More on Mozambeach November 10, 2009

As the time to leave for Moz. drew closer I almost got less and les excited. The amount of logistics and travel it required was so daunting. And the prospect of almost 2 weeks with the same group of people was not great. But I’m now really glad I went.

Economics:
Moz. is very different from South Africa, and it was great to see another side of Africa. South Africa is very frequently differentiated from ‘real’ Africa. There is the ‘typical’ Africa of Kenya and Tanzania that many people imagine. Theres the Zimbabwe style dictator and Egypt’s Arab flavor. Then there’s South Africa’s prosperity, jobs, and infrastructure. Add to that the factor that the Western Cape/ Cape Town is one of the most affluent and prosperous areas of the country and you quickly get a very particular experience.

Moz. is on the eastern side of the continent and has some of the best scuba diving in the world. Many people live in rural villages on the plains covered in palm trees, have jobs in restaurants and security desks in cities like Maputo or are fishermen on the coast. Poverty is widespread, and the tension between economic groups that’s present in SA isn’t really in Moz.

SA runs the gambit for economic status. There are people making millions of dollars and people living in shacks in the heart of Jo-burg. There is poverty, and its widely urban. Township residents have little material wealth or access to infrastructure, but their still exposed to the captialist emphasis on materialism and consumption. Families can’t afford a real house or a doctor but they buy Coke and Sprite because it’s a ‘cool’ and ‘trendy’ thing to do.

Moz. is mostly rural poverty so lives are simple and isolated. From the road I mostly saw small villages of huts that had little family farms. Palm trees have notches in the trunk where people hacked in order to be able to climb the tree and get coconuts more easily. So while in Maputo I actually felt a not safer than in Cape Town or Jo-burg. The wealth difference was far greater and more apparent, but there seemed to be less risk of mugging or robbery. It’s almost as if the gap between us was so great that locals who noticed our purses and accents didn’t even see it as surmountable or worth the try.

Infrastructure:
There’s very little in Moz. It was a 45 minute drive to the nearest ATM or doctor. Roads are mostly pot holes and sand. And there is no social security or welfare. While this leaves many without a safety net in hard times it also means that people are very resourceful about making money. Families def. team together to make ends meet. Young boys learn to make bracelets and necklaces and spend their weekends and school holidays selling them to tourists. When a bit older they graduate to selling their Mom’s and sister’s homemade bread and produce on the streets. Girls farm and learn to bake. THey also man their family stalls in their market/roadside/ village while the Dad fishes or works odd jobs. There are few beggars on the street because there are too few people with enough to spare to give them anything.

While it’s a shame that Tofo is so niche-d to tourism it’s also a great opportunity for the locals. We met two 20-odd year old cousins who live together in a nearby village who taught themselves to surf so they could teach surfing to tourists as a way to make a living. They’re now hired by a scuba company on the beach and have learned to kayak and scuba and such so they can do more work. While it stinks to pay more in a ‘tourist town’ or to not see ‘real village life’ the benefits of tourism were very apparent in that case. And to really see ‘MOzambique’ would require us to have walked to a village and just set up camp for a week with no idea how to build a hut, speak the language or get food.

A New Section
My traveling companions and I have had mixed reactions to Mozambique. My friend really had a tough time adjusting to it. The lack of infrasctructure was very daunting, and the lack of roads, to him, excalated from inconvenience to all-out hatred. Many in the group had a hard time eating few vegetables (because they’re rinsed in the questionable water), and the bug bites were fun for no one. Maputo is very much an urban jungle, and it’s very true that with few ammenities and little electricity living a ‘normal’ life was just 3 times harder. But I there are some big aspects to Mozambique that I can appreciate. Life is much simpler. There may be little electricity or technology but there is also little push for ‘stuff’. Billboards promote health and education not clothes and gadgets. I’m sure it’s a hard life- and I’m def. romanticizing it in my head- but to me rural poverty seems much more manageable and fulfilling than urban poverty.

Conclusion
Sorry there was no feel-good ending to this. I’m still processing, contemplating, and unpacking. Maybe in a few days when I’ve had a bit more distance I’ll have some more thoughts. By then I’ll also have stolen pictures from my traveling-companions so I can share those with you too.

Until then, cheers.

Mozambeachend November 10, 2009

I went to Mozambique for the week/weekend on the beach, prompting a naming of the trip Mozambeach and then Mozambeachend. This is what happens when you travel for 3 days straight.

Wow, 11 days of no posting means I have a lot to talk about and no idea where to start. Well, obviously I survived. That’s good. No sign of malaria although the mosquitos definitely tried their hardest. I’m covered in bug bights and sand flea bites. It’ll be nice tonight to finally sleep in a bed not covered in a bug net.

I guess the easiest thing to do is start with logistics and move into reflection so this post will just be the day-to-day schedule and I’ll give more opinion stuff in another post.

