Tudo bom!

After airport hopping from Asia, via the Middle East, to Africa and practically not breathing fresh air nor feeling sunlight on my skin for 42 hours, it was something different to disembark at Maputo International Airport, Mozambique. As I had made my way through the continents and noticed the skin colour of the other passengers change with each embarkation as well as their body odour (I’ll leave the description of the (un)pleasantness of it to your imagination), I was glad to be on firm ground again.

Maputo was hot, humid and so Africa. While I was wondering whether my checked luggage had made it along the same itinerary, the immigration officer took EUR 25, my passport and walked away with it after a casual “You wait there..”. So I waited and behold, 45 minutes later I had my identity back, found my ridiculously big suitcase - well, I am traveling for three months - and was allowed to enter the country. As Darja & Ivan were still driving down from Kruger Park, South Africa, I hooked up with Jose, a Spanish vocational traveller who needed a taxi ride to the same hostel in town. A few hours later (which I killed at the Internet cafe), my sister- and brother-in-law :-) arrived at Fatima’s Backpackers Hostel and we exchanged stories about fantastic bush walks, safari game drives, safari dive trips, romantic floating bungalows and South African braai.

The next day, we set off to Tofo by car, a 7 hour drive up North. Fantastic sceneries passed by and while Ivan was zigzagging to avoid the potholes and Darja was doubling as a human Tom Tom, I was sitting comfortably in the back, watching the landscape go by, reminiscing about my recent South East Asian explorations and fantasizing about the African adventure to come. Lunch on the way was Moelas, and between the three of us speaking French, Spanish and Italian, we were convinced they were mussles, but it turned out to be giblets, which I think is gésier in French, and in normal language, probably chicken stomach. And we had it with Mozambiquan piri-piri sauce. And it was delicious.

Just after the warm orange-coloured sunset, we arrived in Tofo, where Marco and Jule (friends of Darja & Ivan) welcomed us. Marco was so happy to see them again that he was jumping up and down in the sand, in the middle of the road next to the Market of Tofo, where their car (a nice 4x4) was parked next to ours (a small red rental, sorry, I’m a woman), together blocking the way for all other traffic passing through (zero cars to be exact) while we were greeting each other.

Since then, it’s been eat, sleep, dive, eat, sleep, dive...

Let me elaborate on the eating part. Our staple food has been fresh fish (but I mean FRESH, as in bought on the beach from fisherman just coming from the sea), caught in a totally sustainable manner, usually speared by local fisherman. I know somebody who would kill to come fishing here.... :-) I’m talking a 7 kg Spanish mackerel and an equally big Dorade on the braai, prawns by the bucket marinated in the sauce of the pickled mango piri-piri from the market, clams seared in white wine for the pasta, steamed lobsters with self-made mayonnaise (I beat an egg yoke and with olive oil for about 40 minutes, but it was worth it!)... All this complemented with Italian pasta (home cooked alle vongole or con gambe, whatever is the catch of the day), potato and butternut baked in the braai, creamy avocado’s & tasty tomatoes with fresh lemon juice, pickled chilli mango and of course, the Mozambiquan piri-piri sauce. Add juicy mango’s, sweet pineapples, fragrant passion fruit and fresh cashew nuts and you have what I would call culinary heaven.

Let me also tell you about the sleeping part. Marco & Jule arranged a villa for us. In the dunes, view over the ocean, a roof made of palm tree leaves and a big veranda where we have breakfast, afternoon relaxing sessions and dinners,... Darja & Ivan have the master bedroom, I sleep in the “attic” all constructed with wood, under a mosquito net, gekko’s sneaking around at night, sound of the waves in the background. Add a big BBQ pit in the front yard and a guard/housekeeper who washes the car, cleans the house daily and does the dishes and you have what I would call rented paradise.

And let me now try to describe to you the diving part... At 7 am we are at the divecentre, get our gear ready and from there we walk to the beach in 3 mins, where a pick up truck launches the rib (a big inflatable speedboat with two 85 hp engines) in the ocean with all the equipment on board. Together we push the boat into sea, through the surf, with explicit instructions never to let go of the boat as many people have been pushed under the boat or worse, the engine, by the current and the waves. Once the boat is afloat, we jump on board (a rather uncharming climb by short little me) and then drive out to the divesite braving the oceanic swell for 30 minutes or so. So far we’ve had mild conditions, but I’m told there can be waves up to 4 meter high. The side of the speedboat is all you can sit on while you hold onto to the ropes during bumpy rides so as not to be launched off the rib. At the divesite, we gear up, do a self-buddy check (contradictio in terminis), do a back roll, negative entry (* see below) and 20 seconds later we’re at 25 meters or deeper and in another world. The return to the beach is just as much fun. Close to shore, everybody is told to hold on to the ropes and to fix their feet in the straps on the floor of the rib. Then the skipper goes full speed towards the beach and just before the front of the boat hits the sand, he brakes hard, sending everybody into a whiplash. Hence the ropes and strap instructions. If the boat is not beached far enough, we have to push it forward until the pick up can be roped to it and drag it onto the beach. Quite a difference compared to the Red Sea, where the two hour easy ride is usually spent by our guests on the sundeck, napping or listening to their MP3 player, where we provide full fledged lunch and there is a toilet and a salon to hide from wind or cold...

