We made good time to the border, the roads being good on the Rwanda side. We had to wait a while at immigration to get our passport stamped out as the guy had gone to lunch but other than that it was easy enough.

Once more as soon as we crossed into another country the landscape was completely different this time turning from tropical paradise to remote scrubland with minimum infrastructure and vast trackless expanses of land . This route from Rwanda to Mwanza in Tanzania has a history of robberies and car jackings so when we needed to find a place to cam for the night we approached a police checkpoint to ask if we could camp in their compound. The first place didn't want to know and refused but at the second checkpoint we found Sgt Idi the Section Commander who was busy interogating some prisoners when Peter walked into the little command post hut. He quickly told the prisoners to sit on the floor and shut up and turned his attention to us. He was more than accommodating letting us park by the side of house where we camped for the night. We made a camp fire, cooked our tea and were then the evening's entertainment for the 19 children that surrounded us as we ate. Most of them just sat and stared but a couple of the older ones asked if we had any balls, books or shoes they could have.

We set off early next day as we knew the road was rough and it was. Apart from a 40k stretch of tarmac it was 200k of gravel, potholed, corrugated road which was worse than normal because there had been heavy rain..back to mud splattered truck!!! We reached the small ferry landing to take us across Lake Victoria to Mwanza and promptly fell asleep in the truck during the crossing of about half an hour as we were exhausted.

WE drove into Mwanza to a place we intended to camp which turned out to be 8k out of town with no camping. As there was no other camping we had to book into a hotel for the night which we have now turned into two nights as it is a lovely place with a lively atmosphere and we were kept entertained in the bar. There are many business men from different countries here together with a crown of anglers from Australia and South Africa and it was fun watching a couple of what looked like high class local hookers trying their best to 'pick up some business!! We never saw the outcome as we were so tired by 9 p.m. we had to retire to bed.