MOZAMBIQUE January 2008

N.B. We are waiting for photos...


PHOTO ; PHOTO AT END OF CHAPTER?

Removing trees from track.

Having a beer at Lake Niassa




I’m…….GET ME OUT OF HERE!


When I was recently in England, the programme ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!’ was on TV and , although I can never see myself eating live worms as some of the contestants have had to do, I know the feeling of ‘This-is-not-quite-where-I-want-to-be……’

The only way to drag myself out of Zanzibar (one night turned into nearly three weeks), was to book a flight to Mtwara near the southern border of Tanzania.

Thus 2007 ended very successfully when I stayed in a hut/house built by an Australian lady who wants to settle in a remote village near the border with Mozambique. Conditions were basic but the gentleman and his woman who looked after me were superb hosts. He used to be a Benedictine Priest and still plays the small, rickety (give it a push and pull to get the keys unstuck while playing) organ in the vast nearby RC church. Despite these Christian beliefs, the first thing he did for me after I entered the hut was to push a piece of millet stalk into the thatch above the door to ‘keep out bad spirits’.

I bought the food and his lady cooked…a very successful arrangement! Patricia had left her bicycle (21 gears!!!...never before seen in Africa!) for my use and it was wonderful to just explore the nearby villages and tracks.

A few days before Christmas, we went to the church and I saw the local man who arranges the Nativity display every year, finish it off by sowing millet seeds on the sand in front of the beautifully carved figures. A few days later, this was a thick carpet of ‘grass’ two inches long!


2 x PHOTOS? From James’s camera….


The Christmas Eve service eventually started when the generator got going. In the heat of the evening about 600 people crowded into the church and there was inspired singing, prayers and endless scenes I was too far away to see…although the three wise men were a very active and laugh-inducing trio as they played to the audience up and down the aisles. Just as the host was being offered and queues forming, the generator packed up and the church erupted into frightened screams in the dark. Chaos prevailed and I never saw if that part of the service was ever concluded after two heat-filled hours.

In my hut I often listened to the BBC World Service which was covering the Kenyan Elections before and after Polling Day with discussion, good humour and optimism. The only discordant note was to hear from someone that some of the Asian community has closed their businesses and gone across the border for a few days. No doubt they had returned, thinking all was well before the troubles started.

After the pleasant break in my ‘own’ home, I returned to Mtwara and met Alex, a young post-grad Brit, at the bus/truck-stop early the next morning. He was going south to meet up with his sister and proved to be delightful company. We were both intending to cross the river Rovuma which is the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. Despite the driver trying to persuade us to pay double so that we could depart, we refused and eventually, four hours later, he managed to fill the truck with enough passengers to justify the trip. Standing in the hot sun in a jam-packed pick-up truck for many hours of very bumpy roads is neither a good start to a trip nor a good ending to 2007. It was the 29th December and we hired a dugout canoe to pole us across the river. 40 minutes later, having fought strong currents, sandbanks, islands and hippos, our exhausted polers got us across and a tractor took us the 4km to the Immigration/Customs buildings. This was a small village with no facilities and no transport that day.

Alex and I slept on the concrete in a half-built house and were up at 5am, hoping that someone would be departing. All that happened was that a South African man in a 4x4 arrived at 6am, intending to catch the last car ferry going north for a week (neap tide makes the river too shallow). There was a chain with ‘STOP’ hanging from it across the road and no sign of officials, so we dropped it for him so that he could go and warn the ferry that he needed their service and then return to do his paperwork. The second he crossed the chain, the place was alive with Police and Immigration officials in their neatly-ironed shirts….

The outcome of all the fuss was that our passports were demanded (we refused so Alex was hand-cuffed) and bribes expected. We refused again and they gave up on us for being the usual penniless backpackers and because the car-owner was a much better bet for something. He resignedly paid up and we never saw him again, so maybe the ferry was still there… Incidentally, the Immigration blokes were totally out of touch with the ferry despite there being a telephone number the car-owner had been given. It just had nothing to do with them….Thus our introduction to Mozambique.

Late that afternoon Alex and I managed to get a lift on a truck and when we arrived in our village by the sea, managed to arrange a dhow for early the next morning. At 3.30am we left our hotel without food and walked the 1km through waist-deep water to get to our dhow. I was to become very adept at carrying my full and small rucsacs on my head in the next few days….

