John’s Blog

This is our third night staying in Gorongosa National Park.  It’s a pretty amazing place.  The park was destroyed in great part due to Mozambique’s civil war in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and an enormous restoration project is underway here since 2004.  I won’t give too much away because it has been written about quite a bit (see this article for starters), and will be written about more soon!

At any rate, the drive from Vilanculos was - what shall I say? - long.  But we’re here, and the countryside is radically different.  Very hilly, an incredible diversity of trees.  And from what I hear, this park is known for its amazing bird life.  We’ve noticed that amazing bird life is supported by a pretty remarkable level of insect life - less pretty and fun, but still interesting.  Last night we went on a game drive and saw tons of animals - warthogs and baboons (the most common animals - the baboons are everywhere - even near the camp), several kinds of antelope (including waterbuck, reedbuck, impala, nyala…), and lots and lots of birds.  Yesterday morning we had walked down to the Pungwe river and taken a poled boat across to the village of Vinho.  This was pretty cool - a decent-sized but very traditional village, we visited the relatively new bakery, a former crocodile farm that is being converted into a cinema (they’re not on the grid - I’m assuming a generator will be involved, although there are also lots of solar panels around), a clinic that was built as part of the park restoration project, and a school.  This last was the site of a really magical experience: I was staying behind as members of our party went to visit a farmer’s field nearby (I was tired).  I was left with an English-speaking Thai woman and her two-year-old daughter (who speaks Thai, English and Portuguese), and a crowd of local kids who had gathered as we walked around the village.  This group of spectators grew to probably almost twenty children (all under the age of eight, I’d say) sitting around us, watching.  We were doing absolutely nothing - just sitting and resting - but they were undeterred, and seemed to be waiting for something to happen - wordlessly, without expression.  After an almost painful forty minutes of this scrutiny (inspired, I suspect, by the little girl from our party walking away and sitting far away by herself), the children started talking to each other, laughing, and started to get up and entertain themselves.  They were joking, playing an amazing game with a ball and four pairs of girls’ sandals, just chatting, rolling a broken bicycle tire around… what was magical was the long period of total and uncomfortable silence and alienation that gave way to what felt like a village scene from anywhere: children playing and talking.

This morning, we headed into the town called Gorongosa (along the western border of the Gorongosa park).  I was planning to just sit at a restaurant, read (perhaps blog) and do some academic work, but while I was picking up a couple of things in the market, I heard some amazing music from the distance.  I was hungry, too, so I set off to find either a place to sit and eat or the source of the music.  I ended up at a house on the edge of a soccer field where a few small groups of people were sitting around.  I couldn’t tell if it was a party or a bar, but as soon as I greeted a group of young men (in Portuguese - aw yeah), they invited me to sit.  I did, and was immediately offered a glass of palm wine, the first of something close to ten glasses I accepted throughout the course of the morning.  I had a great time chatting, drinking, and tasting some bits of pork that were served up at some point.  The music, it turns out, was Zimbabwean, but it reminded me a lot of Congolese music.  When the guys found out I was a music scholar, they had the hosts put on some local music in the local language (Chisena or just Sena).  It was a really cool experience.

On our way into town this morning (while still in the park), we saw a HUGE herd of what we think was sable.  All I know is they were huge, majestic creatures, I’d never seen anything quite like them in my life, and there must have been two dozen adults and probably twice as many young.  It was amazing.

I should mention that on our last night in Vilanculos I was asked to perform in the resort bar (I brought my guitar along this trip), and did.  It was pretty fun!  As usual, some people were really into it, some people didn’t care at all, and most people preferred my music to silence…

I should also mention that the food in the park is great!  From what I’ve heard, it has improved a great deal.  Also, the place is fully booked.  Pretty amazing, considering that there was pretty much nothing here just a few years ago…

More soon!  Thanks for reading, and don’t be shy about leaving comments.

I’ve been so busy I didn’t even get a chance to write about the end of my last adventure until a few days into the next one!

I’m just outside of Vilanculos, Mozambique now.  Since my last blog, I flew from Kinshasa to Johannesburg, where I spent a few nights, and this is the first day I haven’t been on the road Mozambique in four days.  We arrived in Maputo after dark on the first day after a surprisingly easy border crossing, and stayed in our favorite guest house from the last trip, called Palmerias.  The breakfast there is the main selling point (along with the internet connection).  We had a very interesting dinner experience that night in the “Feira Popular” which is basically a permanent fairgrounds - full on with rides - right next to downtown Maputo.  I’ve never seen the rides operating, but the dining ambiance is quite nice.  The next day we walked around quite a bit, and later met up with a Mozambican colleague of mine from Johannesburg, then had dinner down by the water at a pretty fancy marina club.

