May 2007

It wasn’t until we were bumping along the main road of Ilha de Mocambique in a dilapidated van, which had clearly been used for fish haulage, that Nat realised her mistake. She had left her hiking boots behind in the previous bus.

We had spent the morning travelling from Nampula, on a large bus for about 4 hours until about half an hour before arriving at our intended destination, the remaining passengers were taken to a small bus station and told to jump into a smaller van for the trip over the bridge to Ilha de Mocambique. At some time during the transition Nat had forgotten that she’d stuffed her boots under the seat. I was given the unenviable responsibility of reminding Nat not to forget her boots. I forgot. Apparently that makes me even more liable than her. Luis (proprietor of the imaginatively named “Casa Luis” Guest house) knew the manager of the bus line and called to see if the boots were still on the bus. When the message came through that they were not we instantly assumed that they either hadn’t looked in the right place or worse that one of the staff had found them and decided to mind them for us, indefinitely. The ramifications started to sink in. No Boots = no Kilimanjaro. We hitched and walked back to the bus station and asked if we could search the bus. We didn’t find them and after harassing the staff some more we gave up. Having something stolen has an instant effect. We found ourselves distrusting everyone, the rose glasses we had been looking through had been cracked and muddied. We formulated a very average plan B and headed back to Ilha for lunch.

Half way through lunch Luis popped his head into the restaurant looking for us. He mumbled something about boots… thief… now… We didn’t really know what was going on but we jumped in the back of his ute and headed back to the bus station. As we pulled into the station we were greeted by a group of 30 or so angry looking guys (most of whom were wearing kofias). At first I didn’t get it but then I saw the guy who had been sitting behind us on the bus, the front of his now ripped T-shirt covered in blood. His clothes were shredded and his face was bleeding in quite a few places. Sitting next to him were the boots. It looked like the damage had been done a while ago. He had been kept at the station for our benefit. We didn’t really know what to do. Was I supposed to slap him or abuse him further or thank the punishers??? I was tempted to take a photo but it looked like the thief had been humiliated enough. We grabbed the boots jumped back in the ute and got out of there as quickly as we could.

After all the commotion a relaxing arvo strolling around the island was in order. Ilha de Mozambique is one of a string of East African islands, all of which have had a very similar past. Fishing hubs for thousands of years, settled by Arabs as spice trading points, invaded by the colonies and used as administrative posts and finally turned into tourist meccas. The most famous of these islands is Zanzibar which has been a tourist mecca for years and years. Ilha is so close yet so far being an Indian ocean paradise. It’s got plenty of crumbling colonial buildings, a big fort, a touch of Islamic architecture, swaying palm trees and it’s surrounded by beautiful reefs and turquoise water. We stayed for a few days and in the whole time we were there we saw 8 other people that could have possibly been tourists. Beautiful island, hardly any tourists, what’s not to like! Nothing spoils an island more than poo and rubbish on the beach. There are twenty or 30 little coves all round the island and all but one of them are used for dumping of rubbish and dumping of dumps. We were tempted to swim, especially considering the temp was above 30 and the humidity was out of control, but the risk of running into a battle ship was too great. It really is a shame but we enjoyed our few days there all the same.

We headed north to Pemba for some chill out time. We really did chill out and as a result we don’t have anything exciting to tell you. We basically went into town a bit, swam a bit (no battle ships in Pemba) and read a whole heap. We had planned to travel overland into Tanzania but we met some girls who had just done the reverse trip and their tales of woe were enough to deter us. We decided to stay a little longer in Pemba and fly to our next stop, Zanzibar.

Rule 8: If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

Lots of Love,
Nat and Ev

As soon as we crossed the border I felt good. Nothing had really changed but for some reason I was buzzing. Maybe it's because Mozambique is more foreign, more exotic. A week has passed and nothing has even come close to bursting my bubble. Mozambique rocks.

We had a few days in Maputo to organise the next leg of our trip doing things like getting our Tanzanian visas and organizing flights. As always the places we needed to go were scattered systematically throughout the city making a succinct, mission accomplishing sojourn, impossible. It did however take us to some cool places we were unlikely to see otherwise. Maputo is a pretty shabby, kind of mouldy looking, place but the people are super friendly and it's got a really cool Latin / Afro thing going on.

So far the Moz food has well and truly exceeded our expectations. It's all about super fresh seafood and piri piri, loads of piri piri. We went to the Maputo fish market for dinner. It was one of those pick your own squid jobies. I'm thinking "what do I know about picking fresh seafood?" How is this a good idea in a country with substandard
hygiene? Fortunately our cook helped us and the meal was fantastic.

A few people have requested a kg update. I would love to know myself but the only scales we have found were at the Mapotu Central market and I tipped the scale at 110kg. Hmmm. If I had to hazard a guess I would go with 93kg however I must confess that the photo in the last blog made me look thinner than I am. Lets hope my exercise / piri piri ratio is low enough to keep the kgs dropping.

