I woke up as soon as the sun was up, lying on the floor of the truck. I looked at my phone which said 4:25am and went back to sleep. Sleep was now fitful as there were lots of people outside the truck making a racket. Consideration is something totally absent in Africa, although to be fair they probably didn't think there was a Mzungu (white person) sleeping in the back of the truck.

Dixon and I were both up early and we drove down to the border, which was open for processing people but not the truck. We decided to get ourselves processed to try to save some time. Dixon said I should get in the massive line first, it turns out the massive line was for men only. There was a separate women's line and as there were hardly any women I basically went straight in.

I got back to the truck in about twenty minutes and Dixon just said, it can't have been that quick. I told him the big line was for men only and he just groaned, got his passport and went and got in the line. We waited for what seemed like forever for the truck people to get there and stamp the truck out. I sat in the cab and people watched while Dixon was gone, among the things I saw were a man using his buddy in a wheelchair as a scooter. No compassion or sense of political correctness here.

Dixon and I finally got through the Zambian formalities and went across the border to endure the Tanzanian side of things. Again, it was quick for me to get in, and Dixon just needed a stamp, but the truck took ages and at this time of the morning there were literally about a thousand trucks trying to get in.

We finally drove away from the border at about 12pm after having arrived at 7am. We immediately drove to the next town to get some lunch, beef on rice again. I love how Dixon always asked me what I want for lunch, as if there is anything else to eat here. Tomorrow I may just say, Big Mac, large fries and a Coke to confuse him. The Coke is the only thing you can get here, even in a shanty mud hut of a restaurant you can still get a Coke.

We attempted to get moving, although now we were falling victim to the Tanzanian roads, which have speed bumps everywhere and corrupt police. At one point we got stopped by a guy with a speed gun who held it up with a reading of 66km in a 50km zone. He hadn't even been holding the gun when we approached and we wouldn't have even been doing 40km as another truck had flashed his lights at us around the corner and we had slowed right down. Dixon and I were both aware that the police need extra Christmas shopping money at this time of year. The way to policeman looked at us too, pretty much said, Are they actually going to buy this? No. Are you taking the piss mate? I said. Dixon looked at me as if to say, shut up. He put 10000 shillings (about $6) in his driving license and handed it over. Just like that our mythical speeding problem went away.

It continued on like this for the rest of the day, bumps, arguing with police, more bumps, donkeys all over the road, accidents (13 today so not as bad as yesterday), at one point we were stopped at road works near the small town of Chilinze and all the locals came up to the windows tapping on them and trying to sell us things. At one point I was looking over chatting to Dixon (whose window was down) and a live chicken just popped up behind him, with its owner trying to shove it through the window. I lost it, I was in hysterical fits of laughter, almost crying. This also made Dixon laugh as I don't think he really got why I was laughing so much. One minute I was looking at Dixon and the next there was a chicken that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

We drove on and finally reached our destination at Mikumi, where there was supposedly a hotel room waiting for me. I knew I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. The hotel was one of the awful shanty buildings, with all its rooms leading of a single corridor, with galvanized iron doors, padlocked with numbers painted on them. The inside had only a bed, and a separate room with a nonworking shower and squat toilet. It was Wadi Halfa all over again. After the day/night I'd had, I could have cried, I realized that unlike Wadi Halfa I did have an option, sleeping in the truck again. Just at that moment I got an email from the office telling me about my next trip.

Going to collect clients in Nairobi on some kind of shuttle, which me in my now foul mood read as public bus, something that I will never, ever get on in Tanzania. I knew one of the bosses was currently in Arusha, so I sat at the bar with Dixon fuming and plotting exactly what I would say to him when I arrived. Dixon seemed to think it was a private shuttle which made me feel a little better and I consoled myself with the fact that as bad as they treat their crew, the company probably wouldn't put clients on a public bus.

I was still fuming and really disappointed about not having a real bed to sleep in or even somewhere I could put up a tent that I wasn't really good company for Dixon who seemed intent on sitting at the bar and chatting. I went to bed in the truck, this night was much more unpleasant than last night. The heat combined, with the guys watching TV at full volume in the street all night and mosquitos did not make for a good nights sleep.