Probably the most significant part of this day was realising Ant's driver's licence was invalid. He just never bothered to check and it had been invalid for 6 months. Now the police everywhere think that surely a couple planning to spend 3 months on the road will try to chance it by setting off without windscreen wipers or headlights and definitely the driver's licence needs to be checked often as they will probably be unlicensed drivers trying to do the trip. Today they got lucky, or observant as it had been checked before, that Ant's licence was invalid. I don't think they could believe their luck either, they have perhaps never caught a tourist like this! Anyway, they got MK3000 (R90) and we were faced with a dilemma, although they assured us we could carry on through Malawi without being fined again (this was true despite our scepticism when Ant was required to produce it the next day).

The lakeside road is slow firstly because the roads in Africa are the most efficiently build: not a cent is wasted on unrequired width so cars must slow down when passing trucks that tend to own the road as they speed along. The second reason is that all the way we found the road to be full of people, the whole of Malawi seems to be built on the side of the road. Everywhere you go there are bicycles, people crossing between roadside stalls and children running around screaming "Mzungu" at us elatedly.

Kande Beach ("Candy" to the tourists) is an overlanders dream. It is a huge campsite and on the main route to Zambia. Most tour trucks stop their en route through Lilongwe to Zambia. We arrived at about 5pm and there were 5 overland vehicles there. Paul Theroux writes about the kind of people who travel on these busses as having no idea where they are going and getting out to indulge in revelry. Probably a fair assessment, we were asleep at 11pm when the power came on for the first time in a week and the party started!