Sabie, South Africa, June 8, 2016
It always seems to take much
longer than it should to get around to distilling experiences into blog
posts. The essence of blogging should be
its immediacy and speed, and yet it seems to take me a few weeks (or even months)
to get around to it. I’d like to claim
that it’s because it takes that long to ruminate on events and assess their
significance, beauty and interest, but that would be a lie. Mostly it’s that I don’t get around to it
because I have other things (usually further travel) occupying my time and my
mental phase space. We left Mozambique 9
days ago, and we’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern, but I still am only
getting around to writing about our wonderful two weeks in that unfortunate
country now that it’s a grey day and we’ve done the hiking that we wanted to do
in this area.
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| Waves coming into Pomene |
I had been looking forward to
visiting Mozambique for years. I had
heard about its lovely beaches and its historic remnants from other travellers
and from friends who had worked in the country.
I heard that it was rebuilding after its brutal years of independence
struggle and subsequent civil war, and that it was an optimistic place. Looking through the Lonely Planet, it sounded
as though there was a lot to see throughout the immense length of the country,
and we planned to drive Stanley north, at least as far as the main border
crossing into Zimbabwe, preferably as far as the Malawi border, and maybe as
far north as the Quirimba Archipelago, about which I had heard great things. Unfortunately while we were in Johannesburg
in early April, having brunch with Erin Conway-Smith, fellow ex-Thunder Bay-ite
and current Economist correspondent for southern Africa, she told Terri and me
that things were rapidly falling apart in Mozambique, with Renamo, the losing
side in the civil war, having walked out of government over its demands to rule
the northern provinces of the country.
There were reports of frequent shooting attacks on traffic on the EN1,
the main north-south highway of the country, carried out by Renamo, and of
government retaliation against civilians in the Gorongosa and Manica provinces
where Renamo’s centre of support is. In
an article in the Global Post, Erin wrote about the very real dangers of the
civil war kicking off again, and urged us to be careful and keep ourselves
informed about the current state of play in the country. I subscribed to a couple of newletters and
Twitter newsfeeds on the country, including the excellent Zenaida Machado (a
Mozambican journalist) and as we travelled through Kruger, I would follow
developments in the country, none of which looked good. Hidden debts used to fund useless tuna
trawlers and line officials’ pockets; imminent default on the country’s foreign
debt; the IMF and Western countries cutting off financial support; more
shootings; mass graves in Gorongosa. We
set off for Mozambique already thinking that we might not be able to venture
beyond the beautiful beaches of the south, firmly held by the Frelimo
government and out of range of the Kalashnikovs of Renamo.
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| On the dusty road through Limpopo Park |
We entered Mozambique on
Thursday, May 12th, at Giriyondo border post. This is one of the most soporific border
crossings imaginable. We arrived at
8:05, just as they opened for business, and crossed relatively quickly,
although not painlessly. We were the
first vehicle to enter Mozambique there that day; we heard later that in total
three vehicles crossed all day. The
South African side was relatively quick, while the Mozambican side was a bit
more leisurely. We regretted not doing
our homework and reading up on visas in more detail. Mozambique issues 30-day single-entry visas
at the border, but the prices vary wildly depending on the currency in which
you pay. In Mozambican meticais, the
price is Mt 2085, or a little under US$ 40.
If you pay in South African rand, the price is R 785, which is about US$
52 at current exchange rates. If,
however, like us you want to pay in US dollars, it’s US$ 90 per person, which
is an outrageous markup. We scrounged
together enough rand to buy one visa, then swallowed the loss and bought the
other in dollars, muttering under our breaths.
Perhaps the visa prices (which were on an old printed list) were set
when the rand and the metical had not yet fallen off a currency cliff.
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| Terri at Fish Eagle Camp |
We drove along a reasonable dirt
track for the next hour and a half to get to Campismo Aguia Pesqueira (Fish
Eagle Camp), through the Parque Nacional de Limpopo. In theory Kruger, Gonarezhou National Park in
Zimbabwe and Limpopo Park in Mozambique should form a single tri-national
wildlife safety zone that is one of the biggest wildlife reserves in southern
Africa. In practice, Limpopo is almost
bereft of wildlife, its elephants and lions poached long ago. We drove through scrubby forest very similar
to the bush on the South African side, and yet we saw barely a single animal,
other than a snake, a handful of zebra and a few impala. It was sad; there were barely even any
birds. Despite Kruger’s relative lack of
visible game, it was still the Garden of Eden in comparison with Limpopo.
