The drive back north to Lilongwe took us along the border with Mozambique which is said to be another very scenic African country but which is not on our agenda for this trip.

We reached Lilongwe in 6 hours and found it to be a nice sleepy little city with good facilities and a couple of small modern shopping malls. Lilongwe golf club has a small camping ground with good facilities where we stayed and Peter managed to get in a game of squash with the resident pro who is seeded 4th in Malawi...he lost!! One night we had a good meal at Don Brionis Bistro a bizzing place run by an english guy. We were advised by the golf club to take a guard with us for the walk into town which we did and got a taxi back. It didn't seem a particularly dangerous place and we were only 10 mins walk from the restaurant but the city was virtually deserted and as there were no street lights for most of the way and it was absolutely pitch black. We were glad we took the guard as although it would probably have been o.k. and now after 6 months we feel pretty safe it is wise to not get complacent and better to err on the side of safety.

Unfortunately some of the roads since we had the repairs done in Tanzania have taken their toll again and we have another problem with the truck. We had been hearing a lot of squeaking again and we decided to take the camper off the back. What we originally thought had been good work done in Tanzania turned out not to be the case. The tray off the back of the truck has moved completley and out of 6 bolts , 5 sleeves are missing from 5 of them and one of them can#t be undone as it has been cross-threaded. Peter has had the whole thing stripped down once again and repaired it as best he can. His sister meets us in Zambia in exactly one weeks time so hopefully she can bring the missing parts with here.. saga to be continued!! Nobody said it would be easy and in fact we were recently studying our journey to date on the map and thought we must have been mad..it looks worse looking back on it than it did before we set off!!!