Mozambique Island, Mozambique

Another early morning to walk back to the bus station to get a minibus (chapa) to the island. A very helpful man warned us about the thieves at the station and sent us in the right direction to get the correct minibus. No touts came chasing after us as we had got used to in Zambia and Malawi.

The minibus had 3 rows of seats The back seat had 4 people. The next seat had a small seat that folded out into the walk space and 4 people had to sit here too. John was given a thin vinyl covered cushion and he sat on the edge of the bench seat and over the gap with the fold out seat. In the next row there was the same arrangement but there were also small cushions on which 4 people had to sit behind the driver and passenger seat facing those in the front row. There was a large lady who took more than her allocation and 2 women with babies tied to them. There were also 4 people in the cab who had to jam up so the driver could change gear. Once everyone was seated the conductor stood in the doorway leaning over those in the second row. He had even perfected the art of falling asleep standing up without falling on the mothers with babies. After 3 hours, 21 of us all bailed out. Luckily there was a trailer for all the sacks of maize and baggage.

As we neared the island we passed several salt ponds. there were queues of women with woven baskets on their heads collecting the dried salt crystals and dumping them in piles. They had to manoeuvre past each other on the little mud dam walls around the rectangular ponds and they were practically running.

A 3.5 km bridge joins the island to the mainland and it is still under construction in parts and has passing bays as it is only one laned. There are water pipes under the bridge carrying water from the mainland as well.

We checked out the only backpacker hostel on the island but it was full so stayed around the corner in a guesthouse. It was a pretty big Portuguese style place with high ceilings, fans, mosquito nets, and antique furniture. The receptionist didn't speak English so we had to communicate in Spanish. He could understand me better than I could him.

All the rooms had a toilet, handbasin and shower and they were hidden behind movable wooden screens in the corner of the room.

There was a huge well in the back yard that was being renovated because the iron support beams had rusted. It was 10 metres deep and all the rain water from the roof ran into it during the rainy season.

We were looking forward to swimming in the sea but it was pretty rough the first day so we didn't go out. Later we walked about and discovered the locals using the best place to swim as a toilet and sewerage was running into the sea. So we didn't get to swim.

The island is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of the historic stone buildings built by the Portuguese. The island is only 3 km by half a kilometre with 18,000 inhabitants. After the years of fighting finished with independence, many people from rural areas settled in Makuti Town as the island had an established hospital and schools. The island is divided into the historic Stone Town and Makuti Town where the local fishing families live. The Makuti house walls are constructed of a skeleton of thin branches. A second grid of branches is tied to the first and then the space between the two grids is filled with small stones and rocks. Later this is covered with mud and if there is enough money it is painted. The roof is thatched with coconut palm leaves woven flat onto split bamboo. The whole village is situated below the road as it was thequarry site where the granite to build the stone houses came from.

In Stone Town there are many run down empty buildings with families living in them with no electricity or running water. Some mornings we saw people sleeping on the streets in the front of houses.



We only found a couple of other guesthouses and 3 places to eat. UNESCO has given a lot of money to upgrade the historic building ready for tourism but there are not many of the old buildings finished yet.

In Makuti Town the women queued up for water at the pumps. It seems that the basic facilities will not be able to handle floods of tourists on the island.


The young men approached us to sell jewelery or to take us on their boats to visit a light house or go snorkeling. When the sea was rough they would be stitching more plastic sheets to the sails for their dhows or mending their nets.

We visited the Maritime Museum and the local history museum. in the Governor's Palace. The Governor's Palace was interesting with its mix of Goan, Portuguese, Chinese (from Macao), and French furniture. Included in the ticket price was a guide who also came with us to the Portuguese fort. The fort is being renovated and has two churches, a slave market where the people were bought and loaded onto the ships, a gaol and barracks.

The roof of the fort buildings had many channels where the rain was caught and sent off to the underground cistern. From above it looked like a large pin ball track.

Vasco da Gama came to the island in 1498 and in 1507 a Portuguese settlement was started, being an ideal place for a naval base and trading post. It was the capital of Portuguese East Africa until the end of the 19th century. It was one of the Spice Islands. Over the years there have been immigrants from East Africa, Goa, and Macao and now there are places owned by Italians, Portuguese, Swiss, Zimbabweans and South Africans.

