Our first rain! We would have easily avoided it but for our late start, it rained from about 7-10am but we still managed to make French toast from under an umbrella. The road through to the border degraded the closer we got, it's one of those phenomena that make borders the most horrible places. We went through Karonga where Ant's grandmother was born but there was nothing really to investigate there.

We intended to make the border our finest effort. The Malawi side went very quickly but why we have to fill in the same information in three different books nobody knows. Does somebody audit these books and what happens if you put different engine numbers in the books? The Tanzanian side went equally quickly and more professionally but with buying our visas beforehand it cost $125. Tanzania are desperate for tourists but they do make it very difficult and expensive to get there. The logic of this Ant has tried to reason with officials at various opportunities but it's beyond their comprehension.

Then came the third-party insurance saga. We wanted to buy COMESA insurance which would apply to all countries. The person we went through the border with did some extensive calculations and due to the size of our engine and how much we must pay for diesel and the number of countries we'll visit (it's valid for most African countries for 3 months) we must pay $120. But nobody, and we tried another seller, could give us an actual amount. We ended up paying $58 after an hour and a half of haggling. We still aren't sure how much we should have paid, but a motorcyclist with a very small engine visiting many more countries paid $90 so go figure.

Immediately there is a steep ascent from the lake shore up to 2400m above MSL. The road winds through numerous tea plantations and the improved economic conditions were immediately noticeable. The thatch gave way to corrugated iron, the walls are painted and although people are still sitting around doing nothing they seem to have more, and the motorbikes are more numerous than the bicycles. We started to see many more land rovers from by-gone eras (maybe 70s?) used as tow-trucks, "sick but never dying" as a game ranger told me.

Then Joey got her first fine, for doing 72 in a 50 zone. Introducing Tanzanian traffic cops, soon to become our dreaded "friends". But we were lucky in that we had no money yet (we were to draw in Mbeya) and another guy was stopped just after us who then acted as an interpreter and the policeman spoke no English. In the end all the discussing got to him and he let us off.

Mbeya specialises in revolting toilets! It was too late to head to Iringa so we stayed in Mbeya, where there are a couple of poor campsite options. The first had terrible toilets and was a bit deserted, the second we chose which was a church "Karabuni Centre" where they also do bible translations into Swahili. We went in the bushes. It just smelt too bad. It was also bitterly cold at such altitude but frying our Malawian fish wish mash potato and guavas and custard made it happy. In Tanzania.