After a night at Fatima’s in Maputo, Jen and I, along with a bunch of other hostel people, gathered at 4:45for our 5am bus to Tofo. This bus (600 Mets from Fatima’s, some lesser price from the taxi rank) scooped us up and then proceeded to the rank, where it waited for another 2 hours as people wandered in and out of the bus doors trying to sell anything and everything. My favorites were the women selling bread. They each had a huge plastic bin on their heads with layers and layers of loaves poking up vertically. The pile reached up quite high, which was especially convenient for the people in the tall busses who could just reach out, grab a loaf, and toss a coin down to the lady. To get your attention, all the hawkers would hiss at you,”sssssss!” I imagined them all as snakes: I’m ssssselling ssssocksss. Won’t you purchasssse sssome bisssssscuitssss?
We finally filled up around 7 and set off for our 9 hour ride. Along the way, we were bombarded at every stop by people trying to sell us fruit, mostly oranges, which are absolutely everywhere, and cashews. If a window was even a tiny bit open, they’d yank it open and shove their offerings in your face. What I wouldn’t give to have regular and cheap access to cashews in Lesotho. Just the variety of foods you can get, even right off the street, is staggering compared to Lesotho, whose only native fruit is peaches. And those are only growing like one month out of the year. Excuse me as I cry a little bit.
The bus had these folding aisle seats (like the side jump seats in taxis), and the woman sitting in my aisle seat was breastfeeding her baby, then along the way she switched with another lady who sat next to us and proceeded to also breastfeed her baby. Boobs out everywhere. Halfway through the ride, we got to Xai-Xai (“shy shy”) which is the “camptown” of Gaza providence. It was much bigger than any camptown in Lesotho, but then again, it’s not really hard to be. We stopped for a gas/food/bathroom break there. Then, in Inhambane, the town before Tofo, we learned that the German guy on our bus was going to our same hostel, so we got off before the final stop and followed him, in the drizzle, to the hostel.
Mozambeat Motel was pretty cool, with a big pool, an open lounge/bar area, and a bunch of individual pod-like houses. Jen and I stayed in one of the “suite” rooms, which was basically like a normal hotel room, complete with grand-looking mosquito-netted beds (AKA princess beds). We heard that this place had some great food, so we went to the bar and I got matapa and rice. It’s the Moz equivalent of papa and moroho. The matapa is cassava greens in some kind of creamy coconut sauce. So tasty.
We just hung out in the bar area with our new vacation friend Matus and the German guy Frederick, who was staying at the hostel while he worked toward becoming a dive master with one of the local dive shops
The next day was a very rainy day, which was somewhat unusual, but apparently much-needed, as this area went through the same drought Lesotho went through. We just slept in and hung out until the rain cleared. Jen, Matus, and I walked into Tofo town, where there was a little market, tons of little shops, and some small restaurants. This place is also absolutely packed with guest houses. We soon found the beach and frolicked around a little bit.
Then we found this unmarked restaurant called Branko’s where we got a pizza and a hot rock. The hot rock was really fun. It was simply a rock that was put in the oven, then brought to our table so we could cook our meat on it (and be in charge of our own food poisoning, Jen said).
Then we headed off to find Piri Piri dive shop, where the German guy was working and where we could get a 40% discount just for staying at Mozambeat. I signed up for 2 deep dives and the deep adventure dive certification, and Matus signed up for the whole open water course. We walked back to the hostel and I did my “homework” for the deep dive on the couch. I had already done tons of deep dives by just being able to convince dive shops that I was experienced despite only having a simple open water certification, but the owner of this place was like “Yeahhhh you need to be certified to go deep.” So I did the homework.
