After another short night at Fatima’s in Maputo, Jen and I woke up early (surprise, surprise) and got a taxi to the airport. This would be where Jen and I parted ways. She was headed back to Lesotho, and I, having unlimited vacation days (I highly recommend it), would continue to northern Mozambique. Jen got on her plane back to Joburg and I got on mine to Nampula. For PC Mozambique volunteers, they have a travel ban through the middle few provinces of the country due to a rebel group shooting up busses there. Not wanting to get shot up, I opted to fly to the north. It would have taken me a few days to bus to the north anyway, as Mozambique is a very long country. The flight, however, took just over 2 hours. There was a very high-maintenance-looking girl in my row, taking lots of selfies, kissing at herself and adjusting her hippie forehead headband in her phone camera, and generally making me roll my eyes a lot.
I landed in the tiny Nampula airport and, putting my head down and just walking straight through all the people trying to offer me taxis and whatnot, opted to walk the hour through town to my hostel, Ruby’s Backpackers. I endured a surprisingly low level of harassment on my way, which was nice, until I walked through the taxi rank where some guy swept his hand across the top of my head, almost knocking my sunglasses off. I put them back on top of my head and gave him a death glare, as I was not competent enough in Portuguese or any other language spoken here to tell him off.
There’s not much here in Nampula. It’s a pretty big town, but I’d already explored it all on foot by the early afternoon. There’s much more of an Islamic influence here in the north, with most women wearing long skirts or capulanas (the patterned fabric here) and a flowy head covering that drapes down to waist level. There is an insane number of women carrying around babies in this country. They take a capulana and plop their baby in it like a sling around their back, coming over one shoulder on one side and under the other arm on the other side. If they need to tend to their baby or breast feed it, a simple swoosh slides the baby around to the front. So simple! The housekeeper lady at the hostel was cleaning the rooms with her bug-eyed baby in one such sling. No childcare service necessary.
As I wandered around, I saw lots of students as they got out of school for lunch. They took to the streets, wearing uniforms like those in Lesotho, but instead of short skirts, most of them had past-knee or ankle-length skirts, some wearing hijabs. I got some street snack food outside one of the schools from the vendors taking advantage of the lunch break to sell to the students. I got a long, diamond-shaped nut bar cookie thing and a tiny frozen popsicle thing which was like a frozen smoothie in a tiny plastic bag.
Then I decided to waste some more time at the ethnography museum, where for 100 Meticais I saw some quaint exhibitions featuring clay pots, ancient metal tools, woven baskets, and some cool masks worn during traditional dances.
Having exhausted all the things to do in this town, I just went back to the hostel and talked with the guy working there about my travel prospects. I made a plan to go to Ilha de Moçambique for a few days, then come back when the train was going to leave to go west. Going from having just an inkling of what I wanted to do to having at least half a plan was such a great feeling.
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