As much as I complain about the school system here, it does
have its redeeming characteristics. Case
in point: the placement of long break by the Ministry makes me feel all warm
and fuzzy inside. They work you, and
work you, and work you some more, and just when you think it can’t get any
worse, the trimester ends and you get a whole week off from school. A whole week!
Typically, these breaks provide PCV’s with an opportunity to get out of
site and go exploring. And that is
exactly what I decided to do.
Day 2 was used for recuperation and lots of stretching. We wanted to get to know the city a bit, and so we decided to just explore the town, check out the market and youth center, eat some apa’s (it’s a fried egg topped with ketchup and mayo and wrapped in a japati), loiter in the park, get haircuts (Hey Val, I survived!) and then go to the afternoon fish market.
For the last few weeks of the trimester, Anna, Mireya, and I
worked on planning a trip during the upcoming “intervalo.” We already knew that
we had to be in Nampula for a few days during the week on account of the
mandatory Reconnect Conference that Peace Corps was hosting for all the Moz 19
volunteers living in the North. Luckily,
we were free to travel during the days before and after the conference and had
good amount of time to do just that.
After switching between various travel destinations and writing and
re-writing various itineraries, we finally agreed on one that would work for
us: the beach, and lots of it. Our plan was to jump from Angoche to Nampula,
and then from Nampula to Ibo Island in the Quirimbas National Park with a
little bit of Pemba in between as needed.
Here’s the story:
Part 1: Montepuez to
Nampula (Bus), Nampula to Angoche (Chapa/Private Car)
Woke up bright (well, not so bright) and early on Day 1 at
320am to take a 430am Maning Nice Bus (Pronounced “Man-ing-gue”) to Nampula.
Maning Nice is a pretty notorious bus company here. The bus itself wasn’t in the best shape and
looked like it was being held together by some creatively woven wire coat
hangers and a whole lot of luck. Even in
all its shitty glory though, the bus still came equipped with a flat screen TV
and incredibly efficient and annoying speaker system which they use, starting
at 430 in the morning, to play the same five songs over and over again at a
very, very loud volume. And not only are
the buses pretty beat-up, but the drivers like to go very, very fast (nice
because it makes for a faster trip, but also not so nice because most of the
time you aren’t driving on paved roads and have to deal with a significantly
higher level of stress than normal).
Apparently, the buses have a habit of running off the road and/or
tipping over every so often. While no
one that I know has been involved in an accident while riding on the bus, the
rumors are so prevalent that you can’t help but think “Well, I guess this is it
for me…” every time you get on. Still,
riding the bus beats the hell of sitting in a Chapa. They
still pack it chalk full of people (imagine every seat filled, and then people
sitting and standing in the isles too) which doesn’t leave a lot of space to
move around in a seat that’s ¾ of the usual size.
The bus ride is supposed to take 7 hours. Not too bad.
Unfortunately for us, today was different. We forgot to account for the fact that our
Cobrador (the guy who collects money and tickets from everyone on the bus) was
going to get arrested in a 3 hours ordeal while trying to bribe the cops at the
checkpoint in Metoro. I still don’t know
why all the chapas and buses need to bribe the cops at checkpoints, but it
seems to be common practice here. I don’t
think I’ve ever passed an inspection point while in a car (typically outside of
big cities) where a bribe hasn’t been paid.
Apart from our 3 hours delay on the side of the road, we
made it to Nampula around 130pm. We
hurried over to the chapa station with the hope of catching one of the last
cars going to Angoche. We made it just
in time and were able to secure seats in a private car (don’t get too excited,
although it was a whole lot more comfortable than normal, when someone going
somewhere in a private car and wants to earn some extra money, he or she will
typically just cram a bunch of people in their car and ask them to pay the
standard price).
Angoche isn’t actually that far from Nampula distance wise, less
than 200 kilometers, but the unpaved and severely-weathered road means that you
have to go very, very slow. We started
what would be a 6 hour Journey around 230pm and finally made it into Angoche an
hour or two after the sun set. The ride
was pretty uneventful. I made some friends while helping fix someone’s flat
tire, thought about how crappy the road was, and ate some corn. Oh wait, also, a big bridge we needed to
cross had fallen down and the only way for the car to get to the other side of
the river was to drive through it. So,
everyone in the car got out and walked across the crumbling remains of what was
once a poorly built, but useful reinforced concrete bridge, while the driver
took a different route, driving down the hill next to the bridge and through
the water.
