Guynes Family Trip and our Mozambique Vacation

May Holiday Vacation 2010

Our May holiday began with Beth, Anthony, Josiah and Shaylah coming to visit. We had such a great time with them and cherished every minute! It was so good to connect with them and share our Peace Corps experience and life with them.

Burchells Zebra Butts

We we were lucky to spot this cheetah. What an amazing animal!

Should have gone to manual focus on this one but its still a great picture of lion.

Jackal looking quite stellar if I may say so. These jackals were scavenging off the lion kill

8 Foot Termite Mound

Not sure if the subject should be the clouds and grass or the giraffe

Big Sky in Etosha National Park

Lavender Breasted Roller (our favorite bird by far)

Black Shouldered Kite AKA Super hero Bird

(mostly because its piercing red eyes)

Etosha Sunset (Take your pick!)

On our way from Tsumeb to our house we stopped by the largest meteorite in the world. Yes that's right folks. We visited a humongous rock composed mostly of iron ore in the middle of the desert...for fun.

FALLING METEORITES!!!!!!

While we were staying at our house in Nkurenkuru we visited the homestead of one of Rachel's co-workers. Traditional Homesteads are beautiful and peaceful. At the end they gave us a chicken for our troubles. What a kind gesture!

Spiny Cucumber (grows wild in Namibia)

Traditional Kitchen at Mr. Sivera's Homestead

Fishing in the bush...Nkurenkuru style

While we didn't see rhino on our Etosha safari we also never go to see a Chameleon until we were leaving from the riverside and almost drove over one. It was difficult to rangle him onto a branch but he was great fun once we got him.

Shaylah and Caleb

(Shaylah and Josiah made us brightly colored oven mitts with this cool kids sewing kit)

On the last day at our house our friend Sikwale had to gather some newly born chicks for branding them. I happened to run into him and quickly got the kids to take part in the chase. It was a lot of fun trying to corner them and grab them. The kids said it was one of the favorite parts of their trip.

In order left to right Josiah, Caleb, Rachel, Shaylah

Our last night together at Joe's Beer House in Windhoek. We had tons of game meat including ostrich, kudu, oryx, zebra, crocodile and springbok...yum!!!!! Do yourself a favor and find a specialty shop selling ostrich fillets in the states, they are now our favorite kind of steak.

After they left, we embarked the same day to start our long drive to Mozambique for the second half of our vacation. We drove from the airport in Namibia through Botswana, South Africa and into southern Mozambique. This took two full days of driving over 12 hours a day! Driving through Botswana was particularly stressful as their cattle apparently live on the shoulders of the highways and seem to have no fear of cars but just cross the road at their leisure. Driving through South Africa we were pleasantly surprised to find a McDonalds in Pretoria!! I know, I know, McDonalds you say?? Well, if there were a Panara Bread, Togo’s, In N’ Out, Pick Up Sticks or any other American restaurant out here we would have been thrilled to go there…but McDonalds is all we got folks, so yes, we were pretty dang excited for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, French fries and coke from the fountain! One interesting note if you ever travel to South Africa – around here restaurants don’t give you anything for free or included in your meal like a bread basket or chips and salsa, and apparently free refills are completely unheard of! I went to the counter to ask for a refill on my coke (fountain drinks are also a rare delight for us!) and the lady looked at me like I was completely crazy and said “A refill?! No, we don’t do that.” I had to buy a whole new coke and fought my urge to tell the lady I was not crazy but in other places it is common to get unlimited free refills. After two long days of driving we finally got to the Mozambique border and the backpackers where we planned to stay that night was in Maputo, only about 100km away.

Overloaded enormous truck with whom we repeatedly played chicken on the roads

Mozambique Scenery

Mozambique Traditional Dwelling

As soon as we crossed into the border post of Mozambique we could tell we had entered a very different country. We were immediately swarmed by 5 guys all trying to “help” us with our paper work, telling us we needed to get the mandatory insurance which was sold from numerous offices that looked more like joints in a redlight district than places of business. They even posed as border officials and tried to take our paperwork out of our hands. Inside the customs office it was not any better. The men were still following us around insisting that they must help us with our paper work and the officials inside customs did nothing about these menaces. I hoped that this experience was not a foreshadowing of what our entire Mozambique trip would be like, but my gut told me it was. My gut was right. Driving into Maputo was like driving into TJ on steroids. There were thousands of people walking on streets filled with trash amongst shacks made into small bars and shops. We did not have good directions to get to our backpacker so we drove around for a long time trying to get oriented to the city and find someone that might be able to point us in the right direction. We had been warned about the corrupt police of Mozambique and got our own vivid taste of that within the first half hour of being in the city. Caleb was stopped by two policemen for making some sort of illegal turn. The police explained that he had made a “big mistake” and needed to pay a fine on the spot of $4000.00. Once they had his drivers license in hand that’s when the bribing began. Caleb asked for a ticket but these cops don’t even carry traffic tickets to issue, you simply have to pay them the cash at the scene. (Seems like the whole system is designed for corruption!) Luckily since we just got into the country we did not have any Mozambique currency. Caleb explained this to the police over and over again but they were still in disbelief and insisting that we must give them some cash. Finally I opened up our wallet and showed them all we had was $10 Namibian dollars and offered that to them. They laughed at this as Namibian currency is useless in Mozambique. They still had Caleb’s license at this point so in desperation Caleb offered to give them the only items we had to offer – bananas and a small pack of trail mix. Seeing that they really were not going to get any cash out of us they accepted the food and finally let us go. This was the first of 6 police stops we encountered within the first 24 hours in the country. The cops always insisted on a bribe and even fabricated our “big mistakes” to threaten us. Wonderful:)

