Ilha de Mozambique is a vortex
Posted By Sika on 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 early than usual*, and so I tried to wake up to catch it. Even when it took me too long to actually get my butt out of bed, the early morning hours were magical. The sunrises, even when not terribly bright or beautiful, warmed up the island with gorgeous, cozy light. Life is completely different in the just-barely-post-dawn light.
Women scraped the paving-stoned road free of moss and other marring substances. Silhouettes of people bent over in the low-tide flats provided minutes of entertainment: a puzzle of possible activities.
I returned to the room for a cat nap (can you really call it a nap when, after it, you still wake up before 8?), or to do some yoga, or to pretend I was going to do yoga and take a nap instead, and then it’d be time to take a walk or a dhow trip or pretend the internet will be opened, staffed, not full, and working. After the busy morning, it’s time for homemade cashew ice cream (well, until the fourth or fifth day, when I apparently had eaten it all), another walk around
the island (circumnavigation took less than an hour, although I would often do half the island in the morning and the other half in the evening), or reading or journaling through the midday heat.
Another walk around the island, a shower while the sun’s heat was still held in the unheated shower-water, and dinner at one of the four restaurants in town, batting at mosquitoes, refusing offers of DEET for no known reason, ripping the heads off shrimp, and debating whether to feed the scavenging cats that populated any outdoor eating space.
I’d return to the room, read a bit, make some plans, and write in my journal until I began to fall asleep, the pen leaving odd-sized blotches on the paper and increasingly erratic and sloppy writing, some of it completely illegible. I’d turn off the light (usually), and drop off to a deep, sea-scented sleep.
I’d wake up in the morning refreshed but eased into laziness by the rhythm of the sea, ready to start it all again, failing to find the urge to leave.
*Mozambique is all in one time zone, and the country took its time zone direction from the districts to the east, so the sun rises and sets about an hour earlier once you get out to the coast.*
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