Summer Break 2010/Christmas Holidays

I have not dropped off the end of the earth. Still here. Still healthy, no signs of malaria.

I finished up my semester at UCM and headed on my Summer holidays before moving down to site three in Inhanbane. While teaching at the university was an unbelievable opportunity, I decided that for my second year I still wanted to have the experience of teaching at a secondary school, hence the move. I was by no means the best professor and there were plenty of areas for improvement, but I did the best I could and worked hard. I feel like the curriculum that I developed was updated, I am really happy that I was able to work things out between UCM and Computer Aid International for a shipment of 10 computers. The facilities had pretty good wireless but only three large dinosaur computers (called latas or cans by the students, which was a pretty apt description) that were not really great, I think these computers will make a huge difference on the quality of education and am excited to go visit when they are up and running. Also science textbooks will be coming in from Book Aid and International Book Project to help bulk up the library for the Department of Engineers at UCM.

My new school is an industrial school, students enter here as an alternative to traditional secondary school. They choose from a number of tracks (like reception, cooking, bar, sewing, electrician, mechanics, accounting, etc.) and study for a few years. They will graduate with the skills to jump into the job market. The school is really beautiful, I have so far been really impressed with the faculty. It will be completely different than last year but I’m up for the new challenges. I will be living on a mission about three blocks down the road from the school and a few blocks up from the beach. The village is small, calm, with some resorts but not quite as touristy as other places.

So the winter break…. You might have noticed I was not home. Since I’ve gotten a lot of inquisitive emails lately I thought I’d post a summary of more or less what we did. Apologies if it turns into one of those rambley and slightly irritating travel blogs.

Overall the trip was a huge success. I traveled mostly with Rebecca and she was a wonderful travel buddy!

Here are some snippets from the trip:

Chimoio-->Beira-->Nampula
The bus may have been called express but it was not express, and we probably should have figured that beforehand. The Nampula Express was a cheaper alternative to the TCO, which is the fancy bus service that provides snack (with real juice) during the trip. The Nampula Express should have really been called the Nampula-Sluggish-with-Long-Stopover-in-Quelimane. I’m not sure why it took so long, not counting our unannounced side trip to Quelimane, which is not on the main road. My main theory involves the driver’s steering technique which would best be described as: squiggly. Physically he looked like my old drunk guard (other PCVs noticed the resemblence), and he hunched over the steering wheel in would jiggle it left-right-left-right like some kind trick car so even when the road was straight we weren’t ever really moving in a straight line. A trip that should have lasted a day turned into a roadside nighttime overnighter just outside of Nampula because the police told us it was too late to continue on. It was hot and buggy on the bus so I slept on the side of the road for a little bit while the boys drank box wine and played cards.
Since the bus ride was so dang long we had plenty of time to play a number of quality roadtrip games but since Pete is English there were some discrepancies that turned these normally simple games into confusion. During the “Name that Jingle” I learned that Lays chips are called Walkers, the Milky Way UK jingle involves some race between a blue car and a red car, and Club Bar sells itself by asking buyers if they want “a lot of chocolate on your biscuit” which sounds more perverse than appetizing to me. We switched games to a word game but all of us Americans were stumped with a word that starts with T-R-O and is something you use in a supermarket (the correct word was “trolley” in case you were wondering).

Nampula-->Monapo-->Ilha de Mocambique-->Carushka
Ilha: timewarp other-worldly and eerie, narrow streets of abandoned whitewash buildings, and a massive fort that shocked me with the scale and horror of slave trade. I swam in a real swimming pool, it wasn’t light green or murky.
Carushka: Paradise. Period.

Carusca-->Monapo-->Nampula-->Cuamba
Rebecca and I took the Nampula-Cuamba train, an all day trip through jaw dropping stunning landscape: huge granite (or granite looking, I’m not the geologist in the family, you’ll have to direct those questions to Ryan) mountains in flat lush green valleys. The train chugs straight through villages and all the kids come out to wave at the train, it’s the big event of the day. Rebecca and I splurged on 2nd class tickets, meaning we shared a cabin with four others. Each side of the little cabin had three bunk beds, the middle one could be unlatched and swung down to form a bench. Our cabinmates shared chicken hotdogs with us and asked about what it was like to live in Moz. One of them was an older lady who was born on Ilha, she lamented how dirty and run down it had gotten since the independence. She was old-school and reminded me of the sassy card playing great-aunts of one of my host families in Ecuador, tightly curled hair and loose floral blouse. Under her bench she had a box with holes cut into the lid that kept scootching around, we eventually found out it was holding a big fluffy white rabbit, she would pull it out and talk to it. She was well prepared for the train: bringing out delicious foods (french fries, chicken, salads) from her cooler and knowing all the right spots to buy grapes, mangoes, lettuce, small fuzzy peach looking fruits from the window of our cabin. She explained to us how to make fried sweet potato cakes and talked about her daughter who had given her the rabbit.
Besides the second and third class cars the train had a dining car. Other PCVs recommend getting 3rd class tickets and then camping out in the dining car the whole time, we decided just to go for a little snack. All of the food in the kitchen, which is a small closet within the dining car, is cooked over huge coal fires in big stoves: a long table with grates for the pots, pans, kettles, meats, etc. and a shelf to fill with coal. The dining car itself was probably once very fancy, but had not aged well. This is not to say it was ugly, I actually liked its funkiness. The windows were jammed down crookedly, the plastic decorative coating on the tables was peeled up, and the wooden floor was broken in certain areas and you could see the tracks whiz past through the holes. We ate shamuses and very very sweet tea, but chicken lunches, potatoes, rice, and sandwiches were also options. Some (presumably intoxicated) men tried to flirt but all I wanted was my crispy shamusa, and we headed back to our car. The train didn’t have the enclosed car junctions like amtrack, it’s open with a little foot pad to step on to move to the next car.