The Mozambicans in 1960 protested peacefully about the taxes they were paying the Portuguese and so started the warring for independence. In 1974 the Portuguese pulled out, sinking ships, filling wells with cement, and leaving the country in chaos with no infrastructure or skilled professionals. A period of unrealistic socialist programmes followed until the country was almost bankrupt in 1983. The Frelimo and Renamo parties warred for 17 years and the Renamo's objective was to paralyse the country which it did by destroying the remaining roads, bridges, railways, schools and clinics. Villagers were rounded up and any with skills were shot. There are still some areas where mines have not been cleared. Since 1995 Mozambique has been part of the Commonwealth of Nations although it was never ruled by Britain like its neighbours.

Nampula, Mozambique

We got up at 5.30 in Mocuba hoping to catch an early bus in the cool of the morning. After making our breakfast and folding our laundry we were out the door by 6.30. The student receptionist told us to hurry because there was a bus a few metres up the road ready loading to go to Nampula. We dashed up the road and managed to get a seat. The seats were very narrow and on one side of the bus were three narrow padded seats and there were two on the other side. Surprisingly there were quite a few empty seats on the bus that would have taken at least 70 people sitting down.

Most of the road to Nampula was under construction and there were the odd patches of seal but it was mostly pretty bad.

There were lots of small villages along the way with mud huts with thin grass thatch. At each stop the locals came to sell boiled eggs, mangoes, soft drinks and samosas. The road sides were busy with women carrying 20 litre buckets of water on their heads. They are so strong. One lady had a 50 kg bag of maize on her head as well as a baby on her back and bags of shopping in each hand. They are able to balance the weight of the goods on their heads and still look around for traffic or swivel the baby from their backs to suckle. Pretty skillful.

We were pretty well left alone once we arrived at the bus station, no hordes of touts fighting over us or grabbing at our bags. Bliss. We even beat the bus that left at 5 AM so we were very lucky not to have taken longer than the 5 and a half hours it had already taken us.

With our guide book we were able to find our way to a hotel in the middle of town. It had been fully renovated since the Lonely Planet wrote about it and we were able to get an air conditioned room with a balcony and TV. The restaurant had reasonably priced meals and the rate even included a buffet breakfast.

The Hotel Lurio.

The real bonus was free internet so we could chat online to our daughter who was dealing with a neighbour who had dropped a tree through two of our tenants cars at our place. They also wrecked our clothesline and fence.

When it was cooler in the afternoon we walked about the town centre looking at the only tourist attraction, a huge cathedral.



We watched a couple of teams play soccer in a hard dusty playground and sat with the locals in a cafe with a cold local ale. If there was more to see and do it would have been quite nice to stay longer in the town even though we were warned by hotel staff to put our valuables in our room safe and take care of bag snatchers. We were also looking forward to resting up by the sea at Mozambique Island.

It was really restful being left alone by the locals for a change.

Blantyre, Malawi

The touts at Mangochi were particularly aggressive, grabbing my bag while I was still attached to it and the fighting with each other. Some touts wanted us to get on a small coach that was empty while others wanted us on a minibus that was almost full. It seems if they get you into the bus they will get some payment from the driver. The most confusing thing for us is that the buses don't have signs showing their destinations and often the touts lie that a bus is going directly to a destination and when we are on it or ask someone else when things have quietened down we discover the lie. Some of the locals seem scared of the touts so will shrug their shoulders or ignore us not wanting to get involved. It is always a relief when a local can speak to us in English or their own language and reassure us or redirect us. Unemployment is so high that this is often the only way the men can get money and of course it is much easier physically than working in the fields.

We did observe the food sellers hassling a local lady who wanted to buy some food. She ended up being surrounded by about 8 guys screaming at her, shoving their goods in her face, and pushing each other about. In the end she didn't buy anything from any of them and I was her biggest fan!

Arrived in Blantyre in the early afternoon and discovered that we were outside Blantyre at Limpe and would have to get a minivan into the city centre. The bus station was chaotic and we were in the intercity part and had to clamber over dirty drains and broken walls to get to the lower more chaotic city bus station.