In the afternoon the wind became so strong that the small boat had to turn back to the last port of call. By this time I was the unofficial bailer-out and it had become a full-time job! We waded through the usual 1/2km of waist-high water (the tides go out for ever) and then walked about 3km to the nearest village where we managed to find a tin of condensed milk and a packet of biscuits. As the only food for the last day of 2007 it was not quite the way we had envisaged celebrating that night. Alex’s sister is a chef in a luxury Lodge further down the coast and he had intended to be there by then. But in Moz. one can never plan anything…

We slept on the boat…Alex at an angle as it settled into the mud at low tide and I constantly adjusting to the very uncomfortable sacks of hard dried cassava pieces below me. The skipper had said that we would be leaving at 3am, but by then the boat was totally stranded in the mud of low tide, Alex’s shoes had been stolen from the dhow during the night and we had to trek with our luggage deeper into the sea to another dhow which left at 5am.

Thus was started 2008.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Apart from the sun/wind-burn one suffered, it was good to follow the coast in a southerly direction. Later in the day we landed at a village where a visiting family who had come to the seaside for the first day of the year holiday, promised us a lift towards the Lodge that afternoon. I swam and Alex brought out his kite-board to the amazement of the locals who had never seen such a thing! The wind was strong and the kite and strings ended up in two palm trees. All very exciting for the locals although a bit worrying for Alex. Order was restored and we bought a full tank of petrol for our corpulent host and his corpulent wife and all their children and grandchildren.

Squashed into the car we set off and it was soon obvious that our host may have made a lot of money, but did not know how to drive…When we were stuck in the sand, he and his wife sat inside, revving the engine, whilst we all tried to push and pull. Starting in gear had not been learnt…. Ultimately I counted 30 souls around the car as passers-by helped out. The engine eventually started and the pushers then demanded money from Alex. He was not in a good mood with Moz. by then!

We arrived at the Lodge and Alex was happy to be staying with his sister. I had to pay too many US$ per night and, as there was no lift out the next day, the two nights there cost me the equivalent of two weeks’ of my backpacking budget. My precious Dollars saved for Zimbabwe had to be spent which lead to endless financial problems later on. Thus my mood about Moz. was also not a happy one….

In fairness, the Lodge was ‘luxury’ and not the most expensive of the selection along the coast/nearby islands. But I do question the eco-friendly nature of these places. I have visited some others and eaten in some of their restaurants but never considered affording a night. In this particular one, the large mosquito tents under thatch roofs were attractive, although I found it annoying to have to zip oneself in and out all the time. At night anybody who wanted to (and there were always night-watchmen walking about), can look into the tents, so no privacy. The shared eco-loos were a bit of a way from the tents, and for someone who needs to get up in the middle of the night, that really is not ‘luxury’. The little paraffin lamps are certainly not effective enough to allow for bedside reading. Alex’s sister is a very good cook and her food is beautifully presented. When one knows that it is all cooked in a kitchen with no electricity and small lamps only over charcoal fires, it is a miracle! A pity that the lack of variety means one is generally given sea-food and rice for most meals. But the young English staff members were lovely and it was a pleasure to chat to them. I managed to do some book-swaps and taught the kids how to play Robbery Rummy. However, one does not have the option of refusing to pay $41 for the local school books etc. and all outside activities are heavily charged for. Just the 4-hour lift to Pemba (customers were being taken to the airport) cost me $65 whereas the trip in a local truck would have been about $5 at most. But I enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere, swam naked straight from my tent and snoozed happily in my hammock in the afternoon.

Alex is a marvel and speaks Portuguese. It was only when I was finally on my own that the reality of my isolation struck! I am hopeless at languages and was totally lost in a country where everyone speaks Portuguese. Having walked for hours in the heat and humidity of Pemba (the Commonwealth War Graves are interesting as the deaths of many British and South African WW1 soldiers who died in 1918 are meticulously recorded and their graves attended whilst there are only memorials which state that 41 Africans and 21 Indians also died), I decided to consult my map. Needless to say, I was too tired to be alert and my small rucsac was stolen from next to me. Big disaster in many ways, but fortunately neither a passport nor credit card disappeared. However, after trying with hand-signals for two hours to get the police to give me a statement for Insurance purposes (I was constantly pushed to the back of the queue and only later did I realize it was because I did not have money for a bribe), I gave up on getting such niceties. Moz. began to be a not-so-friendly-place… How soon prejudices evolve when one cannot sit down to a decent conversation! The Mozambiqueans are perfectly friendly but far more reserved than other African nations so far. It was a pleasure not to be hassled continuously and to be regarded as ‘ordinary’ human beings instead of beings needing extra attention.