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| Fish Eagle Camp sunset over Massangir Dam |
We pulled into Fish Eagle Camp
around noon and instantly fell in love.
It’s a wonderfully situated campsite, high above the waters of the
Massangir Dam, and the campsite itself is well appointed, with nice bathrooms
and braai pits. We found a great spot
with a particularly good angle for sunset and settled in. We did some exercises, then went for a stroll
down to the shore of the reservoir. As
we returned for sunset, another 4x4 camper drove up and picked the campsite
next to ours, doubling the number of inhabitants of this idyllic spot. It was a German couple, Edith and Marcel, in
a camper that they had rented in South Africa.
We watched the wonderfully
coloured sunset together and, after an excellent dinner of steaks grilled on
the braai, we had them over for whisky and Amarula and stories. They had wanted to do a similar trip to ours
a few years ago but had been put off by the hassle and paperwork involved in
buying a vehicle in South Africa, so they were interested in how we had managed
it. In the dark we could see the fires
of the local villagers who were cultivating maize and running cattle in the
bush near the water; between farming and fishing, it’s not that surprising that
there aren’t many wild animals to be seen around the park, other than a few
beautiful fish eagles soaring high overhead.
The next morning we waved goodbye
to Marcel and Edith as we made an early getaway after our usual feast of
oatmeal and fruit a la Terri. We drove
out over 20 km of fairly awful track before we left the park and turned
unexpectedly onto asphalt. Our map had
shown dirt roads all the way to the coast, so it was a pleasant surprise. We crossed the massive dam wall, then turned
into the small town of Massangir, where we got money out of an ATM (no more
miserable exchange rates for dollars for us!), bought a SIM card, had a bite to
eat and tried (unsuccessfully) to buy third-party car insurance (compulsory in
Mozambique) with the help of a friendly local guy, Artur, who worked for the
national park as an agricultural extension officer. Marcel and Edith drove by and headed off
towards the coast. We drove as far as
Chokwe along a new, smooth, empty asphalt road.
Chokwe was a substantial town, full of banks and shops and offices, so we
got more money from an ATM, had a splendid lunch and eventually found an
insurance guy who sold us a month’s third party insurance for MT 660 (about US$
12). I was having fun trying to speak
Portuguese, a language I don’t know. I
basically spoke Spanish, trying to put on a Portuguese-sounding accent, and
hoped for the best, and often it worked.
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| Chidenguele dawn |
The drive to Chidenguele was
long, made longer by the horrible state of the road after Chokwe. The next 40 km were paved road that was in
such a potholed state that it was much worse than a dirt road would have
been. Lots of slaloming between craters,
driving beside the road and (finally) a detour onto a parallel dirt road that
was both a lot better for driving and a lot more scenic than the ruined
highway. Progress was slow, made slower
by our fear of being pulled over by the traffic police. South African tourists are a big target for
the traffic cops, who patrol the speed zones around towns (80 km/h on the
outskirts, 60 km/h in the town, with the signs frequently missing) and insist
that you were speeding and show an old, stored speed gun reading to back up
their claim. We drove with exaggerated
caution past Chibuto and down to the coastal road as darkness fell around us. We finally hit the main EN1 road just east of
Xai Xai and continued another 50 km to the Chidenguele turnoff, where we drove
another 4 km down increasingly sandy tracks to reach the idyllic Sunset Beach
Resort, where we found Marcel and Edith already established. They had arrived an hour before us but had
been pulled over for speeding along the way, only escaping by genuinely not
having a single metical to their name to pay the fine. The campsite was very nice, with individual
bathroom/dishwashing huts and great shade trees. We slept well after a great fish dinner in
the restaurant.
