Bye-bye Mozambique!

Hello blogosphere, did you miss me at all? Whew – what a holiday. I can’t think how it could have in any way been improved upon (other than being a longer holiday of course). We did Maputo, Coconut Bay, Vilankulo (along with 2 islands, Margaruque and Bazaruto) and Ponta da Barra, in 2 Land Rovers (Fat Lizzie and the Blue Bunny, or Team A and Team B as our Landie rechristened them), with 5 Saffa’s (the usual: rude, crass, cocky) and 3 Kanooks a.k.a. Canadians (friendly, polite, obliging).

To summarise, a list of the low- and highlights of the trip:

1. Horas. Directly translated from Portuguese, this innocent word means nothing more than ‘hours’. But juvenility dictated that this word be used to mean ‘whores’, so it was with immense glee that we frequently saw ’24 horas’, ‘super horas’ and ‘ultima horas’ signs plastered all over the shopfronts of little stores in every town. Of course, on a night excursion to a popular pub/dance club/strip club street in Maputo, we saw real horas aplenty – they groped the men’s crotches unashamedly and expectantly joined them at the bar, demanding drinks be bought for them. Every venue we went into had mirrors plastered on every possible surface, which the locals danced in front of in hypnotic reverie. And the strip club we went to had a full-on naked lap dance on the stage – I think that more than sufficiently covers the Gilb’s strip club allowance for life!

2. Corrupt cops (oink piggy piggy!) I offered to drive the Landie on a particularly potholed stretch of road, and was duly rewarded by being pulled over for ‘speeding’ by a cop who claimed I was going 71km/h in a 60kmh zone. “No bloody way I was!” I screeched, “the reason I know I was definitely going under 60 was because all the oncoming cars were flashing me to warn me you were ahead!” Realising that I wasn’t about to give in as easily as he’d imagined, he made me leave a friend (and my driver’s licence) with him, drive back up the road and come back to him so he could re-measure my speed and prove his equipment wasn’t faulty. I was so nervous carrying out this ridiculous task that I stalled twice while turning around to come back to him, and when I returned, he showed me the new speed the meter had recorded, which was not far off being accurate. I persisted in my protests, and he grew tired of his game, so he released me, my friend and my driver’s licence, telling my friend “Wow! Your friend is a very argumentative woman!” Suck on that, piggies!

3. Cerebos (‘see how it runs’). Our codename for diarrhoea, which we experienced aplenty. ‘nuff said.

4. Stickiness. If it wasn’t sweat from the 30-plus degree temperatures, then it was sunblock, Tabard or sea water. I’ve never showered so much in my life!

5. Speaking to the locals in Portuguese. I borrowed a friend’s ‘Learn (Brazilian) Portguese in 60 Days’ book, and we had great fun stringing conversations together from the bizarre sentences it chose to teach us. We managed to wangle some of these sentences into our conversations with Mozambicans, much to their bewilderment. Here’s a sample conversation:

Perigo! Ele siaou sem pecheu!
A escola este aberta? Diga-me a verdade!
Onde este cervao e lenha per fogo?
Por favour, camarao e lulas e peixe e pao e batatas frites! Obrigado!
Levar isto ixo!

This useful banter translates to:

Danger! He left without his hat!
Is the school open? Tell me the truth!
Where is charcoal and wood for fire?
Prawns and calamari and fish and bread and French fries please! Thanks!
Carry this rubbish!

Interestingly, we noticed that all the advertising billboards are in Portuguese – none in the local African languages spoken in Mozambique.

6. The cheap local beer – Laurentina and 2M (no idea how to spell it but presumably ‘Dois M’ meaning 2 m’s in Portuguese). We found cheap shops/stalls selling cases of the stuff, and returned to these on an almost daily basis to buy 3 more crates each time. I have developed a mini beer boep, which will hopefully vanish in the next few weeks. I also bought a 5 lt bottle of imported Portuguese ‘table wine’ which the Kanooks tucked into too eagerly one evening, only to discover its malignant after effects the following morning – suffice to say I had to finish the bottle myself over the course of the next few evenings.

7. Fish fish fish! (actually, peixe, peixe, peixe!) During our 5-day Ponta da Barra stay, enterprising locals correctly guessed we’d want to eat seafood, and so caught the things in the morning and brought them to us to haggle suitable prices for. We got barracuda (4kg), prawns, crayfish, calamari fresh each morning (of course, our haggling down the prices had little effect – the bastards still managed to shnaai us each time on the weight of the fish by using inaccurate scales, hiding ice between the fish in the bags etc etc).

8. Local art. Somehow, you never buy as much in your own country as you do in others, but heck, I like to think I’m doing my bit for the SADC by supporting the Mozambican economy. I bought tons of bangles, batiks, an oil painting, and two beautiful yet infernally delicate long, thin wooden bird sculptures that we had to go to great effort to pack safely every time we loaded and drove the Landie.

9. Suntan! Being the freak Italian that I am, my complexion more closely resembles an ‘English rose’ than an olive-skinned Mediterranean. Except at the moment, because I’ve managed to pick up a remarkable tan – it’s miniskirts and strappy tops all the way until it disappears!

10. Muffled sex. And plenty of it. Because our accommodation never allowed for the Gilb and I to be very casual about it, we had to be sneaky and quiet – unfortunately the furniture usually wasn’t as obliging!


And that was that. I’ll put up a picture or two as soon as I’ve had a chance to look through them and pick out the goodies.

For now though, it’s back to the daily slog in the office. Sigh! And happy Monday to all of you!