Cuamba-->Entre Lagos-->Liwonde
Cuamba is in Niassa province, any tour book will tell you it has a last frontier feeling, and it really does. It feels forgotten, rural, and rugged. A new volunteer generously opened her home to us and we went out early the next morning to cross the border. Here is my advice: don’t cross into Malawi in Entre Lagos. Supposedly the roads are better than the other crossing but transport was complicated. To begin with our chapa/truck kept overheating and loosing the entire way out of Cuamba, the driver decided that his last stop would be a little town some 30 minutes away from the border, which was only a problem for Rebecca and I since we were the only ones needing to get to the border. There was no more transport. No cars heading out. No nothing. Just a meticulously dressed man with a big silver buckle and jeans who walked with us to the crossroads and asked if he could shows us his “big brilliant blue and red stones” so that we could help him develop international business connections for selling them. We declined.
We waited for eternity for a ride in probably one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to in Moz. A big open valley with tall grasses and cattails, grey mountains on the horizon. The grasses were so tall that all you could see of the kids playing were brief glimpses of the fluffy dark tops of their heads and the sway of green.
A number of offers from motorcyclists were made to us, each claiming his bike was strong enough to carry two people and all of our luggage. I asked if we were going to die and they thought it was funny, I wasn’t trying to be funny I really thought we would die. Right when it looked like we were going to have to go back to Cuamba a nun came by in a pick up…. Sigh of relief.
Before the trip I had been a bit stressed about crossing the border, mostly because the only documentation I currently have of my resident visa (my one from last year expired in October) is a letter of “permission of exit” (saying I can travel out of moz) that was typed on tissue paper and a receipt of payment that looks more like a scrap of paper that I printed from my home computer. The “date of pickup” for my document had already passed and of course the real document wasn’t ready by the said date so it looked like an expired receipt. I had gone to immigration and explained I was worried about getting hassled (actually I had already gotten hassled and that was before the expiration date) and, after jokingly asking about all the Mozambican men I’ve been with during my first year and if I’d take him to America, the officer kindly wrote a new more recent date on the back of the receipt with blue ink pen and stamped it. It looks moderately official, but you never know with rural crossings. Luckily nobody batted an eye, I think the officers were so bored out there they were just happy to see someone different crossing.
Unfortunately we were stuck, again, when we crossed the border into Malawi. There were no cars, one of the cars that normally ran had broken down and the other was out of gas. The border officers invited us to lunch. When they initially asked, Rebecca and I had different understandings of what they were asking, I figured they wanted to go to a food stall (not that I saw one but there had to be one somewhere, right?) and I’m not sure what Rebecca thought but one thing is for certain that neither of us really expected to end up at their house. We ate sardines, a quarter of a sausage, and nsima and they talked about how important it was to them as Malawians to be good hosts, which they were, they talked about their job, about living in the rural town, and asked about Mozambique. They were so worried about us feeling comfortable and not sketched out, I was apprehensive but when it came down to it they were just looking for good conversation and good food.
We sat at the border until the late afternoon, waiting waiting waiting. Finally a car came, we split the cost of the ride with a salt vendor from Moz to get to the main road where we could catch a ride at least to Liwonde. At one point we crossed over a wooden bridge that was 75% collapsed, as we pulled up to it I thought that it was something that had happened that very day because it looked completely impassable, but apparently people had been using it the previous 6 months because authorities were waiting for the money to build an expensive cement bridge rather than spend any money to fix the remains of the existing one. What was left of the bridge was a jagged tetris piece, on one end the leftside didn’t exist and about half way into the bridge the leftside was still standing but the right side had given way. We got out, crossed by foot on splintered planks and waited on the other side while the car tediously maneuvered a space more narrow than it.

Liwonde-->Zomba Plateau
Nobody wanted to change our metacais for kwatcha. At the border we had gotten an outrageous exchange from the one money changer and I figured we could wait until the Malawi side (at the Zobue crossing there are money changers EVERYWHERE), but there wasn’t weirdly enough anybody there. The salt vendor switched out a little of our money so we could get to Liwonde, but in Liwonde all of the ATMs were either down or did not accept our cards. We were about to spend the day at the gas station hunting down truckers heading to Moz to see if they would switch out our money, when a curious Australian-born/Zambian-raised man doing mission work and distributing solar lanterns came up to us, asked where we were from. Coincidently he happened to be heading to Moz via Zobue the following week and willingly bought our mets. He said he had three daughters about our age and would like to think if they were in our position someone would be there for them too. Seriously a guardian angel, without him we would have been stuck in Liwonde forever! What are the odds, with him coming up to us and everything.
Zomba Plateau: log cabin, birthday celebration, kebabs and s’mores (not a big hit with the Englishboys they said it was something like a so called wagonwheel, they clearly don’t understand American cuisine… but also it may have been because we had to use digestive crackers instead of honey grahams), the plateau smelled and looked like Eastern Oregon forest but you could hear monkeys.


