After I learned that the train from Nampula westward to Cuamba only left on Saturdays and Tuesdays, I decided to take an out-and-back trip from Nampula and spend about a week at Mozambique Island (aka Ilha de Moçambique, or just Ilha “eel-ya” for short), then come back to Nampula to catch the train. The morning I left from Nampula to Ilha, I quickly found a chapa (what a taxi is called in Moz) going toward Ilha. The chapa drivers called to me in Portuguese, “Amiga! Where are you going?” and directed me to the correct one. It filled up within 20 minutes, which was great. The not-so-great thing was that the 2.5 hour trip proposed by Google maps ended up taking 6 hours. I knew it wouldn’t be as fast as my friend G-maps suggested, but I was not mentally prepared for more than double that time. Details of the chapa life are portrayed in Small Thoughts 21: Moz edition (which I will post soon).
After several transfers and many more instances of me kicking myself for not hitching instead, the final chapa finally let out at the start of the bridge to Ilha. The bridge is about 5 km long. After sitting in a crazy stuffed, hot, dusty chapa all day, I was happy to walk instead of waiting for yet another chapa to fill up to go such a short distance. I started to walk, and it was so refreshing, having the sea wind blowing across my face. I stopped several times to take photos of passing boats with puffing sails.
Luckily, just as I was getting tired of the walk, a guy on a motorcycle stopped ahead of me and waved me over to give me a ride. I hopped on the back, somewhat precariously balanced with my huge backpack on my back, and he took me to the island. I hopped off with a "tudo ben!" (all good!) and I walked the length of the island toward my hostel, waving “ta ta” to the little kids and using my newly-learned 10 words of Portuguese to greet people with “boa tarde,” good afternoon.
The island itself is an old Portuguese colonial town and as I walked across the island, I saw that the (crumbling but beautiful) architecture definitely shows this history. Apparently, the country was named after the island, not the other way around.
I found Ruby’s (a different Ruby’s from the one in Nampula) hostel in the middle of the narrow streets of Stone Town, a neighborhood on the north side of the island. It’s really cool; it has this great outdoor/indoor feel, and it has lots of levels, ending with a beautiful rooftop lounge that looks out over the other roofs and the ocean.
After taking half a nap to refresh myself after a long travel day, I headed out to please my hungry stomach. After a little wandering, I found a restaurant where I got a chicken quiche and a cashew pie. Interacting with the server, I noticed I was getting along decently with my baby Portuguese, being able to understand most things due to my knowledge of French and limited Spanish.
The next day, I was on a photography mission. I walked out to the pier, past old colonial buildings, and around the fort São Sebastião where I climbed around the outside of it and amused myself by spotting passing fishing boats. Around the back, I found a broken door and went into the actual fort, but a guard soon found me and said something like I had to pay M200 for an entrance fee. I scooted back out the broken door, not about to pay money to wander through this thing, and soon found what is said to be the oldest European-built building in the southern hemisphere (too many qualifiers for that superlative, in my opinion). Surprise, it’s a church.
Then I kept wandering and taking photos of kids who were scrambling around me asking me to take their photo. Some things never change.
I then decided to brave the market where I got some potato-filled samosa things, some more nut bar cookies, and oranges. Back at the hostel, I cooled off with my new favorite thing, ice water (who knew ice could be so exciting?), at the hostel.
The next day, I went running down the east side of the island as the sun rose over the water. That day, I also struck up a conversation with one of my hostel mates, an Italian guy en route moving from Namibia to Uganda, hoping to get work as a tour guide. After I explained that I'd be in Lesotho for two years, he said that two years is a long time to be in Africa, saying how you get to absolutely love some things about it, and other things make you want to rip your hair out. Accurate.
To my delight and surprise, that afternoon, my hostel became overrun with Mozambique PCVs. My people! Weeks earlier, when I was asking around for PCVs to stay with, I was told that everyone in the area I would be in would be attending a conference, and so would be unable to host me. Little did I know that their conference would be held on Ilha, and that they would be staying at Ruby’s also. I went with a group of them to Sarah’s Place, a restaurant where I got some great matapa and rice. Just hearing them talk confirmed my suspicions that the Lesotho life is rough compared to other countries. They have roommates (often other PCVs), lots of expat friends, live near towns that actually have stuff, have espresso machines/fridges/running water etc. One girl mentioned washing her hair every day. Living in the lap of luxury over here. But it sounds like they’re not as close as the Lesotho volunteers are, being so spread out. I know almost all the other volunteers in Lesotho fairly well, and there are only a few I know by name only. They have about 200 volunteers in Moz, but they’re so spread out that they don’t know everyone. Weird. They were a pretty cool bunch, though. Some were picking my brain about Lesotho, hoping to travel there soon. While the vast majority of Lesotho volunteers are pretty wasp-ey, their group is more diverse. For Mozambique, since they learn Portuguese in training, they are required to know at least another romance language to qualify to serve there. In the small sample group of Moz PCVs I met, there was a good representation of Latinos, African-Americans, and even some European-born people who were naturalized as US citizens.
It was at this point that I realized that I had exhausted all the things to do on this island. There are only so many times a day I can wander up and down the same streets. I’ve taken so many photos. I’ve been called “cunya” (what I’m assuming means “white girl”) way too many times. I walked all the way across the 2 mile long bridge to the mainland, bought some snacks, then walked all the way back. Due to the train schedule in Nampula, I could have been here for 2 days or for a week, and I decided that a week would be better.
Luckily, I’d finally made some vacation friends with the Moz PCVs, so it had been fun to hang out with them in the evenings when they’re not at their conference. At one point, I ended up sitting with one PCV, an Italian-American girl with long brown braid extensions who teaches at a teacher’s college as her primary project. She said that when the Portuguese left in 1975, there were no trained teachers left, so the teachers now, especially in her province of Cabo Delgado in the north, need help. It’s so cool to see what other volunteers are up to and what kinds of needs different areas have.
The next day was decidedly more exciting than the previous few days where I was just wandering around. I went with a few other tourists on a “dhow safari.” We sailed on our boat, “Titanic,” (how comforting) from the island to a peninsula on the mainland.
We went swimming in this lagoon thing and had a great lunch of coconut rice, swordfish, and some salads. It was cool to watch the tide come in and make the beach turn into a field of bubbles as crab holes filled up with water. Then we went meandering around and saw piles of coral waiting to be burned and turned into limestone/plaster/paint.
We finished the toe by visiting a “Swahili village,” which made my village look like a page out of a beautiful story book in comparison. The other group members were amazed and intrigued by the prospect of living with so little in a village like this. I was just thinking, psh my village has nothing compared to this. I learned that the people who live in this area of Mozambique speak Mocua, which is a combination of Swahili, Portuguese, and Arabic. The population is 90% Muslim, and you can hear people greeting each other with “Salaam aleikum.” We walked right past a mosque as its crackly loudspeaker blasted a call to prayer.
We sailed back to the island, being splashed by passing waves. It was definitely a good way to spend the last day before I had to leave Ilha and venture back to Nampula.
