Second rest day at Ngala Lodge, Kamphambale
Distance 6696
Total from Amsterdam 12096

Peter was up well before sunrise and plugged in his headlamp batteries to charge before the electricity goes off. He has taken apart the Whisperlite and followed a utube video to service and clean the burner. The utube guy says ‘you should use white gas, kerosene or jet fuel’ … now where does this oke think we’re going to find these in a tiny village in the middle of Malawi. This village sells diesel or petrol in plastic coke bottles !! There was some leftover poor quality petrol from Egypt left in the tank which he tossed and we’ll have to try and get some paraffin from the factory, Illovo Sugar about 30 km down from here. With all the dettol I’ve smeared on myself for flies and miggies I smell like a hospital. It’s mostly in the morning that they’re out in force. We had a magic fry up this morning of french toast with fried bananas and tomatoes. The Whisperlite is still playing up but we got our breakfast cooked before the burner died on us. A couple of Zim folk came past and the one guy, Graham suggested we just get new fuel.

I finished my book and have started book three of Tami Hoag trilogy, Down the Darkest Road. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two and Peter said book 3 is the best. By now Peter was hungry again so we boiled stodgy spaghetti and had a fruit/salad of mustard leaves (no lettuce in villages), tomatoes, eggs, naartjies, bananas which was great. We got invited by the owners of Ngala Lodge to join them for a braai and were spoilt rotten with fillet, boerewors and yummy chicken. Salads were … green, potato and beans and fresh bread rolls and real butter. ??. It felt as though we were back in SA.  Got to meet Patricia’s dad, Mervin who lives two houses from Ngala. He had previously worked in Uganda for two years growing hops but due to draught, the farm closed down. With our tummies full we are in our tent reading and enjoying the last of our lekker caramel suckers. Night all xx

PS Thanks to everyone who drop is a line from time to time, its much appreciated

– Our fry up this morning

– Beautiful Ngala Beach Lodge

– Suckers, our nightly treat