Anyway, that’s enough about the entry and exit.

What about the Mozambiquan underwater world? Well, first thing we saw on the first dive, was a huge manta. Second thing we saw, was another manta. And then another one and another one and another one... Barracuda’s, moray eels everywhere, giant lobsters, shrimps all over the place... Second dive, same fantastic creatures and more. Third dive, more and better. And then, to top it all off, as we were ascending, we swam through a massive school of big eye jackfish. It was like natural geographic but wet. Between the dives, we looked for whalesharks at the surface. And we found two, one was a baby, perhaps just 4 meters long. So we put our masks and fins on, grabbed our camera’s and managed to snorkel with him for 15 minutes before he left towards the big open ocean. What a cutie... And we also did some macro diving**. And boy, did we find small critters. Nudibranchs even Darja & Ivan (after thousands of dives) hadn’t seen before, scattered all over the place. Leaf fish, shrimps, flatworms, egg cowries, ribbon eels... Add the sun, a beautiful coast line, some crazy currents, overall nice water temperatures, only experienced divers on the boat and you have what I would call the diver’s garden of Eden.

* Back-roll and negative entry: For the non-divers among you, this means that you sit on the side of the boat with all your dive gear on, roll backwards into the water and don’t hang around at the surface but keep going down down down until you hit bottom or your maximum intended depth.

** Macro-diving: As I learned this holiday, this is the term used to describe spending minutes staring at one square meter of reef, searching for small, odd and beautiful critters that can best be photographed with macro setting. Some nudi’s are no longer than 1 cm, but all perfectly shaped and so colourful.

Anyway, enough about diving. No no, not that I’ve had enough of it (not by far), but unfortunately, I won’t be doing any until the end of March... That’s about 50 days of not diving and I haven’t not dived for that long ever since I move to Gouna... :-(

What else did we do in Moz? Well, we relaxed a lot, went horseback riding and snooped around the local markets at Inhembane, but the cherry on the icing as well as the cake was our overnight stay at Bilene, on the way back to Maputo. If Tofo wasn’t heaven already, then the bungalow resort at Laguna Camp at Bilene most certainly was. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we just made it through the sandy road (remember we were driving a 2x4) and arrived at one of the most beautiful spots by the water we had ever seen.

But I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. For that however, you’ll need to wait a little, because I am now at Johannesburg Airport waiting for my connection to Nairobi and Cairo and the internet is not so fast. Since I have about 800 pictures I want to upload, I’ll wait until I am at a spot where I don’t have to pay by the minute... Just a couple more anecdotes though...

We found out that speaking Portuguese (the national language in Mozambique), is not all that hard if you speak Italian or Spanish. It is just a matter of using Spanish or Italian words, swallow a few vowels, put some “sh” sounds where you would normally say “s” and make a lot of meowing sounds a the end of the words and it sounds Portuguese enough. The fact that we were able to communicate however, is probably more thanks to the friendliness of the locals who really made an effort to understand our strange babbling. The downside for me however is that the 35 words of Italian I had finally managed to cram into my grey cells, have now been replaced by Portuguese. Every time I try to say something in Italian now, these cat-like sounds come out of my mouth. I think I’m too old to learn new languages....

Last but not least, we decided not to take anti-malaria medication, considering the side-effects of those horrible pills. Instead, we opted for drowning our skin with Deet every day at dusk until the next morning, hoping to keep the mozzies at bay. The only reason I'm glad to leave Mozambique, is that the skin of my hands is peeling off by now and it cannot be anything else but the poison I've been covering myself with. Unfortunately, we were still bitten several times. Incubation time is approximately three weeks, which places me in.... aha, on a cruiseship in Antarctica by the time I get fever, headaches and nausea. Assuming the doctor on board will not have malaria-medication at hand (has anyone ever heard of malaria mozzies in the South Pole?), I bought some drugs myself (just over the counter at a local pharmacy) and from now own will keep my fingers crossed and hope I got bitten by the least nasty ones.

So long my friends!

Baci, baci,

xYx