Back at the hostel, Jen and I talked with the bartender about how to say different things in Portuguese, and he gave me this long explanation about how he didn’t know English very well (mind you, he was explaining this in English), and how if you don’t speak Portuguese here, you’ll always lose arguments with people like government employees. We also talked about how even if you mess up a language, it’s ok, and that the most important thing is just to try, and it shows you’re trying to learn. If someone says “bom dia” (good morning) when they should be saying “boa tarde” (good afternoon), just say “bom dia” back to them, then maybe pull them aside later and discretely explain what they should have said. It’s no use embarrassing someone when they’re genuinely trying. I do the same thing in Lesotho. People will often say “good morning” no matter what time of day it is, just because at school during morning assembly, the teachers would greet them by saying good morning. They’re not as used to saying “good afternoon.” I’ll repeat “good morning” back to someone even in the afternoon, but it’s mostly because I’m not paying that much attention to what time of day it is. I’ll correct my students or other kids I know, but other than that, I know what they’re trying to say. Plus they’re just trying to use English with me, so there’s no point in berating someone for saying something slightly wrong.
The next day, Sunday, was truly a Sun Day. We took advantage of it by doing all the water activities. I got picked up at the hostel early in the morning by British Divemaster Steve, and he drove me to the dive shop where my dive buddy (an RPCV from Kyrgyzstan, coincidentally) and I went through the homework assignment about deep diving with Steve. Nitrogen narcosis, the bends, etc. etc. We got our gear and walked to the beach where a tractor had brought the boat to the shore. The whole group pushed the boat into the water and we jumped on. We jetted off, sitting on the orange pontoons for about 30 minutes as we got to the dive site. In two dives, the coolest things I saw were big loggerhead turtles and a huge manta ray. Sadly, we didn’t spot any whale sharks, which are sometimes seen around here.
Some of the American girls from the dive trip and I went to lie on the beach, and I learned that they were working in South Africa doing a project where after people get tested for HIV, if they test positive, they get a follow-up text after the lab results have been processed so they know their CD4 count (which is like the amount of virus in their system), when to start on their antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, etc. Lots of times, people don’t come back to the clinic to pick up these results, so this will make it easier for HIV-positive people to be informed and get started managing their health.
After I grabbed a matapa and crab lunch with Jen, Matus came back from his Scuba course and we went to the beach to rent surfboards. As the more experienced one (and by “experienced,” I mean having only surfed twice in my life), I gave him a 30-second lesson on the beach on how to paddle and stand up, and then we went into the surf to attempt to pretend like we knew what we were doing. Neither of us actually stood up very many times, but it was fun nonetheless. We returned the boards and, after getting lost trying to take a shortcut to the hostel, me realizing that I needed to buy tickets for Jen and me to get the bus the next day, finding the other hostel where they were sold, and buying them, we finally made it back to Mozambeat well after dark where we got smoothies (I had forgotten that smoothies actually existed!), which was great for getting that salty ocean taste out of my mouth.
That night, Jen and I didn’t get much sleep, as we had to wake up at 3:30am for our 4am bus ride. As you can see, dear reader, long-distance public transportation in Moz is a well-before-dawn kind of affair. The bus picked us up on the side of the road, and we were on our way back to Maputo. On the last leg back to Fatima’s, we got into a car with a travel-savvy French girl and a not-so-savvy German girl. The German was complaining about how the bus was so uncomfortable, that there was no space, they only stopped for one pee break, etc., when she’d had one of the best seats up front. I was just like, “Yeah…life’s hard…” as Jen and I side-eyed each other. The both of us had been crammed in the back of the bus that day, and how many countless Lesotho taxi rides had we been on where being squished beyond belief, suffocating, and going deaf from the music are just par for the course? Sorry, German girl, but you just have no idea.
Jen and I had heard of a craft market near the hostel, so we decided to visit. They were selling all the same old, same old paintings, prints, sculptures, jewelry, beaded animals, wire vehicles, and clothes made out of capulana fabric. Blahhhhh. Overall, we were quite unimpressed with Maputo. Why couldn’t we be back at the beach? Another few days there would have been great.
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