Day 207: Nampula to almost Caia

We felt much better waking up this morning, but we both still had to visit the toilet. We drove to Nampula where we refuelled. The petrol station didn’t have air so we stopped next to the road where someone inflated the wheels by taking out the inside pin of the valve and just putting a pipe over the valve and then quickly screwing on the pin again. Luckily we had our own tyre pressure gauge and could deflate the tyres from almost 4 bars.

The road to Mocuba was the same as a week ago. From Mocuba the road is still good, but the shoulder disappeared after a while and some potholes starting creeping in. Instead of going all the way to Caia we decided to turn in at Casa Branca which we saw on iOverland. From the tar road to the farm is 23km on a two-spoor track which took us 40 minutes to drive.

We got to the farmstead by 17:00, by which time it started getting dark already. Some workers approached us and with a combination of sign language and broken Portuguese they showed us where we can park to camp.

They then motioned to Hugo that we needed to phone someone from somewhere. Hugo followed them for about 500m and thought they were going to some house, but then they just climbed up a high ant hill to get reception.

They phoned Fernando the owner who said he and his wife is on his way also from Nampula.

We set up camp and Caro cooked the pork which we ate with spaghetti. In retrospect, this was probably rather stupid and Caro immediately had to go the bathroom again. Fernando and Diana arrived and gave us Charcoal tablets in case it is indeed just a tummy bug, but also strongly suggested that we might have Malaria after all and that the instant test kits are often wrong. Diana said she has had Malaria over 20 times and often the test kits get it wrong.

We took the Charcoal tablets and decided to wait for the next morning to see how we feel.