With our map in our guide we were able to figure out where to get off the bus and then walk up to a lodge off the main commercial area. The staff at the lodge were not very friendly nor helpful but we found a room with twin beds and mosquito netting. We did have the address of a backpackers further up the same street but when we read that their bar was open to the public we decided we needed a calm place to sleep. We were the only westerners at the lodge and discovered the room next to us was a mosque for travellers.

We walked into town to get money from the ATM and buy some groceries. While in town we saw the Hindu temple and found a lovely vegetarian restaurant right next door to it. Our guide book told us not to walk into town at night under the railway bridge which was in our street because of muggers so we bought some vegetarian food to take away for dinner back in our room. We had a power cut and ate by candle light and had to get up at 4 AM again the next day to cross the Mozambique border.

Passed through some tropical areas on the way to the border and passed many tea plantations like this one as well as some factories.

The minibus stopped a short walk from the immigration office on the border at Muloza and in no time we were surrounded by bicycle taxi drivers grabbing at our bags. It was a relief to get out of the minivan that was loaded with huge sacks of dried fish from Lake Malawi but a hassle to deal with the touts again. We walked over the border and then had to wait on the Mozambique side to have a visa processed. Two of the bicycle drivers followed us over and waited for us while we had our lunch.

We negotiated a price for the 3km ride to Milange, Mozambique based on what the immigration guys told us but the cyclists were not happy. They wanted to charge us the tourist rate which was 6 times more than the local rate. There was absolutely no other way to get to Milange so the bicycle Mafia squeeze as much as they can from the travellers and on principle we go for a fair price for both. Even though it was only 3 kms it was far too hot to walk the distance and we could have waited for ever for a vehicle ride to take us. In the end we needed 3 bicycles as the third one carried our bags. The carrier was unpadded and was made of steel reinforcing rods welded together so it was not so comfortable. The road was busy with cyclists ferrying goods between Muloza and Milange but our guys didn't want to spend the whole day working and saw us as an easy target.

As we didn't have any Mozambique metacais to pay them and only Malawian kwacha they grizzled more even though they lived in Malawi. That meant that they had to introduce us to their friend who was a money changer and he would give us metacais at a very poor rate. We are always suspicious of money changers at border towns because we wouldn't know if we were getting counterfeit money or not. We do check the exchange rate online before we enter each country so we have an idea of the current rates. For the last half kilometre of our ride we had to stop at about half a dozen money changers as the cyclists tried to get us to change money with their friends and then they would make more money from the commission the moneychangers would give them. At one point the guy with our bags lagged behind and stopped, refusing to carry on if we didn't pay more. He had after all agreed to the rate at the beginning so was playing games with us. It is always better to chose a guy who doesn't speak English as then they can't explain things when they change their minds!

Once in Milange we were told the banks were closed, which we found to be a lie, and another chance to get us to use the moneychangers. We resisted. A guy in a 4x4 came to the junction point and they negotiated a ride with him for us to Mocuba and he gave them a commission for finding us. The driver was a Malawian guy called Wellington, who was working for an Italian construction company in Mocuba and he spoke excellent English. He needed to eat before we headed off and while we were at the restaurant waiting for him an Indian guy and his locally based cousin turned up looking for a ride too. News spread really quickly in the small town. We headed off on the unsealed potholed sandy road to Mocuba and it took us three and a half hours.

We passed many small villages where they were growing cassava, cashew nuts, maize and coconut palms. The fields were being hoed by hand to plant before the rains arrive next month.

Wellington dropped us at a brand new guesthouse in the main street of Mocuba where we ate what food we had and did some laundry. John had to try a couple of ATM machines to get some local money and we were able to pay Wellington with US dollars. So we had a restful night in an airconditioned room so we would be ready for an early morning the next day!

Cape Maclear, Malawi

Got a lift with the guesthouse owner at Senga Bay to the bus station at Salima where we needed to board our bus to Cape Maclear. We had to hang around the bus station for about 45 minutes waiting for a coach to come from Lilongwe so the touts soon lost interest in us. We had mislaid our small calculator so managed to buy one in the quiet marketplace next to the station for about $1.50 NZ. Patrick and Linda joined us and Patrick had to hire a bicycle taxi and sit on the padded carrier to go to the local bank to withdraw some local currency. When the bus arrived it was already completely full and a queue formed at the door and I managed to get quite close to the front of it while John put the bags in the lockers under it.



