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A Mosey through Mozambique

16 Thursday Apr 2015

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A Mosey through Mozambique

Our day and a half spent in Lilongwe was rather uneventful. Our campsite was situated quite far from the city center and there was not much to see there in any case. It is also considered a rather dangerous city, therefore, I was only able to wander in so far as I could find another member or preferably members to go anywhere with. I had a number of errands to take care of – namely getting a police report for my stolen iPhone, re-printing my US Tax return to mail back home because I’d forgotten to bloody sign the paper version (my identity was stolen prior to my trip and I had to send a packet of forms to the IRS letting them know that someone had illegally filed my tax return using my social security number – this included sending a paper version of the return, and since I’d e-filed these past six years, I forgot to sign the damn thing) and finding a DHL office to send it back.

The report at the police station was an interesting experience. First of all, I had to pay for the report, 5,000 quatcha, which is about $13…this is pretty much a bribe and as my Kenyan tour leader explained “is how it works in Africa”. This was a place to talk and charm the police officer and then wait hours while they type up their report, which inevitably contains lots of errors and will only hopefully pass for what I need to make a claim on my travel insurance. It was a hugely inefficient office and everything I said was questioned, laughed at, and treated with the utmost skepticism.

I would not want to have to actually report a crime that I had a vested interest in getting investigated here in Malawi.

After a frustrating 2 hours at the internet café, I managed to get my return printed only to find out that they wanted 50 bucks to send the thing back to the States and it might take longer than two weeks. I decided to wait till Harare and hope things moved a little quicker there.

Once I’d grabbed some lunch, I was so spent that the only energy I could muster was to walk back to the campground and have a swim in the pool to beat the blistering heat.

The only other event of significance that happened in Lilongwe was the ant attack. Sleeping in my tent that night, I felt something crawling along my arm and neck. After several attempts at swiping whatever was moving on me away, I cringed as I reached for my headlamp, terrified to look at what was going on around me.

Shining the light – I saw that I was literally in the middle of an ant super highway that was pouring into my tent and making its way across and through my sleeping bag towards my head. I jumped out of the tent and starting shaking, and bashing the little bastards as best I could, but it took quite some time. I wandered over to the other tents and started whispering people’s names hoping to catch some sleep in ant-free accommodation. I later found out that most of our group had also been attacked during the night and had already relocated to sleep in the truck. I found one person awake on the other side of the campground and he kindly let me put my sleeping pad and bag in his tent. Despite being ant-free, I kept waking up in the middle of the night still feeling the damn things crawling on me – but this time it was psychological.

Nevertheless, I was quite miffed the next day to find out that the truck carried a bunch of bug spray on board and that we could use it that next night at our “bush camp”. That would have been useful information to have sooner….

Sigh. This is Africa.

The next two days were long long drives to get us to Harare. The Malawi/Mozambique border was one of the more paranoid crossings we’d experienced yet. It took about an hour and half in line, and there was a laborious process that included having a photo visa issued with a printer that we paid $76 for. I look about as bedraggled as ever, and my mug shot lookalike now adorns the very first page of my British passport.

Nice.

The officials at this border took their sweet sweet time, taking a break whenever the mood struck, despite the long line of people trying to enter their country, and at such a high cost. We were only going to be driving through, and our guide informed us that we were not to take any photographs of the countryside unless they explicitly designated it a safe photo stop. Weird, right? Much of the country is under strict military watch and the roads have stringent policies regarding trucks and stopping – which we couldn’t do much of either. There were not many pee breaks this day and it was overall a rather uncomfortable experience.

I also found it rather amusing that the customs official processing my visa kept asking me why I don’t speak Portuguese. This used to be a Portuguese colony – but I still found his persistent question bizarre, especially since I couldn’t tell if he was joking or being dead serious.

We had a picnic on the side of the road as storm clouds gathered and we had rolling breaks of thunder. That night we would be bush camping – which basically meant that we would be camping just off the highway with no running water, facilities, or shelters of any kind except for our tents.

The area we chose to camp was actually quite scenic, and I enjoyed the peace in the evening and the sound that the insects made combined with the distant thunder that pursued through the night.

If we thought the Malawi/Mozambique border was bad, the Mozambique/Zimbabwe border was even more stringent – and we waited two and a half hours for our visas, at a crossing which again had no toilet facilities.

I was rather relieved to arrive in Harare at Small World Backpackers to discover a hostel that was like your grandmother’s stately colonial cottage, and I immediately paid the 3 bucks a night to upgrade to a dorm room. I happily discovered that the hostel also had satellite TV – and not having watched anything in over a month, found myself overjoyed sitting on the couch, showered, with some wine and chocolate watching a re-run of Jurassic Park.

Sometimes, when travel is this arduous, it really is the little things that you’re reminded of being grateful for.

