Week 11 - As the saying goes - good things come in small packages.

Last weekend I crossed the border into Rwanda through one of the most modern and best organised border crossings I've ever used. Everything clean, new and well signposted, with just one small exception - they fail to mention that due to the Belgian colonial past you swap sides of the road,  an interesting experience as I wonder why that truck is coming straight at me.

Rwanda was a country I knew little about other than a vague idea it was small and supposed to be hilly and pretty - and of course that it had suffered the appalling genocide of 1994.

Hilly and pretty both proved to be substantial understatements. I had not realised Rwanda bills itself as " le pays de mille collines" (the land of a thousand hills) and by the end of the week I feel I've driven up and down a substantial proportion of them - not that I'm complaining,  with mostly good and bend filled roads the country has provided some of the best roads I've ridden in a long time . Combine that with some stunning scenery and you have some of the best motorcycling roads I have done - in fact there is one 300 km stretch through the Nguwye National Park and up the edge of Lake Kivu that has to rate as one of the best rides of my life.

View from my $25 a night hotel room - stunning.

$3 - haircut,  wash, face massage

Did I mention it is the rainy season

and that does add a few hazards to the roads. 

Sunset over Lake Kivu - with the Congo in the background. 

Not everyone has as many horse power as me

It hasn't been all pleasure here - I spent a couple of days in Kigali organising the shipping of my Australian passport home to get an Ethiopian visa in it. Their rules say they will only issue it in your home country (something I've verified by trying in some of the embassies here in Africa) and the validity period was too short for me to have got it before I left Australia. With courier charges this is going to be one very expensive visa. This is a time I'm very glad to be a dual national; I'm now able to keep traveling on my UK Passport and am not stuck for 3 weeks waiting for the Australian one to return.

Motorcycle taxis - the main form of transport in Kigali (and most of the rest of the country)

Sprawled over multiple hills it can't really be called a pretty city. 

 Whilst in Kigali I also visited the main genocide memorial - a million people filled in a hundred days - its a terrible fact and needs to be remembered, but I've realised it shouldn't be my defining memory of Rwanda. The people have (or maybe that should be "are"? ) put it behind them,  just as we in other countries have done the same with our atrocities, and the country deserves to be remembered for what it now is, not what it briefly was. It appears (and I had a long, interesting, chat with a visiting American law professor doing research on this) to have done a remarkable job of reconciliation and reintegration of the society in a comparatively short time frame.

Week 10 - The invention that changed Africa?

As I moved through the towns of southern Tanzania one common feeling each night as I fell asleep in my tent was the sweat rolling off me. After a week or more of this I decided it was time to find somewhere cooler and did what the colonials did in their time, and headed for the hills. I'd heard of a small hill town called Loshoto that the Germans, as the pre World War 1 colonial masters of this part of the continent, had considered as the capital of German East Africa.  After several days,  and nearly a thousand kilometres of flat straight roads along the plains the ride upto the hill station proved a joy, 32 kilometres of unadulterated bend swinging as I climbed a 1000 metres - never mind the complete lack of crash barriers and the usual chaos on the road, it was a fantastic ride and brought a big smile to my face.

The town was equally pleasing small and compact and with a largely unrestored pre WW1 hotel whose grounds I camped in and whose bar I spent the night.

Main Street Loshoto

Market time

And this is the main bus station, always the noisiest place in town

And not much quieter at my campsite that night - soon after I arrived an overland tour truck rolled up and disgorged 20 people

It was at the hotel that I had the conversation about the invention mentioned in the title. My informant was a German who had moved to Tanzania in 1973 and he was referring to the mobile phone. He recalled that when he arrived it had taken 3 months to organise his first overseas phone call back to Europe, that it hardly improved for twenty years and that was typical for most of Africa where there were minimal land line networks beyond the major city centres. Then the mobile system started to arrive and suddenly outlying areas started to be connected. Now in 2016 it seems to be everywhere,  wherever you are if you look around there is a mobile transmission tower visible somewhere on a hill top,  even the smallest village has a shop selling air time and another shop offering charging facilities (in the more remote villages via a solar panel). In his argument this has brought the information revolution  in a way much more profound than the superficial way we consider our mass consumption in the developed world, for it had allowed farmers in the remotest village to now find out what his crop is really worth, what the weather forecast is and the like - combine this with a population that is young and an enthusiastic adopters and you have a profound effect that is hard for an outsider to understand. Having looked around and seen just how pervasive the mobile system and is usage is I'm inclined to agree with him.

Loshoto is locally famous for the hikes you can do in the area, so I took a day off the bike and did one with a guide. Six hours of walking tested me out - but some of the views were spectacular.

View to the plains a thousand metres below

Village primary school

Very basic - and apparently not even enough desks to go around

My guide (and a colonials house)

Moving on from Loshoto have me lots of opportunity to ride dirt roads.

