Our final stop in Mozambique: Gorongosa National Park

As we made our way away from the coast towards the centre of Mozambique, there was a noticeable change in the quality of the roads. We were faced with bigger and more frequent potholes and narrower stretches of tarred road, which made driving past trucks a less than enjoyable experience. In addition, after previously witnessing how traffic police try to make a little extra money by stopping cars at regular intervals to see if they can find a reason to charge a fee or obtain a bribe, we noticed that our journey went a lot smoother on this stretch as we were waived through at all checkpoints. We have put this down to Joost wearing his UN security shirt, so Joost has decided to wear this shirt for all long drives for the rest of the trip!

We spent one night in the town of Chimoio to break up the drive, and were faced with long queues of traffic at each petrol station the next morning as word spread that the town was running of our petrol and diesel. Luckily, we managed to fill up our tank and we made the 2.5hr journey to Gorongosa National Park.

Gorongosa National Park was once one of Southern Africa's premier wildlife parks and is experiencing a resurgence under new management and with funding from the Carr Foundation. A conservation project is up and running and animal numbers as well as visitors are slowly increasing, although entry costs to the park are rather high and comparable to those of Kruger in South Africa, but the game viewing and driving experience is still a long way off at present.

Temperatures were particularly hot the two days we were there, reaching between 35 and 40 degrees during the day. Luckily, the rest camp had a small swimming pool, which we definitely made use of.

We were also lucky enough to have internet access at the restaurant of the rest camp, which also served cheap and cheerful lunches.

On our first night camping, we decided to put a little effort into our dinner and made a rather delicious meal of nasi goreng, and Joost made a fire to help ward off the mosquitoes.

The next morning we were up bright and early at 5:45am to get ready for our morning game drive. The park was quite different to what we have seen up until now. It was far more tropical and overgrown and the game was much more sparse. We had been told that the park has lions and elephants, but that it is rather rare to spot them, so it was to our great surprise when we suddenly spotted two male lions at the bottom of a dried up riverbed. When we got back to camp and chatted with the rangers and the other guests we realised we were the only people to spot lions that morning, as even the rangers rarely see them (although we weren't able to get a good photo of them).

That afternoon we went for another dip in the pool to cool off and headed off for another afternoon game drive. It was particularly hot and humid that night with next to no wind, so it wasn't a great night for sleeping in the tent. However, we survived (after I vowed never to camp again! - although I know I'm going to have to take that back) and after a quick breakfast and packing up we made our way westward towards the Zimbabwean border.