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| Graydon on the beach at Chidenguele |
In the morning, we woke up early
with the small, noisy child in the campsite opposite ours, and went up to the
restaurant to watch the sunrise. It was
our first view of the Mozambique coast, and it lived up to its billing. We were above the beach, perched on a sand
dune, and the surf of the waves provided a great backdrop of white noise. We went for a brief walk along the beach before
breakfast, then ate in the restaurant before taking a much longer stroll along
the completely deserted beach for a couple of hours. White-fronted plovers and crabs were the only
other creatures taking a stroll along the golden sands, and it was a relief
after so many days cooped up in the car in Kruger to walk for so long with the
wet sand beneath our toes. When we got
back I went out for a run along the road we had driven the night before, as far
as a lagoon where fishermen were casting their nets and locals were filling up
water jugs. Back at Sunset Beach we took
a dip in the swimming pool, did some yoga, had a luxurious late lunch
overlooking the beach and then bought a
freshly spearfished snapper from a local guy who was selling fish to the
restaurant. We cooked it up on the
braai, the first of a number of memorable home-cooked seafood dinners in
Mozambique.
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| Terri on the beach at Chidenguele |
We had a lazy morning the next
day, doing yoga, juggling, lazing over breakfast, and didn’t even start driving
until 10 am. Terri was at the wheel when
we had two encounters with traffic cops keen to shake us down, but since we
were nowhere near the speed limit, Terri managed to talk our way through both
speed traps. We switched drivers and I
was at the wheel as we turned off EN 1 at Lindela for the long trundle towards
Inhambane. We had decided to stay in
Paindane, about which we had heard good things, and everything went well until
the last 5 km. The track had been
getting sandier and sandier, and suddenly we were stuck in deep sand. We engaged our 4WD and then got out of the
first sand trap, deciding to take another road around. We got stuck on that one too, and local kids
and adults helped push us out, but it was tough going. What we should have done, and didn’t because
we weren’t aware of how much a difference it makes, was to let most of the air
out of our tires, all the way down to 1.0 or even 0.8 bar, to greatly increase
the contact area of the tire with the sand and “float” us better, rather like
fat skis in powder snow. We continued
spinning our way furiously, followed by a small battalion of excited kids who
knew that they would be digging us out again soon. I managed to get us to within 100 metres of
our destination before finally and definitively getting mired in sand so deeply
that our wheels could no longer even spin, as our differential was buried in
the sand. We dug and dug and dug, using
the spade that came with Stanley, but were unable to get out.
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| The lagoon at Inhassiro |
I walked up the road to the
Paindane Resort and to the neighbouring resort in search of a vehicle that
might be able to pull us out of the sand.
Paindane Resort was all but deserted, with only a security guard on
hand, but Vossie, a South African dive instructor, was at the neighbouring
resort and came to our rescue. He asked
why we hadn’t deflated our tires properly (a fair question), deflated them all
to 0.8 bar and then tried unsuccessfully to pull us out. As it turned out, his tires weren’t properly
deflated on his Land Cruiser and his Hi-Lift jack wasn’t working, so he
retreated in search of replacement parts for the jack. In the meantime I had been digging, along
with the team of local kids and an adult, and we had managed to free the diff
from the sand. Putting the vehicle in
low-range 4WD I was able to free myself from the sand just as Vossie returned. We drove Stanley over the sand into Paindane
Resort, managed to get the security guard to agree to let us camp outside a
cottage (we were the only guests of the entire resort) and cooked up dinner (a
fish curry, using the leftover snapper from the night before). It was a spectacular spot to camp, high up
above the ocean, and we slept well.
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| Lobster lunch at Paindane |
Having expended so much effort to
get to Paindane, we weren’t keen to leave too soon, so we spent a couple of
days there. On the first day we had a
local spear-fisherman, Peter, drop by and ask if we wanted him to catch us any
fish. We agreed to take some lobster,
and by lunchtime he was back with 9 lobsters; we had 4 for lunch and kept 5 for
later consumption. We lunched
magnificently looking out over the bay and the fringing reef, and then dropped
by Vossie’s resort (20 metres behind where we were staying) to see about going
diving the next day. We agreed to go as
he promised dragon moray eels (something I had never seen before) and gave us a
very reasonable price (290 rand for a dive, plus 220 rand for gear rental, for
a total of US$ 34 if we did one dive or US$ 53 if we did two). We then went for a long walk along the beach
north towards adjacent Guinjata Beach in search of a supermarket. It was a beautiful walk, with lots of shells
and crabs to distract our attention and great light. Taurus supermarket, tucked into a bay full of
South African holiday homes and a couple of big resorts (Jeff’s and Guinjata
Bay) was full of imported South African goodies at inflated prices, but we were
low on supplies and had no choice but to stock up there. We had great sunset light on the walk back,
and supped magnificently on leftover fish curry.