The bridge tried to stop us, but in the end, we were
victorious. After a grueling day of
traveling, we had made it.
----------------------------------------
Day 2 was used for recuperation and lots of stretching. We wanted to get to know the city a bit, and so we decided to just explore the town, check out the market and youth center, eat some apa’s (it’s a fried egg topped with ketchup and mayo and wrapped in a japati), loiter in the park, get haircuts (Hey Val, I survived!) and then go to the afternoon fish market.
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| Angoche! |
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| More Angoche! |
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| A unique find in the Angoche market: Sting Ray. Apparently that kid in the background is pretty excited about it too. |
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| These kids are selling Ata's, a local fruit, out of a box on the back of their bike. Each one is a little more than a quarter. |
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| Some creative kids made a foosball game out of a styrofoam box. |
The fish market is awesome.
Fisherman literally pull up to this thin and dirty piece of beach, lay
down a tarp, and then throw their day’s catch on it to sell. They rent their “space” for about $0.50 and
sell their seafood for prices that are just as cheap. We were planning one having a seafood feast
that night, so we picked up enough shrimp, crab, and lula (calamari) to stuff 10
or so people with a creamy shrimp pasta, fried lula, and steamed crab legs. We dumped Piri-Piri Mayonnaise on everything. Having not eaten seafood in what felt like
forever, I jumped on those crabs like an addict with a desperate fix. I miss Maryland.
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| Some of the features at the Angoche Fish Market, |
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| Fish market porn. Look, giant crawfish! |
It’ll only took a day for me to decide that Angoche has been
my favorite site so far and that everyone should visit. Unfortunately, because
of how difficult it is to get there, most people tend to avoid it. It’s a shame really, because the road that
takes you there is not at all characteristic of the city itself.
Angoche is what I imagine a small American town in the 1950’s
to have looked like; with a Johnny Rocket’s-esque milk-shake place on the
corner, the store front for a barber with that twisting red, white and blue
thing spinning outside, or the retro gas station where people can fill up their
reliable jalopy’s. It’s phenomenal really, and a gorgeous city at that; built
up by the Portuguese when they were here and then left to crumble away when
they fled the country. Most of the
streets are paved, and the hilly ones are a Mozambican-style cobblestone; rock arranged
to look nice and then laid in cement. The
city is clean and colorful, yet extremely sleepy. Storefronts of semi-restored buildings are
waiting for new businesses to move in, but it looks like they’ve been waiting a
while. Unless they get the road to town
paved, they’ll probably remain empty.
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After Day 3 I was even more enamored by the city, because
that day I was introduced to one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever
seen. Perfect timing too, because I
need a distraction. Day 3 was April 13th,
the day that Ricky, one of my best friends from college, was getting
married. After he proposed last year, he
asked me to be the Best Man in his wedding.
Honored and excited, I accepted at first, unsure of what my future
looked like. As life started to become
clearer and I soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to get back to the states
for his wedding and had to rescind. It sucked, and I was pretty depressed about
the whole thing.
It's hard being away, but it’s even harder when you know
what you’re missing. Knowing that all your friends are together celebrating
significant life events without you hurts.
And it doesn’t help when you are about as far away as you can get from
where they are, living on the opposite side of the world. Either way, our adventure to the beach was a
great distraction, and later that night, some of my new friends helped me
celebrate here.
To get to the beach in Angoche, you have to walk along a
raised-earth road that cuts through a dense forest of mangroves that buffers
the city from the sea. The road was
constructed a few years ago by the World Wildlife Fund to help preserve the
forest, and it’s actually in pretty good condition. The road is raised up and when the tide come
in there's water on both sides up to he edge of the road. But when the tide
goes out, it's a sight to see. The muddy beds of the mangrove forest are
exposed allowing you to watch swarms of crabs and mud-skippers (fish made
famous by the foul-mouthed Muddy Mud Skipper from Ren and Stimpy!) play around.
There’s so much going on down there, crabs running every which way, that it
almost gives you the impression that the ground is moving.
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| Walking along the WWF road through the Mongrove Forest during low tide on our way to the beach. |
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| Finally at the end of the Mangrove Forest. Need to cross a little mud, then it's onward to the beach. |
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| Sometimes you gotta get dirty. |
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| Treking across the sea bed exposed by low tide on our way to the beach. |
We found a spot by the shoreline, unpacked and began
beaching. We swam, we played, and we
relaxed all the while trying to process the remarkable surroundings and the
sheer awesomeness of what we were doing.
