Zebrafish

August 22

Mocambique

Wimbe beach in Pemba has long long palm fringed white sand beaches, cyan coloured water in a surf protected bay and some of the best coral reefs in the world. I stayed here at the laid back Russel's camp. Although most of my time here I spent wandering back and forward to the Pemba Dive shop on the beach. Huge lobster and chips in Pemba costs $3.
http://www.pembamagic.com

I dived here 5 times with Brenda, two geologist proffessors from JoBurg and a teacher from Galicia. It's literally a coral garden here. Flimsy paper fish in cave openings, sea cucumber snakes, a playful lion fish, a giant lobster that tickled Brenda's ears with it's tentacles and 2 rarely seen large octopus with tentacles as thick as my arms. I had to balance upside down controlling my breathing just above the coral so as to get a good look at them under a coral crevice. Highly camoflaged crocodile fish, bloated porcupine fish, cuttlefish, an old coral covered ship's anchor we found and delicate harlequin shrimps.

I also did my first night sea dive here with good moonlit visibility. We switched off our lights near the end and each of us shook our arms and legs in midwater to spark of phospherscent algae. The last dive was a locally famous site known as 'the gap'. Here we dived down to 30m and off a bottomless wall chumming with fish schools. We had a brief look in a cave then dived diagonally down through a 6m tunnel of black coral to 36m. From here we descended down to 48m keeping above decompression limits to have a brief look at very special orange fan coral about 2-3m in size. This was an incredible experience for me and I was glad of the knowledge and experience of my dive buddies and their confidence in my abilities.

I spent an exhausting last day here learning to windsurf gaining just a little progress after a lot of hard work hoisting, trying to hold onto the sail and eventually swimming back into the wind.

Conservation is a serious issue here and the whole area needs the protection of a marine park. With the small growth in tourism has come population growth and the problems of daily survival in Africa. At low tide the beach is covered in people collecting coral off the reef and selling it with shells in kitch baskets. Slowly the nearby reef is being destroyed. One day while I was there a man approached Brenda asking if she would show him some good sites so he could use a harpoon gun to fish. I will not publish her reaction.

I borrowed Niklas' alarm to wake up at 3am and leave Pemba on the only 4WD pickup to the Quirimba archipelago and the Portuguese ghost town on Ilha de Ibo (Ibo island). We were crouched tightly in the back driving on through a cold early morning sunrise, through remote villages, on rough sandy roads where people sold cassava, bananas, papaya and smoked goat carcases.

I then walked out almost to my waist through mangroves to join a dhow sailing to Ibo. A dhow is a ancient arabic sailing vessel. It has one sail that is hoisted up on a timber pole by rope. The journey takes anywhere between 1 and 6 hours depending on the wind. Our trip took 2 hours and we had to pole in the last part due to low tide.

Ibo was the 2nd biggest Portuguese town in Mozambique after Ilha de Mozambique but is now just a ghost town with only several hundred inhabitants. The only restuarant in town with food was unmarked and I bought the last fish that day. In the ruined fort there was a working silversmith where workers were using a mouthpipe to silver coast delicate necklaces and rings.

Travelling north from here would have been impossible if I hadn't met a large Italian overland group. Gabrielli their driver was an architect working at Ilha de Mozambique and the only white mzungu chiapa (pickup) driver in Nampula. We charted a dhow that took 3 hours to sail north to remote Pangane that is not even on my map. Sunbathing on deck we passed through paradise, a perfect small desert sand island, turquoise water and islands lined with mangrove and perfect untouched beaches. They gave me a lift up to Mocimboa de Praia where I could reach the border the next day.

I dress down a lot in Africa in order to not stand out too much and also to travel lighter. I've been here almost 8 months now. I only have 1 pair of trousers repaired many times, 1 pair of shorts, 3 old t-shirts, a l/sleeve shirt I bought from the British Heart Foundation, 1 pair of repaired trainers, 1 pair of repaired sandals and a 'ministry of sound' fleece jacket I found in a hostel in Cape Town.

I have a little rant to get off my chest if you bear with me. The usual African story is always beside you and I forget to think and write about it after a while. I've seen this all over Africa but especially here in the rural villages you see some of the worst of it. Aids has infected between 30-40% of the people in many of the Southern African countries I have visited. All work is done is the street and you can see how busy the coffin makers are. Many people walk around barefoot, malnourishment and sun have turned the skin on the legs of some men to leather. With immense enthusiasm children play football made from plastic bags tied together into a ball, they spin bicycle wheel rims with a stick or pull toy cars made from pilchard cans. Children and adults with dirty donated T-shirts ripped apart and hanging off the collar. Some are quite funny like a man I saw the other day wearing a Benton Cheerleading Club T-Shirt with a picture of a young cheerleading American girl on the front. Women usually make more effort and wear beautifull batik clothing as they walk along carrying food to sell or huge piles of chopped wood to make into charcoal to sell.

Electricity is either non-existent or completely unreliable so that even tourist resturants cook on charcoal which just adds to deforestation problems. The Aid development business seem to have very little positive effect and in most cases merely makes Africa's problems worse through creating complete dependence. Here in Mozambique the government is even taxing the Aid companies on the property they rent and trying to tax their salaries too. Can you blame them completely when maybe 50% of their GDP is payed out servicing loans to the developed world. While debts and charity exist then government corruption will also follow and real democracy will never exist until governments are made responsible for their own country.

The area I am in is very, very isolated, partly due to the 25 year war halting development. For my bus to the border I was woken up about 3am. I'm not sure exactly when because my watch was pickpocketed about a month ago. We drove around in an open pickup for maybe 40 minutes picking other people up from various places in town. Then drove in uncomfortable cramped conditions in pitch black along a sandy deeply rutted single track. We stopped briefly for the toilet during sunrise by a brand new nice looking church. It amazes me that people should build such expensive structures among such poverty. By 7 am we'd passed through customs, a shed and was on a dhow sailing across the river to Tanzania. I was carried out the other side to save getting wet.

Tanzania

I travelled onto friendly, pleasent Mtwara where I rested a night. Ate some curry and 5am the next day caught a rough coach to Dar es Salaam. This area has not been developed by the government and the road shakes you constantly, trying to throw you off your seat making me permanently holding on with muscles flexed to take the bumps. The seats were also too small for me and I had to sit sideways to stop my knees from digging into the seat in front. The bus left late and then stopped for ages until the whole corridor was full of passengers too. So it was then hot and overcrowded too.

We had delays all the way including stopping to mend a puncture because they had no spare wheel. Then we were we just an hour away from Dar they decided to stop in a village for 2 hours because it was not safe for passengers to arrive in Dar in the middle of the night. It was too cramped in the bus so I went outside and slept on the road for an hour, by the side of the lorry and next to some other people.