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Zanzibar – Trying to have fun in the sunny north

22 Sunday Mar 2015

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So my time in Zanzibar did not get off to a good start, but things definitely picked up a little by the time I got to the Northern Beaches. We were staying at a little hotel called the Nungwi Inn (I was sharing a triple with a French couple – Sandrine and Benoit) which is very nicely situated on an incredible stretch of brilliant white sand set against a turquoise, flat sea. Compared to the bath water of Dar, the ocean was a refreshingly cool temperature.

After taking a shower and trying to wash away my tear-stained face in the saltwater, I ate a nice chicken curry and went for a swim in the sea. Relaxing with an almost-cold drink in my hand at the hotel pool – I met a pleasant Swedish/German man called Gunnar who was on his last night of a holiday from his job in Moshi, Tanzania, where he worked for a small elephant conservation NGO. We decided to go together for some food and drinks to the rooftop bar down the beach and hopefully catch a pleasant sunset. It was certainly nice to get away from the group – all of whom had literally ignored me during the entire phone episode, not one offering a word of comfort besides Tabitha, our fearless and compassionate tour leader.

Despite enjoying his company, Gunnar unfortunately didn’t serve to boost my faith in humanity as he began describing his work and telling me about the uphill battle he and his co-workers fight daily in an attempt to save elephants living in this country. He explained how they are trying to create migration pathways for the elephants who are mostly stuck inside parks, their space ever more quickly being encroached upon by human settlements. He explained that at current estimates, elephants will be extinct in Tanzania in about 7-10 years and that much of the poaching that is occurring is secretly sanctioned by the government, with 40,000 elephants being killed in Africa every year. On top of that, and somewhat more disturbing, is the fact that it is locals who are also killing elephants just because they don’t like them, they can’t think in terms of sustainability and the absolute necessity of preserving wildlife in this country in order to secure, in economic terms, the future viability of the greatest source of revenue for Tanzanians – wildlife tourism.

He told me a really harrowing story of when his team were called in to a village that had surrounded a herd of elephants with machetes and other weapons, and forced the elephants off a cliff to their death nearly 30 feet below. One of the baby elephants wasn’t killed by the fall, so they started hacking at it with machetes to kill it, but it still wasn’t dead when they got to the scene. Prevented from putting the creature out of it’s misery, Gunnar described how it felt to be forced to stay back for over 12 hours while it suffered and died slowly. Horrible.

One of the strange anomalies about Zanzibar is that it is inundated with Italians who book direct flights to this island and go to resorts full of only Italians. There are “fake” Masaai warriors, dressed in their full red costumes, wearing flip flops who walk up and down the beach and proposition the middle-aged Italian women who are flattered and choose to spend their week with their local black “beach boy” in an arrangement that’s just a ruse for prostitution. It is so bizarre to observe.

Each evening, the locals play soccer against the setting sun on the beach, boats sail by with tourists on booze cruises, drinking madly, and dancing to drumbeats. Backpackers buy sachets of Konyagi, a local spirit that tries to resemble gin, and pour it into a bottle of tonic water and sit by the beach. It is a pleasant way to pass the evening.

I did go out and get a two tank dive in. I was excited to experience the Indian Ocean again, remembering that the sea life in the Seychelles was pretty exquisite. I wasn’t disappointed, and we had amazing visibility of 20 meters. I saw a school of dolphins swimming under water, a giant octopus that changed colors right in front of me, as well as the comical and rather ugly looking frog fish. It was a great day, despite getting seasick on the return journey and being unable to take off my wetsuit until getting back to the beach.

On our last day, I ventured into the village of Nungwi for a morning jaunt with my two french roommates. The state of the village was quite appalling and the trash and plastic strewn everywhere really highlights the waste management issues that are suffered here in Zanzibar and the rest of Tanzania. It was almost jolting to the system to compare the streets to the manicured lawns and infinity pools of the giant resorts we walked by, built to provide amenities and fresh water to the Italians with large enough pocket books.

I took a sunset cruise by myself yesterday evening as no one in my group wanted to go, and I met with a tour of Australians traveling north to Nairobi on a reverse journey of the same itinerary as ours. It was a pleasant evening spent jumping into the sea from the top deck of the traditional Dhow boat, knocking back cocktails and singing along to the beated drums.

Today marks the two week mark in this odyssey. I am still not sure if I’m enjoying myself – but I am at least adjusting to our schedule and the expectations that come along with this journey. Having said that, my highlights have come when I’ve felt a measure of independence and I’ve been able to go out and engage in conversations and experiences with those outside of my tour group. Having such restriction on the entire experience is rather difficult and makes this trip so different to my most recent solo ventures in South America. I’m just relieved that despite my misfortune with technology and getting my phone stolen – that I’ve been able to borrow laptops and iPads when we have had wifi.

My goal is just to keep up with my writing when I can and do my best to stay present and make the best of what each day brings in this ever-changing and somewhat challenging continent.