Whale sharks, manta rays and a burnt oesophagus – a fantastic first week!
Just 7 days in Mozambique and we have swum with whale sharks, dived with manta rays, seen hump back whales and been more cramped on a mini-bus than we ever thought possible.
The journey
Thanks to some heavy duty sleeping tablets and a lady with a wicked flat-top hair cut at Johannesburg airport who got us on a flight 6 hours earlier than we’d booked, we made it to Maputo the capital of Mozambique in 25 hours. Maputo is a shadow of its former glory in the 70’s – in need of a good coat of paint and new pavements.
Some research on the final flight revealed that only Portuguese is spoken in Mozambique. Luckily Pip managed to dig up a few essential phrases from her Brazil vault (Treen was always put in charge of languages!), that enabled us to get our hands on a giant avocado, but still made getting around very tricky!
The less comfortable journey
Waiting in the pre-dawn cold for a bus to Tofu, after a half-hour walk we were amused to see two Dutch guys (unsure whether lovers or brothers) from our guest house comfortably aboard with good seats. With the general disregard for any system the driver attempted to jam both packs under the back seat, but eventually gave up and allowed one of the bags in the aisle, which in time acted as a substitute seat. We thought we’d scored by moving from the tiny double seats to the back seat, until we turned up at the local bus station and about three times the amount of people that could comfortably get on the bus boarded. It could have been worse, with a seriously big mumma looking like she was going to try and be the fourth person on our three person seat. Luckily she was distracted by someone selling sweeties and a 6 foot man whose hips were substantially smaller took her place and the four of us got nice and cosy for eight hours. Somehow the time passed without too much discomfort, aside numb bums, as we took in the continual rural huts and ladies walking along the highway with huge piles of wood or coconuts on their heads. The men always empty handed, with the exception of a bottle of the local rum.
The local rum
Being too lazy to explore with our packs, we booked a hut where the bus dropped us. Third hut lucky door lock that worked, but sadly the same couldn’t be said for the toilet block. The only rational solution was to wander into town to try the local rum with some of the locals who were busily trying to sell the days catch of barracuda, tuna and giant prawns to tourists. The markets are crazy, with the local delicacy – giant prawns – being controlled by three aggressive ladies, that we termed the prawn mafia. Their rigged scales and crazy comments, not to mention mean ways when you try and ask a question had us in stitches after a few sips of the local rum. While enjoying the sunshine-syrup, a well-endowed American girl and her South African boyfriend, Lacy and Don, told us about much nicer accommodation another kilometre up the beach. It took us a while to work out that they’d be taking a cut, but we figured if it had working toilets we’d give it a crack.
Flashpacking!
Right decision. Somehow we went from thinking we’d maybe treat ourselves to a double room to getting the beach view suite, for a very very good price. The South African owner has since had a go at us for paying so little, but luckily it was all locked in for five days so we are living it up! We are now officially flashpacking – backpacking is for the commoners.
Diving heaven
Being right beside a dive school, we got straight out to snorkel with whale sharks. A truly amazing experience. We saw a total of three whale sharks, each between 7- 12 meters long. We chased them around and dived down to swim alongside them, but quickly wore ourselves out. Swimming alongside them is one of the greatest experiences of our lives.
Then we signed up for 3 scuba dives, convincing the dive instructors that we didn’t need to waste time on the refresher course – we’d dived recently.
“Yeah us Aussies are water babies” …. “Are you sure you’ve dived in the last two years”. …“Yeah mate”. Fast forward two hours with the skipper yelling “masks on, regulators in, prepare for negative entry…dive, dive, dive”. We both stared at one another with panicked eyes and rolled off the back of the boat thinking ‘what the f&^k’. Pip preceded to descend, having dived most recently (5 years ago in Brazil) while her dive buddy’s 10 year dive gap saw him flailing on the surface, thinking to himself ‘how do you use this gear’, while looking below to see the other divers quickly descending. Throwing caution to the wind, he swam for the bottom trying to overcome his fear of sharks.
The next 45 minutes turned out to be some of the best diving of our extensive diving lives. The remote Mozambique reefs still remain relatively untouched and the coral supports populations of tropical fish, huge tuna, sharks, several variety of turtle and most impressive -huge manta rays the size of small cars.
Doxy strikes again
Pip scored a ‘super freckle’ from the malaria medication doxycycline in Brazil, but after the rums on our first night in Tofu, Pip upped the anti by panicking about missing the days tablet but forgetting that you can’t take Doxy’s and lie down. Now with a burnt oesophagus, Pip has had to struggle with swallowing and worst of all can’t enjoy a lager of an evening with the giant prawns that Duncan has been cooking up over hot coals!
Magyver….more like Magubber
Since Dunc repaired Pip’s broken pack with gaffer tape, opened an avocado using his pen knife and cooked prawns on hot coals (started without using matches or a lighter) his asked me to call him Magyver…..more like Maguber – you wouldn’t even get a patch for stuff like that in Girl Scouts. Dib dib dib. Dob Dob Dob.
Photos below.
Emails
Hope everyone is well!
P&D
Loving the first post and hope your osphegus is feeling better Pip. God love those Maputo prawns - tasty!! How far from Vilunkulos is Tofo?
ReplyDeleteEnjoy xx