Leaving Mozambique...

Rein checking in -

"I can't believe it's taken me two whole weeks to finally complete my last entry. So here it is, picking up directly from where I'd left off two weeks ago; recounting our trip to the Inhambane peninsula where we found ourselves wanting to get out of Barra lodge after spending three wonderful days at Tofo.

I continue the story:

We got our shuttle back from Barra to Tofo directly after breakfast and made a beeline back to the Casa, only to hear upon arrival that all rooms were occupied for that night. Our hearts sank to our stomachs of disappointment with the prospects of being left with no option but to return home after all. But, Aurella, whom had just shot back to the casa to get something from her room, suggested we come with her to our friends at the diving school (where Adam was doing his open-water exams) as she thought they would surely be able to help us find a room for the night. So we all lugged our luggage over to the school where indeed Nicola, the master diver on our discovery dive earlier that week, came up with several options through her network, offering the centre’s phone for us to ring around.

We settled on Turtle Cove, a wellness centre located in Tofinho, on the cliffs “next door” to Tofo beach. We rang them up to book a cabin and arrange a pick-up and settled in on the roof terrace of the diving school to wait for the driver to arrive. We chatted with some of the staff and almost felt at home, with so many familiar faces around in otherwise foreign place. Before long an old, rusty truck stopped in front of the building and I called Simon over. He took one look at the mangy vehicle and instantly dismissed it as one of the locals stopping by, but sure enough when I yelled out “Turtle Cove?” the driver looked up at us and nodded his head with a big toothless grin…

We made our way downstairs, threw our luggage onto the truck and squeezed onto the passenger seat next to driver in the front cabin. I could see the sunbeams coming through the rust holes in the roof and instantly tried not to think of the car’s safety record, as the driver tried to get the truck started. It took him several manipulations under the car’s hood to get the engine going and finally we were on our way out of town and on to the surrounding dunes towards Tofinho.

I was relieved we made it to Turtle Cove without any further incidents and pleasantly surprised with the set-up of the place. The wellness centre consisted of a main building in arabesque style with lots of loungy areas and a restaurant, giving onto a lush garden with pool, a yoga hall and fringed by individual cottages, each with a bed- and bathroom.

While checking in we ran into Alex, the centre’s yoga and wellness instructor, and her friend and business partner, Sam, who gives massages and healings at the centre. We had met Alex a few days before at the dive centre in Tofo, where she was taking a plunge with Aurella while Simon, Adam and I were doing our refresher/discovery dive. The four of us started chatting and before we knew it we had settled in one of the sofa’s over coffees, chatting away the afternoon. We told them about our project with TechnoServe and our concerns with it all and agreed to meet again the following morning over breakfast to hear about all the plans and good things that Sam and some other locals were undertaking to improve the life of the local people.

That evening we headed back into Tofo town for dinner and a party! We were invited to a joint birthday and farewell party for one of the resident South African restauranteurs. We arrived at the restaurant at seven o’clock and instantly ran into all the nice people we had met in Tofo over the past 4 days. Jenny and Gill from the Chilli Deli were there as the whole crew of Diversity Dive Centre and Alex and Sam. It was a strange experience to be at a party where we seemed to know pretty much everybody or were introduced to them by our new friends, after only four days. We realised just what a small close-knit community Tofo really is and were happily chatting away with our new acquaintances when Aurella and Adam arrived to meet us there as agreed. They join in in the fun and we all had the most wonderful night!

The following morning we met Sam for breakfast. In spite of the nice evening before, or maybe exactly because of it, Simon and I had both woken up feeling a bit down about our prospect of having to return to Maxixe that day after such a wonderful stay on the peninsula and we were seriously questioning the reasonability of us staying in Mozambique when we could be restarting our lives given the invitation I had received from Hay Group in India. We had a long discussion with Sam about it all and made up our mind that it was time to go.

