Whewie! 10 hours to do the 400km from Bilene to Morrungulo and every minute of the airconditioning was worth the investment. The road was TERRIBLE!! The road from Xai-xai north is really worse than no road at all – a multi coloured patchwork of potholes, some filled, some fixed, some half filled and some partially fixed. It makes driving smoothly impossible. The game is pretty much to see how long you can drive with the potholes between the wheels swerving left and right and off the road and on the road and across to the other side of the road, until you getted tricked into going into a big one and the whole truck shakes, the mirrors fold inwards and everyone gives a little squeal! Slow speed doesn’t help, nor does seeing a Landcruiser 200 flying past at 100km/hour at some point today (I’m sure he was flinching every now and again, and I’m nearly sure that fairness would mean he gets a pothole puncture at some point!).
Well we found our campsite – Morrungulo – as the light was fading fast. Lush and low hanging bushes & trees and they had space for us! We spent three nights here, using the pool, the sea and we even tried their restaurant (once). The pool and the sea were great. We had a bit of rain one evening and only a few leaks in the truck – so all manageable.
We were afraid of setting off again, because we knew that there was only really one more chance of staying by the sea before heading inland towards Malawi, and knowing that there was that patchwork road again (I always thought a truck would float effortlessly over the potholes with its huge tyres and over engineered chassis etc – meanwhile, if you’ve ever driving an unloaded bakkie over a bad road, you’ll be able to imagine an 8 tonne unloaded truck with super hard tyres!! (I’d let the tyres down but have no clue how hard they are! Normal 4x4 tyre pressure gauges only go up to about 3 or 4 bar, and the recommended soft pressure for these tyres is 5.5! So I suspect that at around the 8 bar level!))
After a dry steak and cool fans at lunch time in Vilanculos (Smugglers sports bar) we arrived at Inhassoro early evening. We had time to drive around looking for somewhere nice to camp, but most of the town is very village-y (which means lots of litter lying around the crumbling beach front ruins). After finding a puddle we checked out the guide books which confirmed Laura’s memory from about 9 years ago, and we settled at Hotel Seta campsite.
The sea here is nice and warm but there are thousands of beach weeds in the water – we’ll take a picture tomorrow, but it is really wierd, like millions of leaves in the water – way worse that swimming in sea weed. Kaylin didn’t mind though so we had a good evening swim before heading back to the truck for the night time routine.
Tomorrow we’ll go have that swim in the weeds (for photo sake) and then we’re going to hit the highway (apparently it’s a good road north) and try get to the lake (via Chimoi) as smartly as possible – I think it’s about another 1000km or so.
So we’re nearly ready to get to bed ... one more story, our coffee machine has been double sided tape, presticked and checked regularly. We always knew it would fall off sometime, but we kept on pretending it wouldn’t. Today it happened, while we were dodging potholes, it smashed on the floor (1 x chip in the floor) spread coffee beans and coffee grounds all over the place, and lost a few pieces of itself. After picking it all up and putting it back together we turned it on to see what juice it would give us ...suprise suprise! Jura ENA5 coffee machine is made rugged! Had a perfect cup of coffee – the machine is just a little louder than normal because the side panel has popped half off. Whew! We were nearly going to be home for Christmas!
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