The next morning we drove north, past Xai-Xai (where we had stopped last trip) and into untread ground!  I got a speeding ticket for going 72 km/hr in a 60 zone.  For the metrically-challenged reader, that means going 45 in a 37 zone.  I’m not saying I didn’t do anything wrong, but it was kinda lame.  I did chat and laugh with the arresting cops, though.  We were actually quite lucky (knock on wood) with the police - I got pulled over another time for a “random” documents check (we have South African plates, which means $$$ here) and didn’t get extorted.  I think trying to speak Portuguese and appearing nice and relaxed helps quite a bit in these situations.

That night we stayed at a camping spot in Maxixe, which was absolutely spectacular (and very cheap - Mozambique tends to be on the expensive side).  We set up the tent just up the hill from a beautiful bay, right across from the city of Inhambane.  Although the idea of taking a dhow (dug-out traditional boats) across to Inhambane was considered, we decided instead to move on the next morning, as we’d heard the road ahead was very rough.  It was indeed very rough, and made for a long, exhausting morning of driving the next day.  This was yesterday, and it was particularly exhausting because we’ve had a hard time getting the food we’re looking for here, for what seems to be a combination of reasons: restaurants tend to serve a disproportionate amount of fries/rice/bread for the amount of meat or seafood (or vegetables) on the plate; this, combined with my special dietary needs (low-starch) and my overactive appetite (and it gets worse when I “fall behind,” as I already have here) make me pretty much perpetually dissatisfied; the hotels where we stay don’t have kitchen facilities, and so far, when we’ve camped, by the time we roll into town and set up camp and get oriented, it’s late to go to the market.  This was a bummer yesterday because we actually had struck our camp, had coffee and started driving by 7:30 AM, and made it to our destination (here in Vilanculos) by just after noon, but were distracted until sundown.

The distractions, however, were not unpleasant!  We’ve met some really interesting people - there is a huge community of white South Africans and Zimbabweans (we’ve mostly fallen in with the Zimbabweans, who came after they were kicked off of their farms) who are running tourist businesses.  Among them is a horseback tourism group, and our first act (after having a drink at the bar) was to go on a horseback ride.  This was really cool and special, although quite uncomfortable and a little scary for yours truly.  I was thinking, after I’d given up on trotting (or, I should say, after the region between my legs had given up on trotting) and was trying to just relax, that I would love to know how to ride a horse.  I think it would be way cool.  However, I really have no interest at all in going through the process of learning to ride a horse.  They just scare me.  I guess it’s like guns - you can see that it’s useful and quite cool (depending on who you’re talking to) to know how to use them, and obviously people who are comfortable around them had to learn to be that way, but it’s just scary until you’re comfortable.  I should note, just to point out what a big wuss I am, that actually, the risk to me was quite small, as my horse was being held the whole time by a very nice Zimbabwean on foot.

Anyhow, the coast here is absolutely spectacular, and I’m hoping to have some delicious seafood.  I must admit that even the huge plate of prawns I had last night was not that great, although it might have had something to do with my physical discomfort.  We camped again last night, with the sound of ocean waves rocking us to sleep.  Tonight we’ve been invited to stay in the guest room of a quite nice lodge in the resort next door to the one where we stayed last night, where I’m sitting right now!  We spent the late morning at the local market in the middle of town.  After weathering some overly-friendly boys and men on the way in, we wandered deep into what turned out to be an enormous market.  After finding some beignets for 1 Meticais each (something like 5 U.S. cents), some peanuts, and walking by some amazing produce for sale, we found a place to sit.  The woman there - named “Anna” - served us big helpings of beef and fish with rice.  It was delicious, and with a Coke only added up to 45 Meticais (the equivalent of about $2).  This was the springboard for quite a bit of reflection about the economy here - the tourist places where we’re staying charge prices that seem somewhat more “normal” to the Western outsider ($8 U.S. or so for an average meal, and about $2 for a beer), but exist almost completely independently of the local population, apart from a few employees (mostly cleaners, it seems - the more skilled jobs seem to go to English-speaking black Zimbabweans).  This kind of contrast in adjoining spaces (the market is about a 15 minute drive from the resorts, but the resort’s immediate neighbors seem to be a part of the “town” economy) is totally baffling to me.  And the big question for us is this: if there is such attractive fresh produce available, why do the restaurants only offer bread and fries with a tiny bit of meat?  Do they intentionally avoid serving vegetables for some reason?  Is it a question of taste?  Practicality, like the potatoes just don’t spoil?