When we came back to Maxixe, that evening, we wrote an email to the country director and got an almost immediate response from him saying he understood (and that it may not even have been such a good idea to start the project in the first place… :-s )

Driving into Maxixe on National Highway One

Our street in Maxixe

Our building with our apartment on the top floor

We then spent the following two full days locked up in our apartment compiling our final report and prepare for our final project review meeting in Maputo. We of course also tried to secure our flights back, but as this required working through TechnoServe’s Washington based travel agent, this wasn't easy; particularly with Monday being a holiday in the US and Wednesday a holiday in Mozambique. And on top of that, the colleagues in Maputo couldn't find a hotel room for us there either, due to the African games...

Our "neighbours"

Some local kids playing in our street

So on Wednesday we packed all our bags in Maxixe and drove down to Maputo, with a hotel room for only two nights and no return tickets to Europe yet. So you can imagine Simon and I were a bit nervous. But then I kept thinking about what Sam had said at Turtle Cove, about when you really wish for something you can make it happen.

The town market in Maxixe

The project meeting with the full TechnoServe team in Maputo went really well. They were pleased with how far Simon and I had come on the “Marketing Inhambane” project and the ensuing discussion resulted in a new strategy to move forward on the initiative. We felt happy with how our engagement with TechnoServe came to an end, feeling we had delivered a worthy outcome.

That last day in the office ended frantically with us not knowing until just before closing time whether we’d be on our way the following day or not, but finally leaving the office with a confirmed booking in hand for a flight out the following morning. In the end, we couldn't change our existing ticket with South African Airlines and had to get a cheap new ticket with Egypt Air (ugh) with a 10-hour stopover at Jo'burg airport (double ugh) and another one the following morning from 5 am to 10 am at Cairo Airport. BUT, we would be back home by Saturday afternoon (YEAH!).

And the rest is history. We had a long, exhausting but otherwise uneventful journey back to Brussels.

In the meantime we have caught up with some friends back in Belgium, spent a week at my parents’ place in the South of France and have made arrangements to have “meet and greet” interviews with my colleagues of Hay Group India in two weeks’ time.

If all goes according to plan I will resume work by mid-November and we will be living in India.

Stay tuned….”

- Rein checking out

Inhambane - Tofo, a corner of paradise in Moçambique

Rein checking in –

“I am sitting in the SA Airways Club Lounge at Maputo Int’l Airport as I write this belated blog post. We’re on our way out of Moçambique to Johannesburg and for the second time on our sabbatical journey we have been upgraded to Business Class. We must have been collecting a lot of good karma this year to be pampered like this each time we travel J!

A lot has happened since the last time we wrote on our blog.

After spending our first couple of days in our new home in Maxixe, we ventured out across the bay to discover the beautiful town of Inhambane. Getting there is an African adventure in itself. We decided to not wait for the big ferry, which runs every hour, but instead to hitch a ride on one of the private little boats that run across the bay and back as soon as they fill up. As we walked to the end of the peer we saw the boat waiting there was filled to the brim with passengers and life stock, so we thought we’d have to wait for the following boat to arrive and fill up. But no, to the captain the boat wasn’t full at all and we were piled on top of the other travellers to set off across the bay to Inhambane.

The cathedral

Inhambane is a beautiful little town, provincial capital in fact and appears to be frozen in time in the 50’ies. It is only a 20 min ferry ride from Maxixe, but a world apart. Where Maxixe is the region’s business hub on National Highway 1, Inhambane is a laid back, charming place, filled with historical buildings in various stages of disrepair. We visited the markets, had lunch in a beautiful art deco restaurant and just wandered around town before heading back home across the bay at the end of the day, where reality hit us again.

The town markets

Communist souvenirs: Karl Marx street

Inhambane's colourful architecture

Restaurant Verdelho in a stunning Art Deco building

We really weren’t feeling at ease with our bare apartment above the office in Maxixe. Of course for local standards, the apartment was outright luxurious with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a view across the bay. But without hot water and only the barest of furniture we couldn’t see how to turn it into a cosy home for ourselves. We had just arrived a few days before, but felt deserted and left to our own devices in an alien place, where we didn’t speak the language and people couldn’t really understand us. On top of that, our colleagues at the TNS office, were off for the whole week after the weekend so we would be on our own without really knowing what we were supposed to be doing on our project here.

