En Route to Tanzania

I was looking for a specific photo tonight when I stumbled upon a set of old scans from 1999 of a trip into our northern neighbours of Southern Africa. This makes for a good conversation point around a campfire, and although we are not at the moment sitting around a campfire, I, in any case, decided to share it with you.

Below is a map with a roughly marked route. We went from South Africa, through Zimbabwe into Zambia, and from there to Malawi. We initially did not plan to go through Mozambique, but eventually, because of the poor conditions of the Zambia roads, we decided to return via the top corner of Mozambique.

We did some sketchy research and decided that we will keep to the "highways" because we do not have a 4x4 vehicle - just a normal VW Combi minibus. Luckily I used the opportunity to buy myself a Garmin GPS - with the Africa database installed. Those days, the GPS did not show roads, it was meant to be used by pilots, so the "Africa Database" basically had all towns and all airports/airstrips mapped. At least you know in what direction you are driving.

Our VW Combi and trailer for the trip

Unfortunately, I did not take a good photo of our vehicle, but the above photo will give you an indication of what we used for this trip. We were camping in a tent. We were 7 people in the Combi and all our belongings were in the trailer - including an 8-man large dome tent.

As we have never gone beyond Zimbabwe before, we were not prepared for the conditions of the roads. The road from Lusaka to the Malawi border is known as the Great East Road, but most of it was just a dirt road and the stretches that still had a tarred road surface, was in such a bad state that we drove on the track next to the road. It took us 11 hours to complete the last 380km of the Great East Road!

Malawi's roads were for the most part in the same condition. In some places, the potholes were bigger than the length of our vehicle and trailer together.

When we eventually arrived at Malawi Lake, we were staying at some private lodges - and once you entered the gates of such a lodge, you were in a totally different world - the typical idyllic picture one sees in the travel magazines (The travel magazines just don't show you how it looks on the other side of the fence!).

Next time I will tell you about one of our interesting encounters en route.