Biker Tom and Biker Pete

Living on a border crossing we periodically get visitors stopping over on their way to Malawi.  Since we're fairly isolated in our far corner of the country, we usually welcome these opportunities to catch up with friends or meet interesting travelers.  Something about being so far from home and having benefitted from our share of hospitality makes us more open to taking in strangers, plus they've usually been recommended through the PC network; we've never had any negative experiences with guests or anything from our house disappear. Our latest guests were two English blokes pedaling their way  across the continent from Durban, South Africa to Kenya. Surprisingly it's not the first time we've met long-haul cyclers. Cross-African bike trips seem to be all the rage, although locals here don't quite understand why they don't take a bus! We've greeted several foreigners biking through our town this year (including a couple on a tandem bike), but this was the first time we've hosted any and heard about the experience in depth. Tom and Pete were childhood friends from Suffolk County, England, who both had positive experiences volunteering in Africa, Tom as a teacher in Namibia, and Pete building shelters for slum dwellers in Kenya. Now they are cycling against malaria, helping distribute mosquito nets and health messages across Eastern Africa. They had visited several Peace Corps Volunteers on their way up the country, so we got to see some pictures and hear some news about our friends in far away sites.  Most foreigners in an obscure, out of the way country like Mozambique have an interesting story to share and many are involved in development projects or service, like us, so we tend to be compatible. Plus, hearing about positive experiences helps keep us motivated and gives us good ideas for what we would like to do in the future in our life after Peace Corps.