At one point, I wandered off down the beach by myself. As I walked, I noticed that the white sand I had
been walking on, had changed colors to a sparkly black that was shimmering in
the scorching sunlight. As I continued to walk, I watched a man emerge from the
small bush village in the forest behind the beach a couple hundred meters. He then began to loiter as if he were waiting
for something. I got closer, greeted him, and could
immediately tell that he wasn't very interested in talking. After passing, I
quickly realized why he was out there alone, away from his village on the other
side of the dune: he was looking for a
place to go tithe bathroom. Apparently I
was hampering his progress. Cognizant of
what was about to go down (literally), I walked faster, not really all that
interested in playing witness to this stranger taking a shit in front of me.
Then I got to thinking...why was this sand black? Well, it's probably because it’s
a mixed of eroded rock particles and broken down and composted plant matter.
But, it probably also has a bit of human feces mixed in there too. With that, I
moved back to the white sand and stopped thinking.
Feeling both curious and hungry, my friend Kevin and I
decided to walk into the bush village and try to find some coconuts. We talked
to a few villagers and were eventually led to some lady who made some kid climb
a tree just to get up there and get us some. The coconuts aren't mature yet,
but they’re still delicious. To open them up though is an intricate process involving
violent brute force and a big freakin’ knife.
First they go at them with a machete for a while until they've cut away
most of the husk. Then, they make a
small hole in the top – a cap if you will, that you can then remove to expose
the water inside. After drinking the
refreshing coconut water, the kid used his machete to split the thing in half
so we could get to the flesh. Using your
little “cap,” you scape out the thin, soft and underdeveloped layer of flesh
from the walls of the coconut and eat it.
Then you die happy because it was the best coconut you’ve ever had. And also you’re in Mozambique, and you bought
that coconut off some random kid who climbed into a tree to get it for you, all
of which is pretty cool too.
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| Goin' at it. |
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| Casey playing spectator. |
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| Look ma, Mozambicans! |
As the tide began to come in, the beach that was once part
of the mainland, became part of an island. The incoming tide had cut us off
completely. Lucky for us, there are some
Mozambicans who run a ferry system and some guy in a big rowboat will take you
back to shore for a couple of mets
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| This is that same WWF road on our way back to the city. High Tide, when the water comes and fills in the Mangrove Forest. |
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Even though we had spent the previous day at the beach,
apparently we hadn’t had enough. The
next day, we decided to make the 7km trek out to Praia Nova (New Beach), another
beach site just outside Angoche, but more secluded and with even bigger waves. Praia Nova is that special place we go to in
ours heads when we need to escape for a little, a product of our wild imaginations;
the place they take pictures of for travel magazines. Radiant white sand, untainted by human excrement
stretches out uninterrupted in both directions until the curvature of the earth
prevents you from seeing any further. The warm, blue, cloudy water beats against
the deserted shoreline in sizable, yet subtle waves. There
are no birds squawking, no other people bothering you, and no trash anywhere;
there is just you, the beach, and the sound of the waves gently colliding with the
shoreline. But that’s not even the best part.
As you venture out into the tepid Indian Ocean, the smooth sand
coating the ocean floors massages your feet as it consumes them. A few meters from the shore, it’s still
waist-deep and you start to notice that there’s something in the sand rubbing
against your feet with each step you take.
Too soft to be a crab or a shell, but too hard to be a clump of earth,
your curiosity takes hold as you reach down to inspect. You grab a handful of sand, and as you bring
your hand back up to the surface, the sifting grains reveal a delightful display. You’ve been stepping on a colony of Sand Dollars,
and they are everywhere. You can’t reach
down into the sand with touching one. It’s
like swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s money vault.
Praia Nova is what I came to Africa to see: undiscovered sanctuaries of endless
shoreline, deserted beaches, warm oceans, and big waves.
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| Walking over a big sand dune and getting our first glance at Praia Nova. (Picture stolen from Casey) |
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| Praia Nova, and all her deserted glory. |
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| Observe, solitude. |
It was our last day in Angoche, so we ended it with another
visit to the fish market and a seafood feast of fresh shrimp fajitas, fried lula,
and an enormous bowl of steamed crab claws.
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| CRABS! |