Zomba Plateau-->Mt. Mulanje
Rebecca and I were on the hunt for Christmas presents, nice Mt. Mulanje tea seemed like a good idea and the gentleman running the town’s tour office recommended the tea factory down the road as the place to go. I’m not sure that the factory gets too many random tourist guests, they were surprised when we showed up, they definitely didn’t sell tea locally (it’s apparently export only), and security was tight, but the manager invited us to his office, served us a proper tea and explained history, cultivation, culture, etc. of tea. “Tea is like a good friend, there is nothing between you and the plant” I learned more about tea than ever before. He generously gave us a couple boxes of tea and offered to make tea with us in the factory, from start to finish, the next day but we had to head out but maybe someday….

Mt. Mulanje-->Blantyre-->Cape Maclear
Cape Maclear: got sick and sat in my mosquito net quarantine feeling sorry for myself while everyone else went kayaking. At least I had already done this during my Malawi/Zambia trip in July, I couldn’t really complain.
The boys played volleyball with some volunteers from Japan, though conversation got awkward when one of the girls mentioned she was from Hiroshima and asked if the PCV had heard of it before, the PCV wasn’t really sure how to respond.
I managed to avoid the Worst Restaurant in the World. Last July the girls and I went for lunch, and despite ordering very different foods everything came out as different arrangements/rearrangements of curry, peas, and carrots: the veggie burger was curry/pea/carrot mixture between hamburger buns, the chinese noodles was curry/pea/carrot mixture over spaghetti, the indian rice was curry/pea/carrot mixture over something that was supposed to be chipati, and the chinese rice was curry/pea/carrot mixture over white rice and then re-fried.
Met a Malawian that worked in the refuge camps for Mozambicans who fled to Malawi during the civil war. Mozambicans don’t talk about the civil war and I don’t ask, it was horrific and I’m not sure I want to know. I’ve heard about mine removal efforts, an urban legend about a one breasted woman who would seduce men from one side and then kill them, people talk about how they played guitar and chess to pass time. The Malawian talked about how traumatized everyone was; how some fell in love with Malawians, had kids but then left their kids and wives when the war ended; others stayed and there are Mozambican neighborhoods for those that decided to stay.

Cape Maclear-->Lilongwe-->Gabarone
Immigration called Julian to verify that he knew that at least one American girl was coming to stay at his house. I was just trying to get my passport stamped and the woman doubted that he existed and if he did she doubted he was even going to come to pick us up because I only had a phone number and not his house address handy. I am glad she was wrong, we had a really wonderful time with Julian’s family and were so thankful to have such a comfortable homey place, fantastic food (still have to get that recipe for the sweet potato bake) and good company over the holidays… though I’m not sure I could ever fully adjust to eating summer cold foods during Christmas.

Gabarone-->Maun
Maun is the jumping off spot for all the major safaris in Bots. A cute town with a pretty river, really nice people, saturated with alcohol, and filled with pilots hoping for work (one of the ways you can get hours as a commercial pilot is flying for tourist companies, a scenic flight was not in our budget but the pictures we saw of it did look nice). We did what we could afford while in Maun, this was not any of the lodges which were on average $300-$400 a day, not including your charter flight out to wherever the place was. We went camping on the delta in mokoros, did a safari though the game park, boated on the river, and played lots of bananagrams/cards/uno (even if it did make us look reportedly nerdy).
We were lucky on our mokoro trip on the Delta (three days, a few canoes, tents), most people don’t see much. I think our guides were good, but it could have been because we were with three athletic South African guys so perhaps the guides just tried to push us a bit more. We hiked for hours, passed other exhausted groups going back to their camps, but came up on zebras, giraffe, elephant, buffalo, crane, monkey, etc.… it was much more epic than the car safari, it’s just you and the grasslands and the animals, and as you walk you can quickly go from not seeing anything to coming upon a huge oasis of wildlife.
The south africans were far more prepared than we were, their canoe was like the Mary Poppins handbag, I’m not sure where all the stuff came from but their camp was palacial: tent with pourch and windows, large gas stove, beer and wine, fine foods, etc. Rebecca and I on the otherhand might have come off as hobos. Our tent was cozy (you guys will both fit in there with your stuff?.... we did), we ate soya mince (well we ate other things too, but certain items were indicative of PCV status), and the equipment that we rented for the trip was not quite what we expected: 10 spoons but no forks, 1 knife, no stove but one pot, 2 mugs… at least we had matches.

Maun-->Gabarone-->Maputo-->Home
Air Botswana’s computers were down, as they had been for every other flight we had had with them.
I’m glad to be in one place for a little bit. Phew.