Ibo

Ibo's an enchanted place. Everyone I spoke to said that; they made it sound like Zanzibar after Zanzibar had been discovered by the Arabs and had become the Spice Island, but before it got discovered by Thomas Cook and 1Time airline and became the Package Tour Island.

I think I wasn't there long enough to be enchanted. Its a small island surrounded by blue water with mangrove swamps on the horizon towards the mainland, and has a half-decayed half-restored town with a lazy feel to it. An 18th century fortress dominates one side of the town, dazzling in its just-restored whiteness and housing a collection of artisans and silversmiths hamering away at the metal while crouching on the floor. In the heart of the town is the "Central Electrica", but there is no electricty and no bank.

David and I stayed at the Miti Miwire (two trees) hostel which has a beautiful garden complete with lie-down swings and rabbits, and my best memories of the island were from the long, slow conversations with Elder and Joerg, the French-German ex-backpacker pair who ran it. Our first night there was Eid, the celebration of the end of Ramadan, and I went with them to a dance club, where young people were dirty dancing to slow music and then boogying to club stuff I was a little more familiar with.

The cliche is that the path is the destination, and getting to the island and back from it were the real enchantment, in different ways. Getting there was with a diving dhow safari: a South African outfit Findemundo Safaris which is based there were returning from Pemba, so the trip had about 30 hours on the water, including a couple of dives, dolphins, pods of humpback whales smacking their tails onto the water surface.

The trip back to Pemba was much shorter but beautiful in a different way: an island-hopping flight with a Cessna Caravan which provided views of the archipelago from the air. Some of the islands (like Mejumbe) are private, little larger than an air strip and a desalination plant, and have lodges of the $500+ per night category on them.

Trip on the Onion Truck

Getting back from Ilha de Mozambique to Pemba turned into a 13 hour adventure. It started at 5:30 in the morning, when I got onto a truck which about 5 other people and drove across the bridge at a good clip with the wind in my hair and the thought that this was one of those backbacker experiences. It became one of those other backpacker experiences when they made me change truck half way to the junction town of Namialo onto a vehicle which just couldn't say no to loading extra passengers ... and just when you thought it couldn't get worse and it encountered 3 people carrying large containers (of fuel) enroute? No problem, climb on board.

Then I got stuck in the small town of Namialo, together with a mixed group of other backpackers from France, Germany and Portugal. While I was there, I took these pictures of street vendors:

 The first vehicle going up to Pemba turned out to be a giant truck with a heavy load of onions. One of the other backpackers, Michael from Ulm, agreed to go with; as we were talking a luxury 4x4 pulled in and gave all the others a lift. So Michael and I set off on the onion truck, which broke down for the first of many times about 2km north of the town.

Turns of sprawling on a canvas over a tonne of onions is one of the most comfortable travel experiences you can have in Mozambique, and its also a great opportunity to take photos of the spectacular scenery (just add a lot of sun creme).

But the truck did stall or break down continuously. Each time, the driver seemed to choose an incline to stall on, and then we got to push the truck - and the onions - up the hill to get it going again. The truck broke down one final time at the end of the day, more seriously - they opened up the engine, and I was thinking I'd be spending the night on the side of the road. But one of those African mechanical operations happened, and after about an hour and a lot of pushing we were back on the road and drove through the darkness, reaching Pemba at about 7pm after 13 hours on the road.

Ilha de Mozambique

The Ilha de Mozambique was the capital until the 19th century. Its a surreal mixture of old palaces, fortresses, cinemas, mosques, ruins and compact houses surrounded by a sweep of brilliant blue water.

I slept here in Casa Luis, a private house where I put up my tent in the courtyard. It was close to a giant green mosque, and it was towards the end of Ramadan, so I got woken a lot.

Its a good place to just hang out - I took a dhow out with some Spanish girls to Goa Island which has a fabulous beach, hang out in a roof top bar, and took a bunch of photographs early in the morning.

Mozambiquan Election

That there was an election going on in Mozambique was something that was clear after my first 10 minutes in the country. The vote is happening on October 28th, but already both Frelimo (the ruling party) and Renamo (the conservative party which was set up by the Rhodesian Government and funded South Africa in the 1980's) are having large, colourful marches through the streets. Posters and stickers are everywhere. I was apprehensive about taking too many photos of them, but here are a couple from a Renamo parade entering the Ilha de Mozambique on the 16th of December.

From what I could see, Frelimo was much better represented.

Travelling to Mozambique: Pemba

I wanted to make a short trip in Southern Africa before leaving - my original trip to Botswana with Julia had to be cancelled, and the thought of going there by myself wasn't really attractive. So I thought I'd do something with a bicycle (my farewell trip with my beloved but now also aged Marin Bear Valley), a trip for which I could also avoid flying.

This plan was turned on its head in stages. Firstly, the plan not to fly would have - at least in Northern Mozambique - have involved 5 days of hard bus travel with the bike in each direction - and I only had 10 days. So I compromised: I'd fly, but I'd have the bike trip on the other side.

Enter SAA, in the guise of Airlink, and now way down there as my least favourite South African company. The fact that I'd recently sued them over stolen luggage should have warned me, but when you're flying to Mozambique, the choices are limited. The interaction with them went like this:
Me (on phone): can I take my bike with me as sports luggage
Airlink: oh yes, of course
Me (on phone a couple of days later): can I confirm that I can take my bike as sports equipment?
Airlink: yes sir! Of course!
Airlink (at airport): Of course you can take the bike with you! But we count it as normal lugage, so it will cost R1400 (US$200) excess in each diretion. Double the price of your ticket! And no, you can't cancel your ticket now...
Me (silently): fuckin' SAA.
It wasn't the last time I'd think this. So I end up flying, and sans bike, into a radically different plan. But it was still fun.

Pemba from the air as the plane curved down to land was dhows on the brilliant blue water of the bay and sprawling areas of densley packed huts with grass and leaf rooves, pockmarked by giant baobabs.

The town was large (almost 250 000 people in the greater area, I heard), and I spent a couple of days adapting to Mozambique in it, trying to get a dive in (and failing) and hanging out on the beach, something which I'm miserably bad at.

I stayed at a place called Russels, which has a lot of original local art work in it (Russel used to be a dealer) and was a great hang-out apart from the damned MTV blastig from a giant plasma TV.

Then on Monday, I got up at 3am to catch a 4:30am bus to Ilha de Mozambique. It had been a while since I had travelled in the 3rd World, and I'd forgotten so much: the hawkers with live chickens held upside down and cokes thrust through the bus window, the undersized seats and the heat and the dust. But the bus (and then a lift in a 4x4) got me to Pemba by 3pm.

East to the West Coast

I looked at around the world tickets, but the round-half-the-world tickets are only offered by the one world alliance and they don't do the Joburg-Perth hop which I wanted. So I'm doing individual bookings.