We spent heaps of our time people watching and chatting with the locals. Here are a few classic Maputo moments.

With our admin out of the way we set course for Tofo and more importantly Tofino point. Youngos.net had given me a mega hankering for surf and after being frustrated by flat surf in Cape Town and Durban I was hoping Tofino would fill the void. We stayed at a hostel called Turtle Cove, which was in the coconut groves behind the point. The place was fantastic but the owners were a joke. They were so inhospitable it makes you wonder why they went into the hospitality industry. I awoke to the light rustling of coconut palms and splinters of light shining through the walls of our grass hut casting a zebra
pattern on our mosquito net. By the time I got to the board rack the other three boards were missing, a sure sign that there was a wave about. Tofino is a 200 meter, sand bottomed, point break and on our first day in Tofo it was doing its thing. The water was light aqua, somewhere in the mid 20's, the early morning air was about the same. It took me a few waves to find my feet and for the first twenty minutes I was becoming concerned that 4 months out of the water was going to render me waveless. When I did hook into my first Mozabique wall it was a cracker. Clean, 4 ft, whackable and I managed to fluke my way all the way to the shore. It was a long wait in between sets
but with only the 4 of us out we all got a few good waves. I began to fade after my fourth wave as the inevitable spaghetti arms got the better of me.

Our grass hut

The set up, day 1

We spend the rest of the day wandering the sandy streets and checking out Tofo. It's a really cool town and I'm sure that in 5 years it's burgeoning backpacker scene will be compared to the Byron Bays of the world. Beachfront blocks of land are going for $10,000 USD. It's the perfect souvenir. Unfortunately you need to be a resident or business owner to buy one.

The next day we awoke to a much louder rustling of coconut palms thanks to a strong onshore wind that would all but kill the surf for the next few days. After a lazy morning we caught the bus to the capital of the state Inhambane, which is about as laid back as a city can be. Wide tree lined streets, crumbling layers of paint (pastels of course) on Portuguese or art deco architecture and beer gardens with outdoor pool tables. We had a massive lunch at the Mercado Central and worked it off with some fierce bargaining.

On day three I managed to get a cheeky wave in before the wind came up but with the new swell still few days away it was more about getting wet than anything else. I did however come close to soiling myself when a large fin surfaced in the choppy sea 10 meters away from me and pointing in my direction. Ant's cries of "DID YOU SEE THAT FIN!!" certainly didn't help matters. Fortunately my fears were relieved a few seconds later when a dolphin dove out of the next wave. I have been surfing and hanging out with two guys and a girl from Cape Town. It's funny how South Africans affect me. I definitely have a love hate thing going on. Fortunately my surfing buddies, Ant, Riyadh (and
Riyadh's wife Aniya) fall into the first category and we spend the rest of the day swimming eating and hanging out in the village with them.

(Photos c/o Riyadh)

The Surf cleaned up the next day and despite being a little small it was good fun. The rest of the week followed a very similar pattern and ended up becoming one big relaxing blur. We ended up spending a lot of time hanging with the Cape Town trio, surfing, interneting, drinking massive milkshakes, eating prego rolls, swimming and occasionally
venting about how horrendously run the hostel is.

We did manage to rouse ourselves from our close to comatose state of relaxation for Tofo's major draw card, swimming with whale sharks. There are huge plankton clouds just off the coast at Tofo and the whale sharks can't get enough of it. You're given snorkeling gear, taken out the back and once a whale shark is spotted it's into the
water for a closer look. The first time the driver told us to jump overboard there was a 5 meter shark swimming right towards Nat. It made a slow turn and sunk a little to avoid her and continued on its merry way. They are so docile and quite slow moving so it's really easy to swim with them. Once they want some alone time they slowly
drop into the deep blue. We had just stopped following one that had dropped when another surfaced a few meters away from me. It was very surreal. Riyadh's camera was having trouble focusing through the plankton cloud so it looks a little cloudy. In the water it was very clear.

The predicted big swell never really eventuated but the conditions gradually improved over the week. We had to share the break with a big group from Durban for the last two days but fortunately, by then the sets were marching in regularly and everyone was getting plenty of waves. We had a flight booked so extending, as tempting as it was,
wasn't an option. We decided to get up super early on our last morning to try and get a few in before we had to get moving. It ended up being the session of the trip. 4 to 5 foot, long clean lines and for the first hour or so there was only a handful of us on it. After
two and a half hours of joy I pulled into what is most probably my last wave until we get home. I dragged my self from the water, we said our good byes and started the trek north.

