No One Home at Mr. Mhongo's

So off we go from Chelinda camp. It's an hour later than we hoped, but at least we have a double patched tire that, although the mechanics warned us not to drive out on, should serve as a fairly reliable spare.

I, for one, was bummed to leave. The park was beautiful, the weather was perfect, and Chalet 4 was cozy. I was also excited about Nkhata Bay, however; I had read a bit about it and the Cheeze and Squeezy had talked it up.

JP: From one of our earlier posts, you may remember us describing the road conditions up to Nyika Plateau, namely that they are terrible. So terrible that we could go no faster than 20km/hr, tops. So terrible that Dan would send us out to remove large impediments, oh, you think I'm kidding ...
he'd then take off down the road, make us run to catch up and have a laugh.


RS: Unfortunately, we had to take the same road down that we took up. Fortunately, it's still fun to laugh at Jon.

JP: So after a couple days of these roads, rocking back and forth, side to side and me hitting my head numerous times on the side of the car [RS: Jon is the only one who seemed to have this problem, and he experienced this problem again, and again, and again, and . . . did you ever see that movie Memento?], we were really looking forward to making it back to the tarmac road, especially since we were down a spare. [RS: Or at least a spare we could trust - did we mention this we're driving with the wrong sized tire on the front driver's side?] We were determined to make it to Nkhata Bay for swimming in Lake Malawi and this dinner buffet the Squeeze kept telling us about, but before Nkhata Bay, we still had to do a few things:

1. Drop by Mr. Mhongo's to give the run-down on the borrowed tire drop-off
2. Buy a new tire in Mzuzu
3. Return the borrowed tire to the Nyika office there
4. Buy more diesel
5. Use the internet

Seemed pretty manageable.

RS: We made it to the gate of Nyika without incident. Squeezy, behind the wheel, got us through like a Baja 500 driver on methamphetamines.

(Come to think of it, a helmet would have been good for Jon.)

We went down to Mr. Mhongo's place to tell him about the borrowed tire. We talked to his wife who told us Mr. Mhongo was in the area but she didn't know when he'd be back. Well, we were facing a bit of a time crunch. The Squeeze had already written Mr. Mhongo a note that Prince Daniel was to pass along, so we figured we made a good faith effort and we'd just keep moving to Mzuzu.

We got back on the road, exited Nyika, put some music on the radio, and kept driving.

http://www.sdsefi.com/truck1.jpg