Richard went home.

To Malawi!

So the day has arrived, this morning we stopped off at the Weerasinghe family home from over 25 years ago… How interesting to see the pretty little town of Blantyre where Richard and his family spent a happy 10-ish years. It’s really lovely here!

It’s Sunday morning so we are enjoying scrambled eggs and toast at the only establishment that is actually open, there is also loud and energetic singing, cheering and clapping coming from all the churches in the area and it’s sunny… Pretty good start to the day!

We have had a busy old week making our way from Dar Es Salaam down to Blantyre. We departed Dar last Sunday after Richard replaced our rear shocks and we headed for the border with Malawi. We stopped at two gorgeous campsites along the way and had a quick and simple 30 minute border crossing at Songwe.

Excited about the shocks anyone?:

However, it wasn’t long after leaving Dar that we found our brakes to be toast. How annoying after waiting all that time for parts from the UK! The pads were so bad that they had knackered the discs as well 😦 Careful driving and lots of engine braking later, we were in Lilongwe, Malawi to pop into the Land Rover dealership… that no longer exists. Wonderful.

Richard found one set of Land Rover rear pads and one set of after-market front pads from a local workshop, even though they took 4 hours to find we were very lucky indeed!

We have been travelling with a lovely Swiss couple in their 1980’s Range Rover (lovely big noisy V8!) and met them for our last night of beers and fried foods, they have now departed for Zambia and we have some time left in Malawi yet.

One of our campsite mates:

Anyway, that’s us for now… Richard has just spotted his favourite childhood restaurant so it looks like we are headed out for dinner at Hong Kong Chinese in the next couple of days.