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| Paindane |
In the night the wind changed
direction and started blowing hard from the southeast, rattling the canvas tent
sides of Stanley. We woke up to a windy
morning and a building swell. We walked
up to Vossie’s and suited up for a dive.
His dive shop was well-appointed and he seemed to be a very experienced
and competent dive instructor. We drove
down to the launching point on the beach, climbed aboard the rigid-bottomed
Zodiac and headed out into the sea. Our
dive site, Dragon’s Ledge, was beyond the shelter of the fringing reef that
protects Paindane Beach, and it was pretty rough water by the time we dropped
overboard. We did a negative entry,
dropping immediately below the surface swell.
The wind shift had changed the currents and we ended up fighting current
for much of the dive, meaning that I sucked my air down faster than usual. We had a good dive: the dragon morays were there, along with more
usual marble morays in some profusion, all attracted to a cleaning station
where legions of cleaner shrimp serviced them.
We missed a turtle on the initial descent (Vossie saw him, but we weren’t
fast enough to turn our heads before he vanished into the distance) but had a
number of pipefish, lionfish and two rays, one an electric ray and the other a
very large blotched ray, to feast our eyes on.
The coral was nothing special, and we did our safety stop out in the
blue, but it was still an interesting dive, my first in nearly 2 years (since
Indonesia in August, 2014). We surfaced
to even bigger waves, and decided against a second dive in the worsening
conditions. We beached the boat on the
sand in a crazy James Bond-esque manoeuvre that had us holding onto the side
ropes for dear life with our toes tucked into floor straps as Vossie gunned the
engine at full throttle to hurl us clear of the surf. I have never landed on a beach like that, and
would be happy never to do it again. We
sat around at the resort afterwards chatting with Vossie about his 9 years in
Mozambique, the local attitude toward conservation (complete disdain), the fate
of dugongs and manta rays (eaten for food; there aren’t any in the area
anymore), the malign influence of China in Mozambique, the deteriorating
security situation with Renamo, and the perils of not treating coral cuts
immediately.
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| Terri at Paindane |
We went back to our deserted
resort and had another massive lobster feast before I went out for a run in the
dunes. It was really hard work running
through the soft sand, and I returned with tired legs. Having lunched so magnificently, we settled
for a toast and soup supper and an early night.
In the morning we packed up to
leave, but not before the resort manager finally made an appearance to collect
money for our stay. Paindane, like much
of the Mozambique coast, is full of resorts that have either closed or are
barely ticking over. All the tourists
come from South Africa and outside of major school holiday times, there are
very few South Africans coming to Mozambique.
Apparently tourist numbers have been declining for a couple of years
with a worsening economic outlook in South Africa, but xenophobic riots in
South Africa last year in which a Mozambican man was lynched by a mob led to a
mass exodus of South Africans from Mozambique and a plunge in tourist
numbers. Mozambique has a lot to offer,
with long stretches of unspoiled coastline, but South Africans are reluctant to
come to a place that is falling apart politically and where they feel
unsafe. Paindane Resort was apparently
only open during major holiday times, and was basically closed when we arrived,
although they were happy to take our money.
Peter the spear-fisherman showed up with some freshly caught snapper
and, after some negotiation, we agreed a price for four fish weighing in at a
total of 3.5 kg, which we tossed into our refrigerator.
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| Terri at Morrungulo |
We set off towards Morrungulo,
described to us as the nicest campsite on the Mozambican coast. Terri drove us out across the sands; with the
tires deflated, it was relatively easy and even rather fun to drive, a complete
contrast to our dismal arrival. We got
out to the main gravel road and used the small air compressor that Etienne, the
previous owner, had bought for Stanley to re-inflate our tires to road
pressures; we were glad for Etienne’s meticulous care in equipping the vehicle
for all possibilities. In the town of
Maxixe, back on EN1, we stopped for an ATM and to get Vodacom to get my
cellular data service to work on my (not so-) smartphone. It took the young woman a while to figure out
the problem, but eventually I had a working data connection.
