Backpacking North Through Mozambique

Published by Johnny on August 26, 2010

Having now been in this crazy continent for a few months I can say that Mozambique is Africa with a safety net. It’s awesome of course but there’s certainly a distinct tourist trail as you move north from one beach town to the next. Having said that, the food is amazing, the Indian ocean is warm, the beaches are long and the people are very friendly so perhaps that safety net is no bad thing

From Maputo I’d say the main route (if you’re not heading into the sparse north-east) is to head to Xie-Xie then off to Tofo (cool beach town – loads of tourists), then to Vilanculos (even cooler beach town and much fewer tourists). From there then on to Chimoio (horrible transit town), onto Tete (even more horrible transit town) and then onwards towards the Malawian border.

Mozambique is a great bridge to Africa as you discard your western wants. Maybe you have come from South Africa by land, like me, or flown straight from Europe or North America – Mozambique is the perfect place to land =) Enough other tourists around so you don’t get hit too hard with culture shock but a few minutes wandering down another former Portuguese street and it’s like the Africa you imagined 3 months ago when you were planning your trip.

Geographically alone, it’s a wondrous place. The whole country stretches up the east coast of Africa, allowing itself endless beaches littered with scubadiving centres, water skiing opportunities and a whole host of other water sports. The food naturally focuses around what can be garnered from the sea, and what a feast it promises to be:

Generally the deal is – go to the local market and buy what you want to eat later (normally for a full-on seafood FEAST it’s about $3 per person). Bring it to a local eatery, by local I tend to mean disgusting cheap and probably horrible unhygienic yet what it lacks in basic sanitation and cutlery it makes up in personality and atmosphere! Here is the place we found, note the cardboard box menu:

I wish I was back there eating that! At the risk of sounding uncouth, Africa’s food isn’t exactly michelin starred so when u get an opportunity to gorge on this delicious grub in Mozambique, do it, savour it and do it again!

So Vilanculos was probably the highlight of my time in Mozambique, partly because I stayed at a place called Complexo Muha, run by a guy called Muhammed. To cut a long story short my friend and I were the only people staying at this local-ran place, we stayed for a fair few days and ended up becoming quite good friends with Muhammed. He seemed to take on our advice about renaming his place, remarketing his place, repricing his place, redoing his menu so when we returned from an afternoon on our last day there he had made some wholesale changes to his entire complex! Massive new signs, new pricing structure , new food options all off the back of our advice =) I can only hope it has proved successful for the man. Naturally should any of you guys end up in Vilanculos please pay him a visit, you won’t regret it.

The safety net I described earlier doesn’t extend itself to the transport however! You will be crammed into buses (only big enough for an average family) alongside 26 other Mozambicans who seem surprisingly unperturbed by the whole lack of personal space thing! A tru backpacking adventure in Africa isn’t complete until you’ve had a few sweaty bodies perilously close to your face – and you’ll have this on regular occasions!

Just before I sign off mozambique and have a chat about Malawi I think it’s only appropriate to whack in a few of the beautiful beach shots that you can’t avoid if you spend anytime here – awesome country, awesome people, awesome food, awesome flag (have u seen the AK47 on the flag?!), awesome beaches:

Tags: Backpacking, long term travel, Mozambique

Backpacking in Mozambique – My time in Maputo

Published by Johnny on August 21, 2010

Maputo Maputo Maputo – cracking city! We arrived after an arduous journey from Swaziland crammed into a minibus with 20 Africans across a road bumpier than anything I had ever come across. I had traveled into the country with 2 Candian chicks I had met, over a less than delicious $5 box of South African rose wine, in Mbabane (Swaziland) and they had already booked themselves into a $100 a night hotel across the Maputo bay in an area called Catembe. When we pulled up into Maputo city centre the girls (in my skewed opinion) clearly wanted us to escort them to their hotel, which he gladly did.

On the ferry we jumped to cross the bay, grabbed a beer en route and sailed across towards their hotel. We disembarked, made less than 200 metres progress until we met a guy called ‘Trouble’, he looked, walked and talked like a gangster but a nicer guy you’ll struggle to find. We walked the 200 metres and stopped by a shack at the dock ran by a old rasta lady know as ‘Mama Marley’ and what a cool ladt she was. Trouble, Adrian, Mama Marley and the 2 Candian chicks (Rachelle and Melissa) proceeded to polish off a fair few Lorintinas until 8pm became midnight, the girls had failed in their attempts to offer us room and board and we were, in all honesty, pretty drunk by Maputo dock with nowhere orgainsed to sleep that night and our bags perched by the shack :S Luckily enough, Mama Marley took pity on us and we stayed at her place – Queue the scene of me walzing into this local ‘house’ with a 50 year old rasta woman by our side singing “don’t worry… about a thing… ‘cos every little thing’s gonna be alrite’!! And you know what – I think Bob might have just got that right =)