The next day we promptly left Maputo as fast as possible instead of staying a day like we had planned. The roads to the first main coastal town were great but between Xia Xia and Tofo the road was HORRIBLE!!! This was very stressful driving on these roads. The road was mostly made of potholes and we could only drive 30 mph for long stretches. In addition to ever present possibility of ruining the undercarriage of the car we had to deal with oncoming traffic mostly composed of semis and large trucks or crazy bus drivers. In many parts it was a one lane road and you had to swerve off the road into the “shoulder” to avoid a head on collision. A friend of ours who we ended up meeting in Vilanculos told us that just 5 years ago trees were growing out of the potholes because the roads were so unused during their 20 year civil war. Despite these things Mozambique seems to be a people who are really trying to make it and improve their lives. We were impressed by the vitality of the people, despite the annoying street peddlers that make getting out of your car a chore.

The road between Xia Xia and Tofo

Imagine to whole road being spotted with duzzies like this one

(if you look carefully there are at least two others directly down the road from this one)

So now on to the beautiful scenery. Mozambique has incredible jungle like landscape. Though there is no real canopy everything is verdant and lush with palm trees everywhere. If there were ever a country where you could OD on coconuts Mozambique would be in the running. We would pass piles of piles of used coconut husks ready to be burned, and an equal number of huge piles of just coconut that had already been husked. There were not a lot of animals in the road like in Namibia or Botswana but there were a ton of people on the road, seemingly unafraid of the cars going past at highway speeds. The beaches of Tofo were wonderful with long stretches of untouched coastline and beautiful sparkling blue waves. While Rachel was shopping in the market for a bag (I Caleb was pretty much done with shopping in open markets at this point because of the constant hasseling) I was sitting on a bench in the sand watching a people play soccer with waves crashing just feet from their game. As I sat little boys came up and tried to sell me stuff, only after they had finished fighting over a trashed piece of Styrofoam. One of them came up to me and started speaking in Afrikaans. I told him I don’t speak Afrikaans in my best attempt at the language. He then proceeded to started screaming a song in Afrikaans at full volume about 6 inches from my ear. As wonderful as this cultural experience was I told him if he didn’t stop I would get the cops who were sitting a few feet from us. Once I said that he took off without a word for fear of their retribution. I guess the policia criminales can come in handy after all, though corrupt to the core.

While in Tofo we had wonderful food like ½ chicken and coconut rice, prawns and rice or calamari and rice. Lots of rice but all the food was really good. It was even better when we figured out you can get the same food from the hole in the wall place selling for 150 meticals as the restaurant selling it for 280 meticals.

After Tofo we traveled to another coastal city called Vilanculos. Here the town was much bigger and we stayed at a place called Baobab Beach Backpackers. After settling in we spent the afternoon perusing places that offered snorkeling trips to the islands off the coast. We decided to go with Dolphin Dhows after they offered a deal for 1600 meticais ($50 US) with a free nights stay at their place. This was unbeatable though the guy that sold it to us we quickly renamed “Slick” because of how much of a pure salesman he was. The next day we went snorkeling which was the highlight of our Mozambique trip outside of the scenery. We swam around for hours with beautiful, brightly colored and bizarre looking fish for a couple hours in the morning and afternoon. We had a wonderful lunch of seafood and fruit, sitting on the sand of this beautiful tropical island. On our way back home we sailed instead of using the motor for a quaint and calming experience. This made us think that sailing would be a wonderful hobby because of how peaceful it is.

Low Tide at Vilanculos

Hermit crab during low tide at Vilanculos

This is a picture of our boat and the island we snorkeling off of

Sparkling azure sea

Traditional sailing dhow of Mozambique (pronounced dow)

After snorkeling that night the owner of the place made us a beautiful lobster dinner (well two lobsters really) with rice and salad. We also bought some coconuts to mix a fruity drink made of all fresh juices in the local homebrewed rum called Tipo Tinto.

The view from our room at Dolphin Dhow...priceless when you wake up to the ocean breeze and this view, not to mention the fact the room was comped:)

On our ride home we saw a very peculiar truck with an animal on the back. Look at this picture and see if you can identify what animal is on the roof of this bus and where it is.

Did you find it....its a goat!!!

In summary highlights of the trip were:

1) Seeing beautiful countryside of Mozambique

2) Having fresh prawns numerous times

3) Snorkeling on Bazaruto Islands

4) Buying freshly roasted cashews from people on the side of the road

5) Spending time with one another

Dimlights of the trip:

-1) Corrupt Cops

-2) Bad Roads

-3) Annoying tourist peddlers

-4) Expensive accommodation and food

Interesting facts:

-We were pulled over by police in every country we traveled in

-We were asked for bribes 4 times

-We didn’t pay any money to any country for the road violations

-We illegally reentered because we didn’t have enough money for the road permit (well we thought we did but in actuality it turns out our car already had a Namibian road permit so it was good that we didn’t pay that fee when we didn’t have to in the first place)

-Mozambique market vendors do not barter for price like Namibians will

-When dealing with police in southern Africa not having money on you is a plus:)