The food sellers surrounded the bus to sell the travellers in the bus their goods; they had boiled eggs with small packets of salt, bread rolls with fried eggs, chilled water in small plastic bags that the locals nibbled the corner of to drink the water, frozen flavoured ice drinks in plastic bags, mangoes, packets of factory made biscuits, fried bread, homemade samosa and chilled canned and bottled soft drinks.

We all managed to find a seat in the crowded bus and I sat next to a large lady with a young boy. The boy drank 2 bottles of fanta, ate 2 packets of biscuits and half a bread bun and grizzled if his mum wanted any of it. The person across the aisle from us had a small puppy tied up in a piece of fabric and it whined the whole time.

The women usually wear everyday clothes and then had a length of brightly coloured material that they use to tie their babies to their backs. If they are wearing jeans or a skirt they will still tie a sarong like piece of material around their waist that covers their clothes. Often they will tie their money into the corner of the sarong.

Three hours later we arrived, after many short stops, at Monkey Bay. We were hustled onto the back of a flat deck truck and twenty five of us headed for Cape Maclear.

The backpackers was called Fat Monkey and seemed to be run by Zimbabweans. It was right on the lake going down to the beach and not as nice as the place at Senga Bay because it was pretty dusty and there was no grass to keep the place cool. The restaurant area looked over the sandy beach out to the water and occasionally the locals would look up and wave or the children would beg for food.



There were 2 Dutch girls and an English guy staying who were doing their internship at a hospital in the north. Later a Dutch couple arrived who were catching up with a friend who taught in Lilongwe and then one evening a whole safari truck full of retired Dutchies arrived to camp at the backpackers. We couldn't believe how many Dutchies there were in such a small place.



When you are walking about the local young men come up to talk to you and inevitably they are trying to sell you a trip on a boat like this one. Patrick and Linda headed off to do some snorkeling and we went exploring the village. When we walked along the beach we saw lots of small snail shells and decided that it was not a good place to go in the water because of the bilharzia. No one in the camp told us it was in the lake here and when we asked they said yes there was bilharzia but we could go to the local clinic and get pills for it. Cape Maclear used to be a popular place for travellers but because the local boys on the beach hassle the travellers they no longer come in the numbers they used to and we only saw one other traveller at another place along the beach.


The locals in their dugouts heading off to fish.

In the village the young boys begged for money and pens. No one seemed to be at school and the kids were in and out of the water all day.

The electricity was off most of one day and on and off the others. We did read that they produce more electricity than they use but must be selling it on to other countries as none of the rural village mud and thatch houses have electricity.

Did some research on where to go and found that the border crossing to Mozambique that we had chosen, meant we would have to go on the carrier of a bicycle taxi for 19 kms so changed our plans and headed for Blantyre to cross at a more popular route.

Said our goodbyes to Patrick and Linda who stayed on with the Dutch couple and were headed for Liwonde and Zomba and then onto South Africa to catch their flights home in early December.

We had to get up at 4 AM to get the minibus back to Monkey Bay and then onto Mangochi. The minibus cruised up and down the village looking for passengers to fill up the seats and just as we got the last one they went back to the village centre and loaded up 3 gas cyclinders about 900 mm high and tied them to the front seats with strips of old tyre tubes and moulded the passengers around them!

Senga Bay, Malawi

Caught a minibus from outside our guesthouse to the minibus station in town where we were hustled onto a bus going to Salima. After one and a half hours we arrived at Salima where we were mobbed by touts and they kicked each other and punched each other. It was chaos. We had read and been told that Malawians were friendly people but we regularly saw a lot of aggression especially at transport stops. Eventually we were pushed onto the back of a large truck. It was loaded with planks of wood and bags of maize were stacked on top of them and then our 4 packs were tossed on to the sacks. The locals sat on the rails on the sides of the deck and we moved off a few metres. More people climbed on and everyone had to reshuffle where they were sitting as 3 huge bags of mangoes were dumped into the middle of the deck. Linda and I ended up with babies on our knees as the mothers were getting squashed. I managed to sit at the end of the deck on my pack but at the next stop I had a large lady sitting on my hips squashing me for the rest of the bumpy 20 km ride on the potholed road to the coast where the 28 of us all bailed out.