But not always in sunshine

In this case fortunately a cafe turned up at the right moment

Unfortunately the pounding on the dirt had its consequences

Freshly welded fuel tank mounting bracket

Week 9 - Tanzanian wildlife

Crossing the border Malawi to Tanzania was no drama - but my day was somewhat spoiled by getting a speeding ticket in both countries; I hasten to add both were minimal offences and by their locations were very much revenue raising exercises (fortunately for my budget not that much revenue, they worked out at about $8 each after some negotiation).

Here are a few photographs from the week,

First night spent on a coffee plantation (with a multi purpose campsite)

Kids selling me breakfast the next day- unsugared doughnuts

Very striking eroded stone pillars at Ismilia Stone Age village site

All the above were taken at Ruaha NP where I joined up with another traveler and we paid to hire a 4wd and guide to do a 2 day safari (for some reason they don't let you ride your bike around! ). For the amount of wildlife I saw it is probably the best of all the parks I've visited

And the advice were taken in Mikuni NP which is the only one in the area you can ride through since the main highway goes through the center - much to my surprise I saw quite a lot of wildlife (these plus giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and impala)  apparently undisturbed by the traffic. Wonder if my insurance covers hitting an elephant?

Week 8 - Malawi: the realities of life

Malawi is a very beautiful, scenic country - you ride up the edge of Lake Malawi as you head north and you see the small fishing villages, the canoes out on the lake on one side of you and the freshly planted fields on the other. Every village you pass through is a hive of activity, people hustling and bustling,  on the roads there seems to be a constant stream of people, walking or cycling, moving somewhere, often carrying the ubiquitous hoe used to prepare the ground for planting. Everywhere the people wave and smile at you, the very young and the not so young  -I would say the old but you see so few of them, 1 or 2 a day out of thousands,  the legacy of both Aids and impact of childhood malnutrition on life expectancy.

And the lack of old people is when you start thinking about the reality of life here - it is tough in a way that it is hard for me as a middle income westerner to even imagine let alone describe. All I can do is to record a few snippets of information I have gleaned over the last few weeks:
- Malawi is officially the poorest country in the world with an average per capita income of US $ 250 per annum.
- The country currently has one of the highest premature and early childhood death rates in the world,  caused by a mix of malnutrition and minimal available health care
- Inflation is running at 25% per year at present and interest rates are slightly higher.
- Thirty years ago the Malawian Kwacha value was roughly par with the US dollar - now you need 650 of them (and has fallen from 450 in mid 2015).
- Health and education systems are minimal and have virtually collapsed under the weight of numbers and long term under funding.

I'm writing this at a campsite at Chitimba right on the shore of the lake, it's idyllic, has security,  clean toilets and showers,  shady we'll maintained tent sites yet the reality is I'm the first and only tourist to stay during December  - giving them a monthly income of $8 or 5000 Kwacha.  The manager tells me he's pleased I've come because they can now pay for next months electricity.

The manager is an unpaid volunteer from a church group that owns and runs the site,  as I presume are the two or three others on site who appear to be maintaining the place. Talking to him I learn a little about his life.  He has 3 kids, 18,15 and 10 which is a small family by Malawian standards. (He is a Christian and so monogamous, but polygamy is commen in the country and talked of a friend with 22 children). He and his family survive by farming the 2 hectares of land he owns. Farming here is purely manual, it means hand hoeing, planting, weeding, harvesting;  no machinery of any sort to help them - other than on the foriegn owned tea plantations in the south of the country I have not seen one tractor or piece of mechanised farming equipment in the country, everything is done with the hoe, a wheel barrow (for moving everything) and finally the bicycle for taking things to market. And these 2 hectares are not one big plot, rather they are dozen or more scattered around the locality, the result of plots being broken down and scattered as sons are given part of their parents land on marriage and then new land having to be found further afield.  Neither are many of them easy to access or farm, many hanging on seemingly impossible to cultivate slopes or squeezed into pocket handkerchief size corners at the sides of roads.

Sorry for the slightly unstructured nature of this week's post but I wanted to get some of the facts down before I forgot them. Thinking about these things makes me begin to appreciate how privileged my life is and how lucky I am.

And now a few photos to lighten things a bit.

Campsite Kuti Game Park - a small park, but because there are no predators there you can just wander around it which was really nice. 

and this is what you saw (plus lots of antelope but I didn't get any photos of them)

And when you roll up your tent in the morning this is what you find under the ground sheet - one slightly irate scorpion. 

My 5000 Kwacha piece of paradise on the shoes of Lake Malawi. After here I headed inland and up into the hills to see some more of rural Malawi 

Fertiliser aid being distributed to farmers

And the farmers receiving it. 

A rural road after some rain.  Forty kilometres of this eventually...

...leads to this.

Storekeeper half way along the mud road

With his kids

The source of water for most Malawians

Its usually the kids job to fetch the water  - and it can be many kilometres

My destination Livingstonia - a missionary settlement featuring a rather grand church for what is a small village

The man himself

But they also built schools

And a hospital (and it helped me get another perspective on religion after the Israel experience)

Main Street- pretty in the sun, a quagmire after rain

After Livingstonia I headed back down to the lakes edge and a brush with fame - using a same campsite as was used by Charlie and Ewan in a Long Way Down

Not a bad view for my last night in Malawi.