There is a time difference in Tanzania - an hour ahead and so with the late start we get after camping and setting our watches only in the morning we were on the road at 10. This stretch of Tanzania is at high altitude and very arid, very different from the lush ascent from Malawi.

I've decided we're playing Cops and Robbers, I'm just trying to work out who are who on the road! We were stopped by the police 5 times and had to talk our way out of 3 fines (doing 53 and 54 in a 50 zone and not stopping in the right place as we weren't sure he was indicating it to us) and so haven't paid Tanzanian cops anything yet! There are no speed limits between towns, but every village (every few km) is 50 and the cops wait at almost every one. They were trapping at maybe 10 villages we passed through.

Tracks for Africa has a riverside campsite which we checked out and considered doing the night before. We were lucky as it was completely deserted and would have been terrible to arrive to after dark, especially as the small village has a "boom" to get through!

We stopped at the well recommended Old Farmhouse at 14:30, a possible place to stop on our return, run be white folk from Cape Town, the first South Africans we'd met in Tanzania. Being early we decided to proceed to Iringa and hit all the roadworks in the afternoon for the rehabilitation of the TanZam highway. The next 120km or so took about 2.5 hours so we decided to settle at the real riverside camp at Iringa, after getting advice from the cops who stopped us since T4A and Nokia maps took us to false locations.

This camp was lovely and green, it's way better to camp on grass than sand! They do a Swahili school there and we met an American family preparing to move to Mbeya to help the Karibuni center bible translating where we had stayed the night before. We also met two Capetownians, a retired couple who are doing exactly the same trip as us, but over 6 months. They had been on the road since Easter and had just visited the Ruaha National Park ($20 pppd entry, $30 pppn camping, $40 pd vechicle) and camped in a dry riverbed listening to Lion around them with Jackal and elephant in their camp. So we swopped stories and commiserated the police before enjoying some steak on the braai and Joey's meilie bread.