Some loud pushy local youths met the bus in Senga Bay where we planned to spend some days resting up.


The guesthouse was right on the lake edge and had a lovely soft grass area where we all camped as the rooms were all booked up and far too expensive for us. We were able to eat an evening meal in the restaurant but had to eat in the camp area if we had our own food. It made us feel unwanted like second class citizens!

It was a pretty dusty place so we were thankful for the green grass. The locals were selling boat trips and jewellery. A lot of Lake Malawi has bilharzia but a sign in the guesthouse said that none had been found in the water outside.

When we walked around the village the children asked for money and pens and followed us about. The young men with their Rastafarian hairdoes followed us to sell jewelery or boat trips.

The owner of the guesthouse was a 40 year plus old, Zimbabwean (we were told), woman and had had the place for 9 years. She drove us to the Salima bus station when we left and waved like the Queen as she drove through the village. She is involved in many activities in the village, the hospital, children's clinic, palliative care, and supporting locals with small businesses as well as trying to educate them on HIV/Aids care so she is well respected.

Lilongwe, Malawi

We managed to organize a private taxi to take us from the backpackers out of town to get some groceries, change money, and do some last minute email checks. Linda and Patrick joined us as well so it made it more worthwhile than waiting for minibuses to fill up. When we were done we headed for the Mchinji border town. We got a free visa at the border for Malawi and our guide book warned us about changing money with the touts at the border so we were able to brush them off. We had to take a 12km taxi ride from the Malawian immigration offices to the first town on the Malawian side where we had to then get a minibus for the two hour drive to the capital city of Lilongwe. The minibus was a bit of a wreck as the sliding door kept falling off the runners and the driver had to get out and fix it up after each passenger had got off.



It was noticeable how fertile the farms were in Malawi and a great contrast to the deserts of Zambia and Namibia.



We managed to work out where the backpackers was located that we wanted to stay at and so avoided stopping at the bus station and the flood of taxi touts. Unfortunately the backpackers/camp was nothing like it was described in our guide book. Nevertheless, John and I checked into the 8 bed dorm room while Linda and Patrick pitched their tent.



The place had new owners and it stunk of dog smells on the outdoor padded seating areas. One dog was asleep in the entrance to the dorm room and another in the middle of the outdoor seating area. The place had been without water for 48 hours and we had to bucket water from the pool to wash. There were meals prepared in the camp but we decided to walk into town to eat as we were not sure that things would be very clean without any water to prepare food in the restaurant.



The town was pretty crowded and there was a huge market area near the river in the town centre where sellers were peddling shoes, clothes and food.

The next day we all decided to move from the camp. Linda and Patrick went to the golf club as they had a camp ground there and we went to the St Peter's Church guesthouse. The guesthouse was clean and each bed had a mosquito net and quite a large room. At least it had running water!

We had seen an advertisement for a local internet connection for our mobile stick so we headed off to get it and catch up on emails and the blog. Once we found the headquarters for the company we discovered that they had no SIm cards left any where in the city. We were sent to several places to find one but couldn't and as we were about to return to our guesthouse the company manager found us and had at last tracked one down that we could buy. He was so embarrassed that he didn't have any when we visited him.

By the time we had returned to our guesthouse a wedding party was raging in the garden with loud thumping music. This happened at the same time that two other wedding parties raged across the road at the golf club where Patrick and Linda were staying too. What a racket! As soon as the sunset the three wedding parties shut down so that was a relief. We joined Patrick and Linda at the golf club and ate in the clean and cheap restaurant there.

There was not much to keep us longer in Lilongwe so we planned our route out of there towards the coast.

South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

The minibuses at the bus station across the road started parping their horns at 4am so we were awake early and while we were eating our breakfast at 6am the bus driver came to tell us he would pick us up at 7 sharp. We thought it was rather strange that he was waiting for us when we walked in to the car park outside the rest camp building. We loaded up and then he drove round and round picking up groceries to take to the village of Mfuwe which is outside the national park and we didn't leave until 9.30am. If we hadn't taken this minibus we would have had to wait until 3pm when the Lusaka bus arrived and then we still would not have been able to go until the minbus was stuffed full so we didn't complain too loudly!

