Day 217 - Sweden to South Africa by bike

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A late departure today saw us setting off at 8am. We only had a 4ish hour drive up the shore of Lake Malawi. Along the way we stopped off in a small town and visited the market with an objective: we'd each drawn someone else's name out of a hat and were buying them an outfit for our 'superheroes' fancy dress party. Gemma bought a leopard skin ensemble for a Junglewoman outfit, and Ed went for an English superhero called 'Super 118' once he had found a stall selling shellsuits and a man flogging a pink headband.

The final part of the drive was down a steep hill back to the lakeside, overtaking a lorry going down headfirst but with his reverse gear engaged, probably because he had no brakes left. The campsite was better than we'd expected from the reports we'd heard and we camped on soft sand on the beach, spending time and no little ingenuity on some anti-leaking measures. Just outside this campsite was a great little market and we fine-tuned our haggling skills whilst buying an ebony jewellery box and a few presents and commissioned our very own Malawi chair. We put our success down to 2 main things: firstly Ed's tactic of switching between US$ and local currency to interrupt the market trader's train of thought, and secondly the bag of random items that Gemma put together that we'd dip into to find something to trade (includung used batteries).

We were sharing the campsite with 50 Swedes who were doing a similar trip to us but on 2 bright pink and ancient buses. Unsurprisingly the bar was quite rowdy that night and the bathrooms constantly full with the females demonstrating how vain they are. One of the Swedes wasn't travelling on the bus though - he was cycling the 30,000km from Sweden to Cape Town, an epic journey of 20 months. Unfortunately he was forced to break his journey for a year following an incident in Tanzania when 4 local men parted to let him cycle through only for 1 of them to smash a machete blade into his chin and split his jaw bone. He is back, recovered and determined to get to Cape Town. And to end the day's account on a high note, Ed won the slightly amended version of Trivial Pursuit we played with Paul and Bev (aka. Bob and Beverlin), and Gemma even surprised herself by knowing that John Lennon's assassin was carrying a book called 'Catcher in the Rye'.

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