Thursday Oct. 29th- last exam
Friday Oct. 30th- Afternoon flight for Cape Town to J-burg then 10pm bus from Jo-burg to Maputo, Mozambqiue. The bus is about 10 hours, and it involves crossing the border at around 6 a.m. On this particular morning 6 a.m. also included a very heavy rainfall. Luckily the bus driver didn’t want to wait in the long line and the rain so they collected all the passenger passports and bribed the border guards to get us through quickly. There was also a really sketchy point where the bus was overweight/back heavy so when we crossed this bridge some of the passengers had to unload and some had to move to the center of the bus so we wouldn’t a.)incure a fine b.) break the bridge.
Saturday Oc. 31st- Arrive in Maputo, nap, grab some dinner at this small restaurant down the street from the hostel. Mozambique mainly speaks Portugese so ordering was interesting. But most of our food turned out to be what we wanted (although a notable exception is when Lindsay ordered shrimp and rice and got this green shrimp paste thing…edible but it still tasted like seafood and grass). Moz. also uses the metical which is worth 1/30 of a dollar. So while my chicken, rice, salad, and Sprite cost me 120 meticals that means it only cost 6 dollars. A very nice exchange rate.
Sunday Nov. 1st- 4 a.m. shuttle to Tofo. It’s 7 hours to Tofo even though it’s not 7 hours worth of distance. The drivers don’t make much money driving the shuttle for us tourists apparently so they supplement their income by picking up extra people along the way. So while 14 passengers officially were on the shuttle we arrived in Tofo with around 30 passengers plus their various bags of coconuts and rice. So stopping to pick up those extra people/ fit everything took some time, and then the last 90 kms (around 40 miles) tooks some time because it stopped being paved road and started to be more potholes with some pavement on the edges or just sand. So the bus slowed down a bit.
From Tofo village we made our way to the hotel at which we were staying Mango Beach. We had ‘Cabanas’…huts in local style with thatched roofs and woodwalls but also with the luxuries of a cement floor and an electric lightbulb that worked between the hours of 6 and 10 p.m. The hotel/resort sat on the Indian Ocean just behind a sand dune. We just had to climb some stairs to get to the restaurant/bar/lounge area/beach. We celebrated making it to our destination with a great swim in the Indian and a great dinner.
Monday Nov. 2nd- We made the hour beach trek to Tofo Village to check things out and buy water (you have to drink bottled water or risk dysentary). Tofo is def. a ‘tourist village’ because of it’s popularity for surfing and scuba diving. Theres a handful of companies set up along the beach to provide such activities and then a central craft market to sell the obligatory bags, fabric, paintings and carvings so popular in African cities for tourists. There were also family stall where you could buy produce and drinks. There are about 4 roads in town, all made of sand.
Tuesday Nov. 3rd- Sit on the beach and do nothing/ recover from sunburn
Wednesday Nov 5th- We all ran out of Meticals so we had to hop a ride to the nearest ATM in Inhambane (about 45 minutes away). Our ride was a pickup truck…so 2 people sat up front and the other 8 of us sat in the back with the empty bottles of soda and beer to be exchanged for more good sat the dry-good store. It’ was a long, bumpy road with little cushion, space or things to hold on to while the road was very bumpy and the driver was a speed demon. In Inhambane we walked around the central market for crafts and produce and then walked around the other 50% of the city. There isn’t much to Inhambane. It’s the country’s 2nd oldest city but Moz. is so rural that that doesn’t mean much. But there is a very scenic harbor, a nice market, and some big infrastructure projects going on courtesy of the Chinese government.
Thursday Nov. 6th- Relax and read
Friday Nov. 7th- Relax and read
Saturday Nov. 8th- Kayaking trip to a local island. We loaded up in 2-man sea kayaks and paddled across the crystal clear blue lagoon to an island about an 1.5 hour paddle away. The island has around 800 inhabitants and apperntly when they started the trip 4 years ago it was their first interaction with white people. The island doesn’t deal in currency but trades in cashew nuts and coconuts with people then sell in Inhambane for goods they can’t make themselves. Theres a school, one room doctors office and a church but no electricity or running water. They also have a cheif named Eric who spoke almost no English, but was very hospitable and taught us their secret way of eating crab. After lunch we played with the local island kids who were SO cute and friendly. We played hand clapping games and played with the babies. Everyone was very nice and welcoming, but everything was limited because we didn’t speak Batonga and they didn’t speak English. The return journey we traded our kayaks for a Dhow and we crossed the lagoon in the local sea vessel. It was small and creaky like a proper wooden ship, and the sail was made of scraps of material sewn together.
Saturday- 4 a.m. shuttle back to maputo…again with the extra people, coconuts, and bumpy roads
Sunday Nov. 9th- 10 hour bus from maputo to jo-burg. This time there was no rain and we crossed the border at noon instead of 6 a.m., but again we handed over our passports to the driver (didn’t ask any questions) and got them back 10 minutees later without having to wait in line…there are some things you just don’t want to know too much about).
Monday 10th- Plane from Jo-burg to Cape Town. And here I am back in Stellenbosch.

Actually, that is all off by a day because it’s Tuesday the 10th, not Monday, and that means my numbering is off somehwere and I lost a day somehwere. But just ignore that because I included everything I did; I think I just mixed up days somewhere and forgot another ‘laid on the beach’.

That comes to 2 plane rides, 4 bus rides, 2 treachorous rides in a pick up truck, 1 kayak trip, 1 Dhow ride, 5 days of travel, and 8 days at the beach. I lost my towel, my student ID card, and my camera (which was actually broken by day 3). Luckily I’m leaving for home soon because I have no towel for showering, no way to get in/out of my building, and no capacity to take pictures.