March 27

Great day!  We cycled for 67 miles today with 590 meters of climbing.  It seemed like a short easy day.  Before going on this trip if someone told me ... let's go for a 67 mile ride with 2,000 feet of climbing; I would have told them they were crazy!  Now it seems like an easy day.  Go figure...  :)

It was a beautiful day.  The start was a bit chilly as most people had jackets on.  It was seriously overcast at first.  I put my rain jacket back in my pack, not going to make that mistake twice.  :)   But once we started riding at 6:15 am (that's right 6:15 on the bike and riding, crazy huh!?) the sun broke through the clouds and it started warming up.  The scenery was to die for (for sure, for sure).  The area we are going through is now opening up to vast valleys and fewer forests. 

You could see for miles with a mountain or two stuck here and there.  The landscape was dotted with some forest but mostly cultivated fields.  One of the big crops is tobacco.  The tobacco leaves colors of yellows and greens made for interesting color pallets for the land.  It seemed like such an easy ride that you could take your time a really look out at the scenery.  Loved it!

An interesting thing...  we are in the rainy season but other than yesterday have been very lucky.  But you can feel the moisture in the air in that it is so humid.  When I got up this morning the tent fly (it is the cover over the tent itself that is to keep the rain out) was completely soaked on the inside.  All of the humidity had condensed on the inside of the fly due to the temp being warmer inside than outside.  I had drops of water on the tent floor from the condensation.  Very bizarre.

As someone commented, Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa.  I got to see the impact of it this morning.  We camped on a soccer field of a school.  The tour put up ropes to keep the kids out of the camp and tents.  When they dropped the ropes in the process of packing up this morning, the kids rushed in and grabbed the plastic bags of trash and ran off with them.  They were fighting over them, bags of plastic pop bottles and castaway food from breakfast and dinner.  There were over 50 kids pushing and shoving to get their share.  Kind of sad....

This was the road... it was relatively flat and we had a glancing tailwind in the morning!

This was a sign out in front of a school.