If you're keen to get some epic empty waves in moz Ant's a surf guide. www.surfing-safari.co.za

Nice point break, long workable rides

Lots o love,
Ev and Nat

We had planned to head north but a rendezvous with Jake in Durban was enough to convince us that it was worth looping back down before heading up to Uganda. Unfortunately the meeting feel through but after doing all the planning for the reroute we had plenty of other reasons to go back to South Africa.

Getting out of Vic Falls isn’t easy. For starters we were running out of currency and at the moment withdrawing money in Zimbabwe is financial suicide. The official exchange rate is US$1 = ZIM$250. The black market rate is US$1 = ZIM$20,000 which basically means that if we withdraw money from the ATM or cashed a travellers cheque, you will find that a can of coke costs you $56US. We had a couple of options for getting out: fly for $300ish each or hitch a ride on an overland truck heading back to SA for another tour. We wandered around town searching backpackers and pubs looking for overland drivers. We finally found a truck heading back but they were waiting on petrol money from their head office before they could make the 1300km trip to J’burg. They told us to wait at the campsite and they would let us know when the money had come through. After an excruciating 40 hours of waiting we finally got rolling. Trouble is getting fuel in Zim is difficult and expensive so we left VF with the truck running on fumes. Needless to say we ran out 30km short of the boarder right next to some elephants. The two drivers hitched across the border with as many water bottles as they could carry while we cooled our heels with the remaining crew. When they finally returned they discovered that the fuel lines were full of air which resulted in another hour or so of tinkering. The delay meant that we were going to be driving through Northern Botswana (the most elephanty part of the most elephanty country in Africa) at night. Five or six times during the night the truck would screech to a holt waking us from our sleep and throwing us from our seats. By the time we arrived at the Botswana - South Africa border it was shut. We finally made it to J’burg 48 hours late and more than a little frazzled.

We hadn’t heard too much about Lesotho other than reading about a horse trek Peter Moore did in “Swahili for the broken hearted”. It sounded like just the ticket so we got a car and headed further south. Before we got to the mountains in the south of Lesotho where we would be riding we had to negotiate the knot of nerves that is Maseru, the Capital. Rome, Paris and Bangkok have nothing on Maseru in the bad driving stakes. Fortunately with a population of 290,000 we didn’t have to endure the chaos for long. After a huge feed we hit the hay early in preparation for the journey. I knew 12 hours of riding was going to hurt. The degree of pain was the unknown. 5 minutes in I started to get a little bit a chaffing on my leg and it was looking like two days of pain. Our decision to do the ride was soon justified. The mountains of Lesotho are spectacular. Riding through the canyons, up and down rocky paths and across rivers I began to channel the spirit of John Wayne. I relaxed in the saddle and got a one hand on the hip, one hand on the reins thing going. I felt pain but more importantly I felt like a cowboy. The spirit of Calamity Jane must have been preoccupied. Nat didn’t feel like a cowgirl but she enjoyed it all the same.

We left our horses at the village which would be our home for the night and headed up the valley on foot for an hour or so to a waterfall. As we got to the top the sun started to soften and everything got that warm glow. We got back to the village just as twilight turned to night, the perfect backdrop for baked beans on toast and G&T’s.

After an early start we rode back to base camp and hit the road to Durban. It was a long but pleasant drive along the north edge of the Drakensburg ranges. The next morning we had a drive around Durban and ended up at the beach for breaky. I was hoping for a surf but as the photos show it wasn’t worth the effort. The city has a pretty cool vibe and we would have liked to stay a little longer but with our time with a car running out and lots more to see we headed up the coast.

St Lucia is Hippo central. We were going on a hike into the wetlands the following day but we got a little sneak peak hippo action when two mutone hippos stopped for a late night snack in a park opposite our hostel in the centre of town. The hostel has a guide who was kind of on crowd control, not letting us get too close, but we still managed to get within about 5 meter. I was tempted to move a little closer. It’s easy to forget that they are Africa’s most deadly animal. The next morning on our walk we found a herd (or is it pod? or even hip?) of about 15 hippos playing right near the bank of the river.

A Dutch couple we meet in Lesotho had just come from Swaziland and couldn’t stop raving about the Mlilwane game reserve in the Ezulwini Valley. I think it’s safe to say that after all the game viewing we’ve been doing we’re both looking forward to a change of pace but they told us that Mlilwane wasn’t your classic game park. Seeing as it was finally a step in the right direction (North) we decided to follow their recommendation. We arrived in the Valley in the mid afternoon and as soon as we entered the park we loved it. I’m not sure what exactly made this park so different. One of the cool things about it is the absence of predators. It sounds like a negative but it’s really cool being able to get out of your car and walk up to a zebra or ride a bike around without fear of a leopard dropping from above. We spent the arvo getting up close and personal with as many of the residents as possible.

Next stop Mozambique to find out if it really is unique to be among the lovely people living free, upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.

The waiting game sucks, let’s play hungry hungry hippos!

Lots of love,
Ev and Nat