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| Terri making friends at Massinga market |
We drove off north towards Morrongulo,
stopping in Massinga for fresh vegetables before we turned off the road for the
beach. This road was hard-packed and
such easy driving that we didn’t have to deflate tires or even engage 4WD. The campground is in a faded colonial-era
resort that is slightly overpriced and slightly rule-bound, but situated in an
absolutely lovely shady garden that fronts directly onto the ocean. I raced out to swim in the surf, although the
fierce longshore current made bodysurfing tricky.
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| White-fronted plover, Morrungulo |
We chatted with James and Barbara, the
Zimbabwean couple who have run the place for years, and with Harry, their son,
an engineering graduate who has returned to help run the place. Terri cooked up a feast of breaded snapper
fillets and we went to bed with full stomachs, happy with the loveliness of the
area.
Our day off in Morrongulo was
pretty idyllic. After a lingering big
breakfast, we went for a long walk along the beach, then put on our running
shoes and went for a run. We passed
other, almost-deserted resorts like Sylvia Shoal, as well as armies of pink
crabs that ran away into the surf on our approach. After doing some yoga, we went for a swim,
then tried out our folding Giant Expressway bicycles for the first time. It wasn’t ideal conditions, with soft sand on
the road playing havoc with our bike tires, but it was still good to get out
and ride a bit, past a few tiny bakeries in the village and past newly-built
houses set in banana, coconut and cashew plantations. It was all rather idyllic. Another feast of snapper fillets and we were
in bed early to escape the searching south-easterly wind that hadn’t died down
in two days.
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| Multilingual but bread-less bakery, Morrungulo |
We were reluctant to leave the
beauty of Morrongulo, but talking to other campers there we had heard that
Pomene, which had been on our wish list for ever since watching a nature
documentary set there, was well worth the long sandy detour involved in getting
there. We stocked up on food back in
Massinga and then turned off for the 57 kilometres of dirt roads and sand dunes
that separated us from Pomene. It was
an easy drive until we entered the Pomene Nature Reserve and ran into deep
sand. We were wise enough this time to
deflate our tires and had no difficulty, other than believing in our GPS, in
arriving at Pomene Lodge, easily the loveliest place we stayed in all of
Mozambique. The lodge is located on a
narrow spit of sand between the Indian Ocean and a saltwater lagoon, and we put
Stanley in the shelter of some trees with a view out towards the ocean. Jorge, the friendly Mozambican man at the
front desk, was a fount of information and sent us out towards the tip of the sand
spit to watch the sunset and look for flamingoes. Both quests were successful: the sun set over the retreating waters of the
lagoon in a pleasingly beautiful lightshow, while a group of several dozen
flamingoes posed for us in the lagoon.
We even had the bonus of seeing a humpback lagoon surfacing periodically
as he hunted for fish. As we walked back
to Stanley, plovers and crabs scuttled along the sand. The nearly-full moon rose out of the ocean in
a fiery orange ball, and we went to bed satisfied.
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| Stanley on the beach, Pomene |
The next day the weather had
become even windier, stirring up a steady swell. We walked along the beach for a wonderful
hour, past a myriad plovers and salmon-pink crabs and a handful of local
villagers, to the ruins of the Portuguese-era Pomene Hotel. We strolled around the headland to the bay
tucked around behind, looking for the blowholes that start up at high
tide. We waited for a couple of hours, but
the blowholes never really got going.
The scenery made up for it, though, with big swells surging into the
sheltered rock pool through a narrow keyhole gap in the rocks and colourful
crabs scuttling across the limestone rocks.
After a while, with the sun sinking in the western sky, we gave up on
blowholes and walked back to Pomene Lodge along the sandy track we had driven
on the day before. We passed through the
fishing village of Pomene and looked in vain for anyone selling fresh
fish.
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| Pomene flamingoes |
On a tip from Andre and Carien,
two South Africans we had met in Morrongulo, we asked around for Doc, a local
woodcarver. He wasn’t at his stand, but
we were directed to his house in the village.
We arranged for him to cook us a feast of big mangrove crabs the next
day and then continued our walk back to the lodge, with sunbirds accompanying
us along the way in the bush. The sunset
was just as beautiful as the day before, and the full moon rising over the
ocean, an hour later, was spectacular.
