The road that you see on a map is not necessarily what you get in real life on the road itself!. After our joyful departure from Tembe Village (we gave Antoni 50MK to buy our audience (children) sweets to say thank you for their “assistance”) , we started driving the 21km to Mutarara to see the Donna Ana bridge spanning the Zambezi. This was after a very quick packing of the truck in rain and a new plague of mosquitos.The road was unbelievable bad! We are warned about the Marsabit road in Kenya but after what we experienced on that road, anything more worse could not be driven on with any thing with wheels except a bicycle. Our top speed were about 20km per hour, so it took us more than an hour to get to Mutarara.
The Dona Ana railway bridge…..longest in Africa built in 1934, 3,7km long.
Now we were finally on our way to the Malawian border 29 km away. The bad road deteriated even further to near nothingness! From the Village up to the border were 50km and it took us 4 hours to drive.
We had a small hiccup at the Mozambique border post when the Immigration guy could not understand the entry stamp in our passports. After going away and coming back, everything was fine The Customs guy asked to see what we have in the truck and when we opened the door he said “sjooooo!” and were not even contemplating to look further. He asked “what are all these things you have? Do you have anything for me?” Arno very kindly told him that we are out of food and drinks and only have water. (Witch was not a lie…..we were out of fresh veggies.At the Malawian side everyone was very friendly and everything went smooth. The customs guy had a bit of a problem to understood the Carnet but in the end between him and Arno everything were sorted out and we were looking forward to start our drive to Blantyre on the M1. To our total shock the M1 was just an extension of the previous terrible road.
The M1 in Malawi
Having breakfast and a break from driving
The Villa Nova de Fronteira border post is 172km from Blantyre. This took us another 5 hours so all in all we drove 9 hours on 222km.
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