We are back at the Gappa Rest House in Mzimba. If you ever need to stay in Mzimba this is the place; 11 euro a night for me and Davy, very hot shower, lovely pink cotton mosquito nets, very clean, your clothes washed and dried for 50 kwatcha an item (about 10 cent), very friendly staff who greeted us with open arms and big smiles.


We have just had a very social evening on the narrow porch which joins our rooms; meeting our students again, seeing patients, and eating the most delicious food cooked by our South Korean neighbour who has smuggled a stove into his room. He also cooked us breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes. Sometimes life just turns out to be bizarre and there is not much you can do but embrace it. And it meant I had to run over to the market to buy more plates and that market is my favourite place.


Our journey here didn't turn out to be too bad. The 19 hour bus journey only took 17 and a half hours because of less road works on the road to Dar. Of the four buses we took yesterday one stank of fish but that one was only for an hour and only one was hell; half a seat each with our bags on our knees, literally swimming and sliding in sweat. This bus from hell (something like a Hiace van with 24 passengers) stopped almost every 100 yards to stuff more passengers in and I truly believed that we would never arrive. Every time it went uphill we had to take our feet off the floor because the floor was burning hot and literally too painful to touch, not that we had any where to put them and every movement required a push and a shove to our fellow passengers on each side because we were jammed so tight. But that was all yesterday and the memory is fading fast.


The last bus was a delight; it was the National Bus Company so it was an actual bus and it was headed all the way to Lilongwi, first stop Mzimba, so apart from a long refeulling palaver before we set out (hand pumping fuel from barrels) it actually felt like we were getting somewhere and the sunset landscape we traveled through was like a child's drawing; an extravagance of hills in every shape and size.


One of the exciting things since we arrived has been seeing the books that people sent and hearing about the joy of their arrival. Kathryn sent books to Fulgensio and he is in the process of consuming every word. It was strange for me to come across my old friends Kent and Phatak here in Mzimba and to hold the books that Kathryn packed and posted from so far away and feel connected again to another place a world away.