Free wheeling to Chipata

We overnighted at Luangwa Bridge Camp last night, 4km off the main road to Chipata next to the beautiful Luangwa river. The sun is starting to set earlier as we move east so we only had a little sunshine left when we arrived. Francois worked on our blog post, while I klapped a salad together for us. Before we could get the post up we ran out of data on our simcard, so apologies for only getting the post up today.

We decided to start off early today, but just as we were about to go, we checked the GPS to find a filling station as we already did about 230km on the tanks when we realised that the next station is 100 km away towards Chipata! Luckily Francois could get 2.5 liters of fuel from the owner at the lodge where we stayed, but we tried to be light on the throttle and freed down the hills to conserve some more fuel. This seemed to work as I made it to the next station by getting 39 kilometres per litre and Francois getting 33 km/litre.

The next 100 kilometers on this road proved to be quite a challenge with some pot holes, bumps and dodging bicycles, people and the occasional goat or cow, but gradually got better as we moved towards Chipata. We arrived here at Mama Rula’s campsite at about 15h00 quite tired. Tomorrow the national election is taking place in Zambia so everything will come to a standstill so that people can vote. We decided to stay at Mama Rula’s tomorrow night too and go through the border towards Malawi on Wednesday so we are looking forward to sleeping a bit late and resting the tired bumbs.

We decided to go fill up our tanks and fuel bags this afternoon first to ensure that we are ready for Wednesday and Francois met with Farouk to exchange some Dollars for Malawian Kwatchas. We also tried to find out what we need at the border so that we can be a bit better prepared than last time :o)

We also braaied some “wors” tonight and had some mash and local tomatoes.

Here we are eating out of proper plates, yum! as you can see we are looking at bit tired :o)

For those of you interested in the food side of things. Here is a photograph showing you all the food we have on the bike currently.

It is also now easy to get tamatoes, onions, oranges, watermelons etc. along the road here in Zambia and here is a photo of me loading a watermelon on the bike today. We also bought some local tomatoes (and washed them in salt water like Elsa taught us), flour, rice and eggs today.

Good night!