I spent two nights on the Ilha de Mocambique, a small island of 7000 inhabitants, 3.5km from the mainland. It is reached via a single-lane bridge. This was once an important trading island and the original capital city of Mozambique before Lorenzo Marques (Maputo today) took over at the end of the 19th century.. Today it is a rather neglected town of crumbling Portuguese buildings and an active reed-hut fishing community. The whole is a UNESCO World Heritage Site which will begin to be tidied up in February and its delightful charm lost forever, I suspect. Local lads acted as Guides for two afternoons and otherwise I enjoyed exploring the Fort and Museum with their own Guides. I just mention this because it was so good to speak English! Impressive is a little church which is the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere. And I was amused in the Portuguese cemetery to see a 4m high cement dhow as a memorial over someone’s grave.

The Zambezi floods had started and my original intention of wanting to follow the coastline in September before the rains, meant that I had to divert towards the western border. It was good to hear about the way the local authorities had learnt from the 2000 floods and were coping extremely well without foreign help. In 1967 Janice and I had hitch-hiked up the coast from South Africa, so it was not as though I was missing anything…just endless bush. This way I could indulge in one of my loves; a train journey. A 4-hour drive inland was Nampula, a largish city (tar roads and grid-pattern streets with even a museum) which is the start of a train journey to Cuamba. The train did not disappoint. It left at 5am and was only about 5 hours late that afternoon so that the connecting truck, on which two US Peace Corp boys and I clambered, would have been traveling half the night in the dark. In Moz. the adage of ‘always room for one more’ really applies and we were in a precarious position to start with when Hans fortunately insisted that we stop the truck and get off as Peace Corp rules said ‘no traveling in the dark’. We jumped off, found a hotel and left early the next morning for Lichinga where the boys were settling in as teachers for the next two years. Once again Moz. proved a first for me in the bed-bug stakes….And I have slept in worse conditions!

After three nights of Peace Corp luxury (well, no electricity for two nights, water in a bucket and sleeping on the floor) and conversation in English, I set off once again to fight with my lack of Portuguese. The plan was to get to a small port on Lake Niassa (called Lake Malawi in Malawi) where I could catch the Ilala Ferry to the Malawi side of the lake. 8km north of this landing place is a simple set of thatched bungalows by a quiet beach which is an ideal place from which to await the arrival of the Ilala in three days’ time.

Stepping out of the lake after a swim, I greeted Drew, who was standing next to his mud-covered 4x4 with sleeping tent on top. Originally Zimbabwean, he lives in Canada and works seasonally, so spends 51/2 months a year traveling through Africa. We shared drinks and food and decided the next day to drive north to an even better isolated beach nearly opposite Likoma Island. The latter is another favourite tourist island of charm and history. The track was a real challenge and it had obviously not been used by a vehicle for many a moon. We later found out that visitors to this particular isolated beach are collected by canoe from a town to the north. But it was worth the effort and the unexpected visitors (no-one had been for many weeks) were soon treated royally (or at least our huts were furnished with bedding and nets) and Drew created a good meal from his supplies. We planned to have fresh fish the next day when staff could be summoned; except that it began to rain early in the morning and the fear of flooding in the little hardly-passable streams was incentive enough to send us scurrying back without breakfast. The dreaded wooden ‘bridge’ was confronted and after due planning, Drew set off to cross it and suddenly spurted forward as the rotten tree-trunks collapsed below the back wheels. Relief! Two hours to do 10km…

As Drew was going to the Malawi border the next day anyway, I accompanied him there and must admit that I was very pleased to get to a country where they could speak my language….How arrogant can one get?!

Time was running out for me. We had enjoyed the best, non-touristy beaches on the lake, I had been to Malawi before and there was no requirement to dissect fish, so Malawi became a stepping stone for Zimbabwe. Drew was meeting friends and I went to Lilongwe, the 'garden capital' of Malawi. One can fly out from there.....