1 September 2009: Maputo

| May 28, 2010

Heading into the last little bit of my Mozambique trip and facing the arrival of my mom, which heralded the beginning of the end of my time in Africa, I felt . . .just. . . strange. Not super excited, not super sad, just like the whole idea was unreal and really I was playing [...]

31 August 2009: Travel to Maputo

| May 28, 2010

By the time I got to Maputo, my asthma was all cleared up, and besides a bit of a stuffy nose, I was feeling all better. I immediately treated myself to incredibly nummy (if pricey) Thai food. Well, after getting a hotel room (Mt1250, WTF, mate?). In the hotel room, I noticed that I looked [...]

30 August 2009: Inhambane

| May 27, 2010

I was feeling better, but still sick, and so I refused to accept my wake up time of 6am and puttered around (pretending I was going to do yoga) and then took a nap. John arrived while I was adjusting the toe loop on my damn stubborn left Chaco, and so I finally had someone [...]

29 August 2009: Traveling Again

| May 26, 2010

Woke up in the morning feeling like blech warmed up into more, ickier, concentrated blech. Blech in my head, blech in my sinuses, blech in my throat, blech in my stomach. And yet, I had to get to Inhambane, or I might as well go straight through: my days left in Moz were numbered. I [...]

Dhow Safari

| May 24, 2010

We went to Dolphin Dhow, and luckily they had a group of four American guys, all laid off from a sinking Washington Mutual, already going out the next day for an overnight trip. I decided to go along first, and then John decided to go, as well. There’s some really nice snorkeling to be had [...]

26 August 2009

| May 21, 2010

We got off the bus at the Vilankulo turn off of the EN1. We caught a chapa, for which perhaps we were overcharged due to a confusion about the difference between 15 and 50, although it left immediately and didn’t wait to fill, so perhaps not. Once we got into town, we noted that there [...]

25 August 2009

| May 19, 2010

TCO (Transportes Carlos Oliveira) is a bus company whose office is housed through an unmarked door, down a hall, and through another unmarked door of in the back of a petrol station nearish to the LAM offices. The offices were unassuming and cubicle-like, in a wall-less sort of way , and created a sense that [...]

Leaving Ilha

| May 17, 2010

Part of my reluctance to leave Ilha was the sheer work involved in traveling in Mozambique. It’s really not that bad, as far as traveling in Africa goes, but the distances are long, and I was spoiled by the fact that my two most common trips in Malawi were one and a half(ish) or four(ish) [...]

Meeting Kids in Ilha

| May 5, 2010

I didn’t find many people to talk to in my wandering. John, over and over again, as accidentally we ate together at least once a day, and some Peace Corps Volunteers at one point (also, the French couple that had upped the azungu quotient of our minibus too much on the way over, but with [...]

Ilha de Mozambique is a vortex

| May 4, 2010

I’m still not quite sure how I spent so much time in Ilha de Mozambique. Each day passes slowly and quickly at the same time. Days start to take on a gauzy, amorphous quality, ebbing and flowing with the tide. It seemed a shame to miss the sunrise, even though it occurred even more horribly [...]