring goods to Mbeya, where it is redirected either south to Malawi or west to Zambia.

At the station, it turned out that men ...