Day 2 was equally as unpredictable – ah the beauty of travel. So Mama Marley’s place had no running water (naturally) and the awesome Canadian girls came up trumps and sent their personal driver (Jorge) from their swanky hotel to pick us up from Mama Marleys that morning. Apparently she’s somewhat of a local eccentric celeb. Jorge obliged and before we knew it we were showering both in the glory (and hot water) of the girls’ 5* hotel!

We spent a day wandering around the beautiful city of Maputo, eating copious amounts of prawns and other seafood for dirt-cheap prices and soaked up the old Portuguese flavour that permeated from every old building. Nighttime soon arrived and again we had organized nowhere to stay (some people never learn) but a few cheap beers put paid to our concerns and before we knew it we had 4 people rammed into the back of a single tuk-tuk against the drivers initial wishes but a 50 cent bribe soon persuaded him otherwise and off we went…:

with Shakira’s Waka Waka blasting out of the the driver’s makeshift stereo on 10000 decibels we weren’t the most inconspicuous traffic on the road but we made it in one peace without any police involvement and before we could say ‘free accommodation’ we were in the girls’ posh hotel’s hottub with 4 bottles of cheap wine

A few hours later we were awoken by the girls in their hotel room, apparently a few of the guests had complained of raucous, rowdy behaviour and the room (with ALL its’ inhabitants) had been fined $50 – we paid up and made a sheepish escape, eagerly trying to avoid any other guests or staff members :S Not a good impression!

3^rd and final night in Maputo didn’t get any less crazy, well maybe a little. We wanted to catch an early bus to Tofo the next day at silly o’clock so we tried to find a youth hostel in the city centre – full, full, full – no room at the inn. So we ended up having to rent out the penthouse (a 3 room suite) of a hotel straight from the 1940’s for the grand total of $40 for the night. The night was spent and the alarm went off at 4.00am (whoever said traveling was an extended holiday was most definitely wrong) and before we knew we were off to Tofo, naturally a couple of hours late though – Mozambique is cool but it’s still Africa when it comes to timetables

Tags: Backpacking, cheap travel, malawi, Mozambique

Backpacking in South Africa – Johannesburg, Soweto Township

Published by Johnny on August 03, 2010

I should probably nail my colours to the mast and say first up, I’m not Johannesburg’s biggest fan. That’s not to say, however, that I don’t recommend visiting – just don’t stay too long!

It’s expensive and we all know its less than salubrious reputation in respect to safety! If and when you do go however, a trip to the countries largest township, Soweto, should be high on your agenda. I spent most of a day there, with the highlight being a smaller suburb within Soweto called Kliptown and it was certainly an eye-opener. The squalor in which the South African Government ‘allows’ so many of its citizens to live in is quite alarming and considering this is in a country which likes to be considered ‘first-world’ I find it doesn’t quite sit to well with me.

Traveling isn’t all about drinking buckets of whisky and red-bull on the beach, or finding a cheap happy hour in Manhattan – and that’s what I truly love about it. The end of the apartheid in SA was certainly hastened by the people of Soweto (with a special mention to the students who defiantly stood up against the sweeping changes to their education system and many were killed in the process). But it seems that while lots of Soweto has moved on since then, there’s plenty of it still in absolute poverty with a distinct lack of education and health care. *While I was there I saw an angry mob storm past me, on questioning everyone as to what was going on, apparently where we had parked, a guy had been stabbed in the neck and died a couple of days previously and the mob had just discovered where he was being kept so they were off to fetch him and were planning to beat him to death :S

I don’t want to paint a negative picture of Soweto however – the people here are some of the nicest I have ever run into (and I guess the mob were merely governing their own land, in lieu of an effective police service) and are more than accommodating to people coming in and looking around so go ahead and see for yourself, I’m sure you’ll find the same hospitality as I did. Soweto also houses the only street in the whole to have hosted two Nobel Peace Prize winners in Nelson Mandela and Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu – now that is impressive! You can see their house – literally 20 metres from each other!

Soweto is a great way to spend a day – just go with an open mind.

Also, if you have time there’s a great museum dedicated to the Apartheid – it’s massive though so give yourself time to explore the whole thing, it gives real insights into South Africa’s chequered past. Even if you’re not a museum person, this place is still awesome.