The road from Chipata to Mfuwe is under construction in parts so the bus drives on the badly corrugated donkey road. We were later told that a Chinese company was constructing the road and it had taken a year so far as the local government officials kept taking the money allocated for the road. The Japanese vans are not 4x4s so they rattle and vibrate and could only average about 25 kph so it was a long, hot, dusty ride.

We passed lots of small villages with the farm name on a sign as well as the chief''s name. There were a few fields of peanuts and dried up cotton plants. A lot of tobacco is also grown in this area. The road was again lined with sacks of charcoal for sale and lots of people walking to and fro with hoes, tubs of mangoes, or sacks of mealie meal.

The local bicycle spare parts shop

We had to renegotiate with the minibus driver to take us the 5kms further on to the Wildlife Camp outside the national park where we planned to camp. We met up with Linda and Patrick again and we both camped at the complex. It was a lovely relaxing place with a clean pool, bar, thatched shelters with power points and tables as well as clean ablution blocks. A short walk along the river took us to the main restaurant/bar where we ate our evening meals.

The camp is owned by the Zambian Wildlife Society and 60% of the income goes to the society for various projects and it is leased by a Swiss lady, Dora, and her husband who run it with a South African couple. It was well run and organised. We were not allowed to walk along the river's edge after dark and would be picked up by a driver in a safari truck and taken to dinner at the restaurant further along the river from our camp.

Our tent is the wee one in front

We could see and hear hippos in the river and the first night we had 5 or so elephants eating grass and drinking water in a small stream beside our tent. It was pretty nervewracking hearing their feet squelch in the mud only 15 metres from our heads in our wee tent.

One of the workers told us that a lad pitched his tent under a tree and woke to see the sillouhette of an elephant astride his small hiking tent with its trunk in the tree above. He coughed and the elephant stopped eating and after a while it continued and when finished it went on its way without harming him! There are no fences between the animals and the camp so they roam from the park into the camp and off into the village. Being mango season, it is the time when the elephants cause problems and about 3 or 4 deaths a year in the villages as they go after the ripening fruit.

We were able to order a fresh loaf of bread baked by the chef each day and at US$5 a loaf it was pretty expensive but cheaper than taking a taxi to the village 5kms away for US$20 return! We also had enough food to prepare our own breakfasts and lunches.

On our first night drive we were lucky enough to see a leopard in a tree on dusk and another at a waterhole. We also saw lots of elephants, hippos, kudu, impala and puku antelopes, zebra with black feet, genet, mongoose, crocodiles and spotted hyena.

The next day we did a walking safari with Patrick and Linda and two Spanish guys. We headed off early in the morning and were accompanied by an armed scout and a park guide. We learnt a lot about animal droppings. the hyena has white droppings because it eats the bones of dead animals. We were able to tell the sex of the girrafe by the shape of its droppings and Patrick even joined in a spitting competition with the guide- a game the village children play when they are bored- seeing how far they could spit the girrafe droppings. The elephant poos and wees at the same time and we could tell by the position of the urine if it was a male or a female. We passed several places where there were skeletons of buffalo and learnt o tell if tehy were male or female as well.

John, Patrick, Linda and the two Spanish boys later went on an afternoon hike and stayed the night in a bush camp further up the river from the camp. They had to have a bush shower and had to take the armed guard with them when they wanted to go to the toilet at night.

I chose to stay at the camp and go on another night drive and was lucky enough to see another leopard. He was in a tree eating an impala that he had caught earlier in the evening. We also saw an old lion who had been in a fight and lay without moving as we took photos of him.

All in all it was a great place to rest away from noisy cities and touts, enjoy some nice food, and spend more time getting to know Linda and Patrick. It was the International Schools' holidays so several ex pat teachers passed through the camp as well.

Took the crowded minibus back to Chipata and checked into a backpackers on a hill overlooking the town rather than spend another night in the rest camp with its lack of running water and crawling bugs.