Vacation Roundup

I wrote this post in Word at the office, and then when I went to save it, Word ate it. It was a really long post, and I had some other stuff written that also got eaten, so this version (being written directly into the website) may end up being a bit shorter. I know--how does Word eat documents as you're trying to save them? Because of virus-riddled South African computers, that's why.

Anyway, I began vacation in Maputo, where we wandered around and only managed to accomplish about half the things we intended to but still had a great time. It was a Monday, when the museums are closed, so the Natural History Museum was tightly gated shut; the Art Museum, on the other hand, had somebody there who would let you in for a nominal bribe. And the art was well worth it. We got horribly lost on the way to the fish market, but spent a nice hour wandering through the central market and buying immense quantities of fresh produce, including the first cilantro I've seen for sale in a year and a half. So instead of fish, we had delicious guacamole and very rich pastries (bought from one of the 5 million bakeries in Mozambique) and some other mezze for dinner).

After Maputo, we headed up to Vilankulos, which turned out to be a much longer drive than we had anticipated. My fault, I didn't realize how much the pothole obstacle course would slow us down. We got in well after dark and then got lost in Vilankulos looking for the backpackers, since Mozambique is very poorly signposted and the map in Lonely Planet is basically like navigating off of a globe. So we ended up parking near some distinctive statuary and calling the backpackers, which sent someone to guide us the rest of the way.

The next day, we had a relaxing morning sleeping on the beach. Well, relaxing except for the horde of dogs that tried to have a fight on our beach towels and spent the day stalking us, begging for morsels of our fruit (we didn't have any food that should have been appetizing to dogs, I swear. It was all fruit and chocolate). At last somebody from a nearby bar/restaurant chased them away for us, and I attempted to read but promptly fell asleep while E and Milenka went wading in the ocean and had a fun brush with death (Milenka can't swim). It was wonderful to sit on a beach. About four days in, I finally felt like I was on vacation--not to say I wasn't having fun already, I just didn't feel like I was actually on vacation yet. That afternoon, we rode camels. Seriously. Evidently there was a Sudanese guy who brought some camels with him when he emigrated and runs half hour rides on them now. Camel riding on a beach, after you get over the initial fear of death, is quite fun.

For day two in Vilankulo, we took a dhow, which is like a sailboat, out to the Bazaruto Archipelago, where we went snorkeling and had some amazing fresh crab and fish. It was beautiful out there, though the current was overly swift and instead of gently floating through the fish it was more like speed cruising through the water while straining your eyes to make sure to see all of the cool sealife as you careen past, while also trying to avoid running directly into the 8 million jellyfish the current seems to want you to accost. No stings, though I had some still-healing wounds from scraping against the coral. We spent that evening wandering around for about two hours looking for a restaurant that was open and had food, the latter being a much more difficult prospect than you would think.

After Vilankulo, we headed down to Tofo, which involved another insanely long day of driving. However, we didn't get lost on the way and we made it into the backpackers before dark (though the previous entry's photos were taken later that day in the backpacker's parking lot). We also found the bread shack that day, which listed donuts on its menu, a very exciting prospect, but they turned out to just be fat cakes with fillings. The bread was great, though. The next day, we went whale shark watching. It started with an ocean launch, which involves pushing a motor boat into the ocean and then hopping in while it is getting ready to start motoring rapidly against the waves, and then riding on the side while it rocks back and forth wildly on the water. No seatbelts, terrifying, and not a little nausea-inducing. Lots of fun though. Unfortunately, it was really cloudy which made it difficult to see any whale sharks in the water, so we didn't spot any. There were many, many dolphins out frolicking, though, so we jumped in the water to snorkel with them instead. Well worth it.

After the whale shark watching, we went down to the market in Tofo which sold textiles rather than fresh produce and was a lot of fun to walk around. Combined, E and Milenka are fantastic bargainers, and I got to reap the bounty of their skills. We also had lunch at a little hole in the wall restaurant that served fantastic tasting and fantastically cheap shrimp. Mmm.

The next stop was Swaziland, so we wished Mozambique farewell--which, as always, took a lot longer than expected since the drive took twenty million hours and included bribing a cop, buying strange fuzzy fruit, and getting lost looking for the border--but we made it into Swaziland before the border closed. Seriously, finding the border was a lot trickier than expected. Have I mentioned yet that Mozambique was really poorly-signposted? Also, the last stage involved driving through a tree farm. No joking. Now, Lonely Planet's map of Swaziland is a lot less globe-like than their Mozambique map, in no small part because Swaziland's map covers a much smaller area in the same sized page, and it is infinitely better signposted (they also have a strange obsession with speed bumps, which we experienced in a number of different flavors, none of which were potholes [Mozambique] or cows [South Africa]). We still got lost on the way to the backpackers. This was because it was dark, the map of Swaziland is still like finding a particular hotel on a page-sized map of Massachusetts, the Coast to Coast directions are usually only penetrable if you already know where you're going, and we were really tired. But we pulled into a restaurant and got surprisingly good directions, after which we found the backpackers. We then drove back to that restaurant for dinner, before watching Brazil humiliatingly defeat the US in the Confederation's Cup semifinals. Eish, we were up three when we left the restaurant! What happened?

We considered going back to the same restaurant for breakfast, but sadly it was closed. However, it worked out for the best, because it turned out there was a great coffee shop further down the road. We needed to get to the South Africa border before it closed at 4 pm, so we had an activity-packed morning and managed to get everything we wanted to done in record time: hearty breakfast-eating, craft-shopping, museum-visiting, and hot springs-swimming, where we attempted to teach Milenka to swim (see pictures). As expected, it took twice as long to get to the border as we had expected, but now that we know to expect it, we made it in plenty of time.

Farewell, Swaziland. Farewell, Mozambique. I really love both countries, and would love to go back...or transfer to there...but probably won't get a chance to before my service is over. Oh, final note: fun game to play while driving through Mozambique? Spot the Peace Corps Volunteers. They're the white people jogging by the side of the tar road with their iPods.