road trip

The photos were taken on our way to Nayla Park a lovely wildlife reserve only an hours drive away. However the story is about our road trip to Lilongwe: everyone says that it’s 3 hours drive (4 tops) from Blantyre to Lilongwe, we’ve never found this to be true. Our first experience was when we arrived in Malawi and the journey took all day because the driver didn’t have all his paperwork, got stopped for speeding as well as a regular stop by the police! This time the journey there was quick and uneventful, we met the friends who were leaving for the UK and after a night in Lilongwe set off home about 10.30am. We thought that we’d found a short-cut out of the city, which proved to be wrong and was a route that we’d used before and it’s really slow, we were driving two cars back so there wasn’t time for any nifty map reading. I had the easy drive listening to BBC world service whereas the doc had the air/con and the kids! Driving long distance in Malawi is quite tedious as the roads are reasonably good so you get a good speed up then you get stuck behind a slow lorry or reach another village and have to slow down and then there’s the speed traps. We both got caught at a speed trap one behind the other and pulled over. I was trying to impress the cop with my Chichewa and southern African driving licence in the hope that he might be lenient but he explained that we would both be paying the fine. I went to check the video footage (essential as it’s quite common to be accused and find that you weren’t caught) but there we were both speeding. I came back to the doc to find him deep in conversation with the policeman about his medical problems and a long conversation later our fine was reduced from 10,000 MK to 2. I’m still not sure what the doc agreed to but was relieved at the lower charge as we didn’t have enough cash to pay the fine and buy lunch!