Some other random observations: tons of people speak English here, even in the markets - I’m assuming that’s because a lot of the money coming in is from anglophone tourists (especially South Africans); as in other places I’ve been in Africa, it’s HOT in the sun, and quite nice and cool in the shade; the people we’ve met are almost embarrassingly welcoming and generous - I’m not sure if that’s how they are to everyone, or if it has to do with us being American, or being a potential source of publicity; the birds are amazing - beautiful and diverse; I was able to call from a cell phone to wish my nephew a happy birthday - as a friend and blog-reader wrote to me recently: “ain’t technology grand?”

I’m writing from a nice air-conditioned room in Xai-Xai, Mozambique. The walls and ceiling are white and tall, the room is furnished with simple but nice wooden furniture, and I’m looking across the room to an open window and the Indian Ocean just about 50 meters away. Yesterday morning I woke up in Maputo - the capital of Mozambique. This has been a road trip from the get-go - a rented car from Johannesburg took us the 6 or 7 hours to Maputo. Two nights there in nice accomodations like these, and then about 3-4 hours to Xai-Xai yesterday. The climax of this drive was the last 30 or 40 minutes, when we descended into the Limpopo river flood plain. It was quite spectacular to pass so quickly from jungley-looking villages along the highway into an enormous, expansive, flat plain.

Mozambique has been wonderful. Right from the border it felt much closer to Congo or Cameroon than South Africa. This includes the inconveniences (very limited access to internet, a larger number of beggars/hawkers/etc, more challenging road conditions - both the physical road and the increased unpredictability of other drivers, more police checkpoints, pedestrian traffic on the highways, etc), but also some advantages: car theft is apparently very common here, but overall the place feels (and, I believe, is) much safer than Johannesburg. The seafood is amazing and cheap (as well as the beer) and the people are incredibly nice.

Speaking of people, I’ve had to make an adjustment here because my Portuguese is non-existent. I’m just not used to living places where I don’t speak the language! This is not due to a large repertoire of foreign languages, but rather to conservative choices in travel destinations. Generally, I really only go to the Francophone world. I have enough Spanish to hack my way through those situations, and although I had some unanticipated problems with the English in South Africa, I think those have been smoothed out a great deal. I just don’t like feeling speechless and helpless.

But who does? On my way into town today, I stopped at a stand that looked like they were serving food. Either the young girl there either didn’t speak Portuguese, or my two-word sentences were too mangled for her to decipher (or she was just intimidated and didn’t want to try to understand me). At any rate, we awkwardly waved goodbye after having muttered mutually incomprehensible phrases at each other (under the watchful eye of passers-by), and I got in the car and drove off, muttering now to myself. I thought, “this was a real cross-cultural experience - and this is why people don’t do it more often.” Nothing happened. No real communication took place. She wanted to understand me, I think, and I know I wanted to understand her and to be understood, but it just didn’t happen. There’s something very heavy about that experience: I guess maybe it makes one doubt in the conviction (which most international travelers share, I would think) that we can all understand each other, get along, and live together in harmony. The problems are so complex, and sometimes the barriers feel impossibly great - even for the most basic kinds of communication.

After that, I found a little restaurant on the main drag in the city (of Xai-Xai - as opposed to the place I’m staying on Xai-Xai beach, which is about 10km out of town), and managed to get pointed to the small central market. There I sat and had some rice and kidneys with a beer. Market life was swirling around me, and several people tried to speak to me: the girls who were serving me food (with whom I ended up commincating mostly through hand gestures - thank heavens for charades…), the “mama” who ran the bar where I sat to eat (I just stared stupidly at her), and some random passers-by. This felt much better - although perhaps it’s just because of the beer…

I wrote a bit the other day about the drive to Maputo. Here’s that:

The countryside is glorious between Johannesburg and Maputo. Joburg is quite high in altitude (6000 feet or so, I hear), and since it’s “winter” here it is quite cool and dry there. After an hour or so on the road east out of town, you stop seeing factories and mines and start seeing large rolling hills which are brown right now, but I’ve seen pictures of them covered in lush green during the summer months. After a couple more hours the road starts a long descent. The vegetation changes slowly, and there are more and more farms of various kinds (rice, then oranges, then eventually bananas). The air also gets slowly more heavy and moist. We received many warnings about the crossing the border by car, but it went quite smoothly, although it did take some time. It was getting dark by the time we got out, but still Mozambique’s dramatic landscape was perceptible, and other differences between here and South Africa were quite apparent (besides the language difference): many more people on the highway on foot or on bicycle; vehicles generally moving more slowly and less predictably; more small, rickety stands on the roadside… I was surprised to see that they drive on the left here, like in South Africa. This observation led me to look around and find this amazing blog post about this question, for which I had never found any satisfying answers!

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this, but I’ll plan to write more as the trip goes on!