Metaljockey
Race Dog
The next morning dawns slow and peaceful.
Brian’s spot.
Ablutions
We hit the road, we are going to be passing through Lichinga again on our way east.
Everybody is feeling perky today.
And we get the right kind of roads too, nice and fast.
Many of the villages we pass through have specially made structures for shade.
When we hit Lichinga again we have lunch and as chance would have it we meet Warrick, an ex-South African. He farms in the area that we are going to be travelling through today and we are invited to stay over on his farm.
This is very fortunate as Lichinga is our last fuel stop for the next 600 odd km. He will cart our fuel drums to the farm.
Leaving us to steek it without all that dead weight.
This river later cuts through the farm.
When we pull up at the farm we introduce ourselves to his wife, Fenn, who immediately offers us something cold and sends us to the river to swim with the kids. This river is right below their house, and it supplies their drinking and irrigation water all year round.
We spend most of the afternoon in Fenn’s lovely company, Warrick only arriving at about 21H00 from town with our beers.
Some of you will remember when Moz invited commercial farmers from SA and Zim to relocate to underdeveloped areas of the country. The basics were that you get the land for free as long as you create a farming enterprise from scratch.
Warrick and Fenn came here to an area of complete wilderness, and have turned it into a sizable well developed farm. Hectares have been cleared, irrigation installed and thousands of cashew trees planted. Still some years to the first harvest, but I am mightily impressed by what Warrick is creating here by himself. I certainly have neither the skill nor the tenacity required.
For instance, he has a generator and irrigation pump running off a Land Cruiser engine 24 hours a day. Except this engine is not running on petrol or diesel, it is running on wood. Check this out.
The first cylinder is burning the wood, the suction of the engine pulls the gases down so that there is no flames or smoke, just glowing coals. These unburned gases then moves through the next cylinder which uses water to cool it. What the third one does I do not remember, but this gas then goes straight into the inlet manifold where the carburetor normally would be.
Like so.
Amazing stuff, a R24 000 a month diesel bill sent packing.
Like I said before, on every trip I learn some new shit.
Hopefully Fenn will follow her dream to have a guesthouse here, it will be the only one in a radius of several hundred km. They are wonderfully hospitable people and a treat to talk to.
On top of eating like kings, having cold beers and sleeping in a proper bed, we are also lucky enough to be joined by some professional hunters that will pass through Mavago the next day. We also are to travel through Mavago and they offer to drop our fuel at the government office there.
Most excellent, this takes our fuel far enough that we will now certainly have enough to reach the next fuel quite comfortably. One of our main obstacles sorted.
Brian’s spot.
Ablutions
We hit the road, we are going to be passing through Lichinga again on our way east.
Everybody is feeling perky today.
And we get the right kind of roads too, nice and fast.
Many of the villages we pass through have specially made structures for shade.
When we hit Lichinga again we have lunch and as chance would have it we meet Warrick, an ex-South African. He farms in the area that we are going to be travelling through today and we are invited to stay over on his farm.
This is very fortunate as Lichinga is our last fuel stop for the next 600 odd km. He will cart our fuel drums to the farm.
Leaving us to steek it without all that dead weight.
This river later cuts through the farm.
When we pull up at the farm we introduce ourselves to his wife, Fenn, who immediately offers us something cold and sends us to the river to swim with the kids. This river is right below their house, and it supplies their drinking and irrigation water all year round.
We spend most of the afternoon in Fenn’s lovely company, Warrick only arriving at about 21H00 from town with our beers.
Some of you will remember when Moz invited commercial farmers from SA and Zim to relocate to underdeveloped areas of the country. The basics were that you get the land for free as long as you create a farming enterprise from scratch.
Warrick and Fenn came here to an area of complete wilderness, and have turned it into a sizable well developed farm. Hectares have been cleared, irrigation installed and thousands of cashew trees planted. Still some years to the first harvest, but I am mightily impressed by what Warrick is creating here by himself. I certainly have neither the skill nor the tenacity required.
For instance, he has a generator and irrigation pump running off a Land Cruiser engine 24 hours a day. Except this engine is not running on petrol or diesel, it is running on wood. Check this out.
The first cylinder is burning the wood, the suction of the engine pulls the gases down so that there is no flames or smoke, just glowing coals. These unburned gases then moves through the next cylinder which uses water to cool it. What the third one does I do not remember, but this gas then goes straight into the inlet manifold where the carburetor normally would be.
Like so.
Amazing stuff, a R24 000 a month diesel bill sent packing.
Like I said before, on every trip I learn some new shit.
Hopefully Fenn will follow her dream to have a guesthouse here, it will be the only one in a radius of several hundred km. They are wonderfully hospitable people and a treat to talk to.
On top of eating like kings, having cold beers and sleeping in a proper bed, we are also lucky enough to be joined by some professional hunters that will pass through Mavago the next day. We also are to travel through Mavago and they offer to drop our fuel at the government office there.
Most excellent, this takes our fuel far enough that we will now certainly have enough to reach the next fuel quite comfortably. One of our main obstacles sorted.
