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 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 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 [...]
Sika | September 30, 2009
In knitting we say, “It’s only sticks and string” to indicate to newbies that it’s all manageable. Well sailing a dhow only uses sticks and strings, too, but it’s far more impressive. Out on a dhow, watching how it is manoeuvred, I couldn’t help but think that my grandpa would love to see how it [...]
Sika | September 15, 2009
The train was meant to leave at 5am, and so I had to wake at O’Dark-thirty. I pulled on my traveling clothes (because what’s the point of dirtying new clothes every day when all you’re going to do is sit and sweat and then have dirt and grime stick to the sweat?). My jeans—chosen as [...]
Sika | September 14, 2009
After that was another, longer, hotter bike taxi ride up several hills, with a surprisingly wide lane considering the nearly complete dearth of motorized traffic. The lane was unsealed but in most places pretty smooth, and lined with trees, although the shade they gave was more theoretical than actual. The bike taxi dropped me at [...]
