Day Four - Stockholm Hotel in Mbeya to Bush Camp

Distance: 120.15km

Ride time: 7:04

Climb: 972m

Non-race day. Hooray.

These are the days that we get to have cokes, take photos and generally mess around.

The ride itself was pretty nice. A pretty decent climb straight out of camp. This quickly took us out of Mbeya and all its craziness and above the layer of cloud. Above the cloud there was a fantastic view of the hills all around. In our head-down paceline we didn't actually notice until we saw a bunch of other riders standing on the side of the road. "Flat party?" Stuart wondered. Turns out no, not a flat party, but a photo party. Once we saw the view, we had to stop and join the photo party as well.

The photo party in full swing.

Part of the panorama at the photo party.

The climb to the top was pretty sustained but enjoyable. The whole time, you had a great view back into the valley that we rode up from yesterday afternoon. The whole valley was blanketed in a thick layer of cloud. Although the climb had been billed as a bit of a monster, it was over way too soon. I felt like I could have climbed it all over again.

So, too soon we were on the descent. After the climb, we dropped all the way down to the Tanzania / Malawi border. This was pretty sweet. Plenty of smallish (and not so smallish) hills. Most of them were exactly the right size for smashing up in the big ring. There were one or two that required some shifting, but for most of the ride, I could have been riding a single speed.

We had more cokes than was probably healthy. Stuart and I had six cokes before we got to camp. Three of them in one place. It is surely a nice change to the usual though.

One of the coke stops. Stuart, Gisi, Erin and Dana.

I don't think I have had more than a handful of days with cokes stops that weren't non-race days. One of them was the day after Dindir in Sudan when I was wasted and had around 1 million cokes. Another was the Blue Nile Gorge climb were I had a great couple of cokes about halfway up. Lastly was a stop on a really heavy traffic day out of Khartoum when we were all mentally shot from fighting against trucks and buses.

On non-race days, it seems like we have to make up for all this. Not only did we stop for cokes, I also bought a Camelbak full of passionfruit in a market.

The border crossing was probably the most annoying yet. The actual paperwork, getting stuff stamped part was pretty painless. The hassle came when we needed to get some Malawi money. Gisi and Stuart tried with some dodgy looking guys in the no-mans land between countries. These guys were pretty annoying. Crowding around, touching my bike, yelling, moving us around. I was pretty unimpressed and said that we should just go. Gisi changed anyways. It wasn't until we were over the border and in Malawi that she worked out that instead of 4000 Malawi monies, she had been given 400. She went charging back across the border to see if she could find the criminal that gyped her, but to no avail. It kind of short circuited a lot of hassle where they denied it happened, etc.

After the crossing, we powered up the slight incline to the camp. Basically, it was back to Ethiopian camps. The most frustrating thing about it is that a lot of the adults around the camp (read: the ones that have nothing better to do from noon to sunset on a Monday) think that it is hilarious when kids:

• watch women pee.
• watch women get changed in their tents.
• steal stuff.
• walking around peering in tents.
• yelling out for us to give us stuff

It is pretty crazy the difference between Tanzania and Malawi. In Tanzania there were schools everywhere, including in the remote, dirt road areas in the middle of the country (like where the guy had to ride for six hours to get where he was going), and there were hardly any kids hanging around camps. In Malawi, I've seen hardly any schools and there are hundreds of kids, on the sides of the roads and in camps.

So, I guess that if you are going to donate money, then donate money to some scheme that is going to build and staff schools. It may not make any real difference, but it will make life for cyclists a lot easier.

Dan's Camping Tip: If you have two doors on your tent, in countries that are officially pro-stealing stuff then you can use a keyring to lock your tent doors. Hopefully, key rings are some kind of magic that they can't understand.