Mozambique: Beaches, Brawls and Buses

*Warning: this blog entry contains evidence that Fiona and I do not have the flawlessly perfect marriage you might have imagined 😉

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I haven’t blogged in a bit… We’ve been… err… busy.

After our few days in Nkhata Bay in northern Malawi, we headed to the southern end of Lake Malawi to Monkey Bay/Cape McLear, famous for beautiful waters and great fresh water diving and snorkeling. What was supposed to be a 2 night stop morphed into a week-long sloth-fest as our camp, Fat Monkeys, grew on us and the kids. Our boys even voluntarily joined the owner’s kids in the “home school” on the premises – and were really happy to have some friends to play with at last. We spent lots of swimming and snorkeling amongst the most amazing populations of cichlids, and feeding fish eagles, and more. The fish were astounding – gregarious and numerous (see the pictures). The camp was filled with a wide array of people: Dutch, Israelis, Brits, South Africans, Americans, Germans. There were 4 permanently stoned, and really nice, Israeli guys camping next to us – one of whom set himself alight with petrol while trying to help Ben light a campfire, much to Ben’s (and his utterly incapacitated Israeli friends’) amusement. Every day, the Israelis would tell us of their great plans for tomorrow that never quite materialized out of the smokey haze that surrounded their tents.

One of our evenings was spent with about 100 local kids in town, watching a movie. The movie was organized by an older Dutch couple who built and continue to fund an elementary school in the town. So we joined all the kids seated cross-legged on the dirt main road in the centre of town watching a Disney movie projected onto a wall on the other side of the street. Until a car came. Or it rained. Or another car came. Or the generator ran out of fuel.

We eventually dragged ourselves and the kids away from Cape McLear and Fat Monkeys… it was brilliant and a Top 10 highlight of the trip.

We bolted through the rest of Malawi, spending only one evening with our Malawian cleaning lady’s son. We drove quickly through some gorgeous countryside of tea plantations and mountains to get ourselves to the Indian Ocean and the gorgeous Mozambiquan beaches the Israelis had so enthused about.

Our trip from the Malawian border to Quelimane, Mozambique which both our GPS and our map suggested would take 5 hours, actually took a painful 14 hours on horrendous roads through deeply rural Mozambique. The Malawian road had been in great condition but it became much less road-like at the Mozambiquan border. The Mozambiquan road was terrible, having 3 foot deep rain trenches running through it which were manageable if it wasn’t raining and there was adequate light with which to see them. But of course, the skies opened and it poured torrentially as we drove late into the night. The roads were so bad that after 8 hours Fiona was in agony, talking about her lungs having become detached from her body cavity somehow. But stopping in the middle of rural Mozambiquan nowhere wasn’t really an option no matter how gruesome and alarming her major organ self-diagnoses were becoming… We eventually arrived in Quilemane, a grubby little town on the Indian Ocean, at midnight only to find that every hotel in town was booked and thus stayed in an apartment, with the kids sleeping on the floor… And then bolted out of town first thing the next morning to get to Beira and the promise of a Mozambiquan beach via a camp on the Zambezi River…

And a beach we got! We stayed at a place called Rio Savane about 30kms north of Beira, on an archipelago accessible only by dhow/boat. The place was stunning… Coconut palms, thatched huts, seafood and a 10km empty white sand beach on the warm Indian Ocean. And we were the only guests. It was enormously difficult to get back on the dhow to leave that place.

And then things got interesting… Fiona and I had a disagreement that it seemed to me (or an indignant and enraged version of me) would be best resolved by my early return to Cape Town and her continuing onwards to South Africa by car. Not to make any excuses, but I guess 3 months of spending 24 hours a day within 3 feet of each other had become fertile ground for a really big blow out — and I/we didn’t disappoint. So I booked a flight from Beira to Cape Town and hopped out of the car about 2 hours outside Beira to take local transportation to the airport somehow… As Fiona and the boys headed off into the distance and I surveyed my surroundings, I quickly concluded that this was a big mistake. Who the hell would let his wife and 3 young kids drive and camp alone in Africa? Doh. Fiona had no working cellphone and I had no idea where they were going… Double-doh. I eventually got a bus into Beira, cancelled my flight to Cape Town, checked into a hotel, and wrestled with how on earth I’d track Fiona and the kids down. I figured that getting a bus to Vilankulo, about an 10-hour drive south of Beira was the best plan as I thought I’d get vaguely nearby for when Fiona would eventually buy herself a SIM card and call me. I awoke at 2 a.m. to catch the Beira-Vilankulo bus. It was an old half-length Chinese bus (they send them to Africa when they’re old and clapped out). The interior was stuffed with bags of presumably stolen USAID maize meal, luggage, potato sacks full of clothes and effects and a couple of live chickens. Bags were stacked 8 feet high on the roof under a tarpaulin, and a rather alarmed, loudly bleating live goat tied to the front of all that. As I hadn’t booked(??!!??), I was sent to the very back of the bus (over the diesel engine) for my 10-hour journey and paid only a $10 fare. What followed were the longest 6 hours of my life… The engine started and diesel fumes rose from under my seat. The bus pulled away and a huge cloud of billowing diesel fumes followed it along the road, mostly emanating from below my seat. Then it started to get really, really warm. And there were plastic burning and oil burning smells to add to the choking fumes. The drunk guy in front of me, who controlled the sliding window, really needed to sleep with his head against a closed window so kept closing my only source of fresh air. I had to close my eyes to stop the tears welling from as my body tried to cope with the diesel fumes. Only 10 hours… I couldn’t move seats as the entire bus was packed. My fellow travellers (the sober ones anyway) in the back of the bus didn’t seem too bothered – as I struggled to hold down the contents of my stomach. Fumos! Woah! Fumos! And then, just as I had convinced myself that I had to make it the 10 hours to Vilankulo somehow, it became clear that the bus had developed some very serious engine issues as we crawled up hills at 5 kmh, with ever larger clouds of black diesel fumes rising from below me. 6 hours later, I clambered off the bus only 120kms away from Beira (and at that rate, 20 hours short of my destination) and in exactly the same town that I had been dropped off by Fiona and the kids a day earlier. Utterly futile. I stank of diesel and smoke. My eyes were beet red. Famished. Defeated. I got back on another bus back to Beira to spend another night in the same hotel and make another plan… Fortunately, Fiona called later that evening and we set everything right. This time I caught a proper coach and traveled 12 hours down to Maxixe to meet them. All ends well. But I can’t help feeling that Mozambique wanted to punish me somehow…

Fiona and the boys had traveled to Praia do Tofo, a spectacular beach town near lovely Inhumbane, with a gorgeous beach and crystal blue waters. We spent five days swimming, snorkeling with dolphins, trying to find whale sharks, bodyboarding and just beach-chilling. Paradise.

We then headed southwards towards Maputo, stopping at one gorgeous lodge (Sunset Beach) and one so-so (Palmeiras, Bilene) lodge on the beach. We were told to visit the fish market in Maputo which didn’t disappoint… You haggle for an hour in the market for your prawns/calamari/crab/langoustines/octopus/fish and then take it to one of the tavernas in the back who’ll cook it for you. Hilarious, exhausting, expensive but delicious.

We’re now back in South Africa. After 3 months in some pretty remote places, even the smallest towns in northeastern South Africa appear sophisticated!

We’re in Kruger National Park for 3 more nights and then we’ll make our way along the South African coast back to Cape Town in 3 weeks. What a crazy trip it has been…