Mozambique - the good, the bad, and the ugly would be a suitable description of the country and our experience.
Let's start with the good, which was not only good but very good if not brilliant. South Africa surprised us with its beauty on land, Mozambique dazzled us with its richness of life on the coastline and particularly under water! Unfortunately, a cyclone with lots of wind and some rain passed across the Eastern coast of Africa and hit Mozambique just that week. Still, we had a lot of of sunshine every day, 28C. degrees above water and about the same in the water. The strong winds kept the aggressive mosquitos away, but as Mozambique is a high risk malaria area, we decided to take our tablets (Malerone) nonetheless and were pleasently surprised about the little side effects. Bad luck for us, that the strong winds also kept the the gigantic and graceful whale sharks and manta rays away; our main reason for coming here. The plan was to hop on a boat and jump in the water and swim with them, but they had other plans. Instead I went surfing, which was great fun because of the fine swell, and we went snorkelling. In Mozambique, you can stick your head underwater practically anywhere, and you are guaranteed to be greeted by an amazing variety of fish and other creatures in hundreds of different colours, shapes, and sizes. As you can imagine, we spent a lot of time at the local reefs just a few meters off the beach.
We also enjoyed the lush and green countryside that reminded us a little of Vietnam or Thailand. Large rice fields, mangroves, grassland and palm trees thanks to the warm and very humid climate. And yet another step deeper into the real Africa. Mozambique has very little touristic influence, mainly because the infrastructure and the whole lifle is basic and simple. One has to be prepared to live without a lot of things that we would normally count on as part of our daily lifes. Food is very limited in variety, you eat what the farmers grow in small quantities in their back yard and then sell along the street - of course at "special" prices, meaning we paid twice as much as the locals and we had to negotiate hard for every Meticas (Mosambique money). Mainly tomatos, potatos, onions, avocado, garlic, pineapple, lemons, coconut and that is it. But all of it super fresh, organic, no pesticides, really good. No super markets at all, only little shacks selling a handful of things from toothpaste to sugar. At 8 o clock in the morning the fishermen go out in their small two-man rowing boats, and come back at lunchtime, selling their daily catch fresh off the boat. Lobster, giant prawns, barracuda, squid, lemon fish, rock cod, red snapper, oysters. A fish lovers paradise! Our meals were easy - lots of tomato (my favourite) with lots of avocado (Nicole's favourite) and fish. Life was simple but happy for us, and after a few days we did not miss the daily Starbucks coffee or London Times newspaper anymore at all.
Now for the bad and ugly. Essentially Mozambique is still a poor country with a history of 30 years of brutal civil war. We spoke to a lot of local youngsts and most children dont have money for the school and cannot find work later in life. That leads to high crime in certain areas, and even the South African travellers, who have problems in their own country, stopped going on holidays to Mozambique because it appears to get more violent. And it is also very expensive, almost European prices. We actually had a lovely time and felt relatively safe, until our last evening, it was 5pm and just at sunset, when a completely distrought and tearful girl came running to us. She had just been the victim of a horrific sexual crime and was crying out for help. Nicole looked after her, I sprinted to the police... and they looked completely uninteressted and did not move, it took them more than 20minutes to finally send someone 50meters down to the beach! Terrible! Unfortunately, we left Mozambique with very mixed feelings.
But here are photos of our happy days in "Mozzie"bique
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