10 January - Mosquitos

10 January

64 Miles

Choma – Monze

Erik:

Easy ride today. Went through a few towns. Got mangoes. Got rained on. Monze doesn't seem as friendly as Choma did. The guest house we found is very lowball. Not impressive or worth the money we're paying ($16usd). Needless to say, I don't think we'll stay here one minute longer than we need to. We did have an amazing dinner at a place called Food Royale, which we're pretty sure is owned by the same people as Food Palace in Livingstone. It was excellent. Meat pies. HUGE ones.

I felt great on the ride today. The scenery is great. Rolling hills of green fall away from us on every side. After the rain, there was this cool layer of steam covering the road. It looked like a B movie special effect.

Steph:

So I'm going to tell you about the night we had in Monze. By far, the least amount of sleep I've gotten in a while. So the room wasn't great. It was big and had more than enough room for our bikes, which is good. We agreed to pay K80 purely because we were tired and because there was a shower. We paid and I went to shower but there was no water. Boo. The nice lady said, "ok, I will bring you water". Five minutes later, she knocked on the door and came in with a bucket of hot water and a bucket of cold water. Haha! Good enough! We went to bed around 10pm and put the mosquito net down. All beds have had mosquito nets so we don't get eaten alive at night. Since the sheets did not seem or smell clean, we slept on top of the bed cover and covered ourselves with our travel sheet. I couldn't sleept though. Everything was itching and I felt like there were bugs crawling all over me. At one point Erik got up to get the anti-itch cream because he felt the same. I kept thinking, crap, there are bed bugs here, I want to get out of here. I also figured we could just get up and leave since I was sure it was around 5am. Well, no. It was 1:30am. Erik turned on the lights, I looked up and almost screamed. The inside of our mosquito net was COVERED with mosquitoes. COVERED. There must have been at least 20 in the bed with us. Ugh. So gross. These guys had been sucking our blood for hours. I spent the next ten minutes killing every single one of them. But even after we re-secured the net, we didn't get any sleep at all. As soon as the sun came out we were out of there.

Good riddance Monze!!

A healthy Erik leaving Choma

Some hills to spice up our day :)