We cooked chicken on the braai (in the absence of fish), watched the
moon light up the ocean and basked in the natural beauty of the place, glad
that we had come to Pomene.
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| Tree art, Pomene |
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| Pomene pink crabs |
Sunday, May 22nd we
awoke to local women strolling by to sell avocadoes, passion fruit, fresh bread
and oranges. We got up, had a breakfast
of toast, tomatoes and avocadoes, then rented a sea kayak for the day for US$
12 and went out for a paddle on the lagoon.
The tide was going out, and it was hard work paddling upstream against
the tidal current. The lagoon was
rapidly becoming shallower, and finding deepwater channels became
challenging. There were birds
everywhere: distant flamingoes, cormorants
and egrets up close, pied kingfishers hovering over the water to pounce on
fish. The mangrove swamps lining the
edges of the estuary teemed with crabs and birds, and everywhere villagers were
out casting nets and gathering some of the abundant shellfish.
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| Sand art, Pomene |
We made our way as far upstream as we could
before the stream petered out into mudflats and oxbow lakes. We drifted back with the current and made it
back to Pomene Lodge in time for a quick swim and a long run along the beach
before setting off for our late crab lunch.
We stopped by Doc’s place and then were directed to his father’s
restaurant. His father is chief of the
village and is clearly the wealthiest guy in town. Doc eventually appeared with a huge platter
of rice and crab stewed in coconut milk and we sated ourselves. It was interesting to get into the village
and see how life outside our idyllic campground worked; mostly, Doc’s father
and his friends sat around watching Premier League football while his sister-in-law
served us food. Kids kicked around
ragged footballs and steered elaborate handmade metal toy cars around the
streets. As we drove back to the lodge,
we passed neatly tended huts and compounds with fish being smoked over
fires. The sunset that evening surpassed
the previous two, as did the moonrise. I
sat playing guitar on the beach, and it was hard to believe that we were ever
going to want to leave Pomene.
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| At the old hotel, Pomene |
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| Smoking fish in Pomene |
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| Pomene sunset |
Sadly, the next morning saw us
leaving. We hadn’t arrived with very
much cash, and the lodge didn’t accept credit cards, so we were out of money
until we got back to the main road. On
the way out of the lodge, we had a couple of baby plovers running like mad
along the sand in front of Stanley, waving their tiny stubby wings madly. We stopped and waited for them to get out of
the wheel ruts, but the chicks, only a few days old, weren’t strong enough to
climb up out of the tracks and into the surrounding bush for several
minutes. It was a long sandy slog out of
Pomene on partly deflated tires, along a track chewed up by people trying to
drive on fully inflated tires, and just after leaving the nature reserve we
pulled out the compressor again and reinflated the tires. We made it back to EN1 and turned north. It was an uneventful drive to Vilanculos, an
actual beach town, and our first couple of stops were for cash and to refill
the diesel tanks. We looked around for a
place to stay, but weren’t terribly impressed by the lodgings in town and
couldn’t find anything north of town.
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| Pomene sunset |
We ended up driving south of town,
following a ridiculous route plotted by our GPS, to the Blue Water Lodge. We arrived there not long before sundown to
find it had closed for business months before.
Luckily the caretaker wasn’t averse to us camping there for a
consideration that went directly into her pocket. The initial asking price was Mtc 1000 (US$
20) for one night without any power or water.
We bargained that down to the same price for three nights, then sat
beside the empty swimming pool gazing out to sea, sipping a sundowner and
watching fishing dhows returning to shore from the islands of the Bazaruto
Archipelago. We headed down to the beach
and, in my miserable pidgin Portuguese, managed to buy a couple of decent-sized
snappers from one incoming boat for a great price of Mtc 200, far cheaper than
we had paid in Chidenguele or Paindane.
We cooked the larger one on the braai, watched the moon rise over the
bay, thinking about the slightly melancholic feeling of being in a closed-down resort. It was
yet another reminder of the decline of the Mozambique tourism industry.
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| Re-inflating the tires on the road out of Pomene |
We spent two lovely days in
Vilanculos. The first day we slept in,
had another big oatmeal and fruit breakfast and then spent time doing yoga and
going for a long run on the beach at low tide, when it looked almost as though
we could walk all the way out to the islands of the archipelago, ten kilometres
offshore. We lunched on toast, tomatoes
and avocadoes and then drove into town to fill up our water tank, buy some
groceries and see about a boat trip out to the islands. We ended up booking a snorkelling trip with
Dolphin Dhow Safaris, run by the grandson of an Indian immigrant who lamented
the fall in tourist numbers which had led to him cutting back from eight boats
to two, laying off most of his employees.
