Sika | June 7, 2010
Back in Zomba. Yay! The day was longer than expected. First of all, in Tete, Mercado de UAO was nowhere near Rua de UAO, which took me forever to figure out. And, when giving directions, multiple people in Tete did this annoyingly vague hand gesture—generally in a diagonal direction from where I was at any [...]
Sika | June 7, 2010
At the airport, waiting for the flight to Tete, my ticket said the flight’s at 11. The electronic sign when I came in said the flight was at 11 and on time. But when I got to check-in there’s no sign for Tete check in. I ask and am told check in starts at 10:45. [...]
Sika | June 7, 2010
I had to get more pages put in my passport. After over two years of traveling all over the freaking place, my passport only had a couple blank pages left. It was sort of frustrating: I liked the symmetry of filling my passport at the end of my service*, but I knew I was, at [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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) [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | 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 [...]
Sika | January 25, 2010
17 August Javier, Beatrix (the Spanish students), and I ended up not going to an island because while I was busy trying out the homemade ice cream (mmm, cashew) and running into John in random places, (like ya do in a tiny town), they had been out bargaining and comparing deals and that kind of [...]
Sika | January 23, 2010
I walked from the hotel in Nampula, in search of the minibus going to Ilha de Mozambique. This was made difficult by the minibus stand being in a completely different place than what my map said, and necessitated stopping to ask some construction guys (not actually doing any construction) for instructions. When I got to [...]