We returned to Blue Water to cook up a delicious fish and coconut curry
after watching a dramatic sunset light show in the sky.
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| Vilankulo fish braai |
The day of our boat trip dawned
sunny and cloudless. We made our way to
Dolphin Dhow and set off in a dhow, sadly under motor power and not under sail,
with an Irishman, Paul, and a Kiwi woman, Jacqui, probably the only two real
backpackers in Vilanculos. It was fun to
sit and chat about our various travel experiences and to watch the light flash
green over the sandy shallows. We
watched keen-eyed for signs of dugongs, found in the area, but had no luck; we
probably needed to head out further towards the fringing reef to have had a
more realistic chance of spotting them. We
landed on tiny Macaruque Island and spent a few hours walking the dunes,
watching the cormorants and crabs and snorkelling in the lagoon.
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| Macaruque Island sea colours |
The sky clouded over and a few spits of rain
came down, making for dramatic skies but cold snorkelling. We had a big lunch on the beach, then motored
back, passing dhows that were floundering under sail in the almost windless
afternoon. That evening Terri cooked up
a lentil stew and we did some internet activities until a sudden burst of rain
drove us under the roof of an open-sided hut (a barraca, in Portuguese). We fell asleep to the sound of drizzle, and
were awakened several times in the night by torrential downpours.
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| Terri on the beach on Macaruque Island |
We had decided not to push on
further north from Vilanculos, with our Twitter feed bringing us news almost
every day of further shooting attacks on the EN1. Instead we packed up Stanley on the morning
of Thursday, May 26th and set off on the long drive south, back to
Chidenguele. We split the driving; I
used my passenger stint to try to book camping spaces in Kruger again. It was a futile quest, and we ended up
deciding against backtracking through Kruger in favour of the direct route
through Maputo and Ressano Garcia. I
took the wheel after Maxixe and drove us through huge cloudbursts to Chidenguele. We had almost no run-ins with the traffic
police, although there were an increased number of security checkpoints,
perhaps in response to the surge in Renamo attacks. It was a pleasure to return to the familiar
loveliness of Chidenguele, where we had the campground to ourselves. It felt strange to have water, 24-hour
electricity and a reliable cellular data signal again. I braaied up some delicious steaks and took
advantage of the data connectivity to restore my iPod after iTunes had deleted
all my podcasts a few days earlier.
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| Macaruque Island, Bazaruto Archipelago |
Friday, May 27th was
our last day in Mozambique and it went remarkably smoothly. We set off early, drove steadily past Xai Xai
to the northern outskirts of Maputo, where a half-finished ring road brought us
to the EN4 towards the border with only a few stretches of mud and potholes to
navigate. The EN4 is newly built, smooth
and mostly empty, so we raced to the border unexpectedly early. The border crossing was remarkably smooth and
easy, with only the minor hassle of would-be touts trying to earn a few
meticais by telling us to do what we were already doing. We traded the rest of our meticais for rand
with one of the hundreds of women sitting beside the road with bundles of
banknotes and crossed back into the familiar confines of South Africa after two
enjoyable, beautiful weeks in Mozambique.
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| Tree art, Macaruque |
We really enjoyed the Mozambique
coast, and had a great time. We had very
few hassles from the traffic police, and other than that had very positive
interactions with Mozambicans. We had
pristine, wild beaches almost entirely to ourselves, ate delicious seafood, saw
lots of colourful sunbirds and made use of our transport freedom to see some
really wonderful places, especially Pomene.
It was a bit sad seeing the decline of the tourist industry, and sadder
seeing the signs of Mozambique’s impending decline into economic malaise and
possible civil war, but overall it was a very positive experience. I only wish we had been able to continue
north directly to Malawi, rather than making a multi-thousand kilometre detour
to avoid the depredations of a bunch of cash-hungry hoodlums. I would gladly come back to Mozambique in the
future when the central third of the country has calmed down again.
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| Pomene sunset |
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| Sand art, Macaruque Island |
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