We resolved to have a discussion with them before they would leave for the week. So the next morning, at 8 am we set down to have a heart-to-heart about the situation and our frustration with not having any clarity on our project. The outcome of this meeting was that Simon and I were to go and explore the region as if we were tourists. To try out the beach resorts, the villages and to basically be tourist in this holiday paradise for a week to get to know the “product” we were supposed to develop a marketing strategy for. Obviously, we jumped at the opportunity to go on a holiday, trading in our depressing apartment in Maxixe for a beach hut in Tofo!

After this discussion our colleagues set off for their trip up north for the week and Simon and I went to the local coffee shop to plan our week. As we were sitting at the cafe, starved for some (western) people to chat with in English, Simon struck up a conversation with a couple of tourists sitting at the other table.

Our lovely new friends: Adam & Aurella, just married!

And so we met Aurella and Adam, honeymooners from London. They had spent a week on a beautiful five star resort further up on the north on the coast and were now planning to "rough" it backpacking down the coast of Moçambique. They had just been dropped off at Maxixe to get the ferry across to Inhambane and onwards to Tofo.

We told them that they must stop at Inhambane town and gave them tips on where to get the best coffee, lunch and well, why not stay the night in this lovely B&B we spotted there. In fact Simon and I had been walking around Inhambane town the day before to see if we could find somewhere for us to stay as an alternative to our bland apartment in Maxixe. We said goodbye with the vague intention to maybe catch up again some time at Tofo when we’d get there later in the week. We walked home after that and Simon prepared our first meal in the flat; no mean feat if you have a kitchen with a stove and a fridge, a pot, two knives and no bench or table top to prepare things on. Of course Simon’s wasn’t deterred by any of this and rustled up a delicious salad and bread meal.

The following day we asked the office driver to take us around the Inhambane peninsula to check out the famous beaches that everybody had been talking about. We drove around the bay, through Inhambane town and onwards to the tip of the peninsula through some stunning scenery to arrive at a wonderful little beach side village centred around a small local fruit and vegetable market. We had arrived at Tofo and instantly loved it.

We stopped there for lunch on the town square with a view of a stunning white beach and an azure blue ocean. This was bliss, as we dug into our local fish curries. After lunch we wondered around town and walked onto the beach and found a pretty little white cottage at the far end of the town beach, overlooking the bay. This was Casa Azul, and turned out to be the loveliest little B&B you could imagine. A white little beach cottage with four tiny rooms, each individually styled and decorated in a bright melange of sunny colours, a beautiful, shady terrace in front, decked out with cosy sitting areas, for the guests to enjoy sunset drinks. The place was so warm and light, we instantly felt at home. We spoke with the housekeeper and booked a room for us to spent a few nights on the beach, the following day.

The cliffs of Tofinho, just around the corner of Tofo are a great place for whale spotting

Much lighter of heart than we had been feeling since days, we returned homewards to Maxixe with the knowledge of having a sunny stay at Casa Azul ahead of us. As we drove through Inhambane on the way home we spotted Aurella and Adam walking on the streets and indicated the driver to stop. We hopped out to say hello, feeling good about running into fresh acquaintances in our new hometown, and smiled as they told us they had followed our advice, booked into our recommended B&B in town and had spent the day checking out all the sites we had recommended. They said they’d make their way over to Tofo the following day so we told them about our recent “trouvaille”, the Casa Azul.  They said they’d check it out and we all agreed in any case to meet up for drinks the following evening at a Tofo bar, mentioned in the guide book.

That evening we came home with a renewed sense of excitement with the recent turn of events and the prospect of a mini holiday at the beach and a nice evening with our new friends.

The following morning we made our way to Tofo where, upon arrival at the Casa we were told by Laura, the owner that “our friends” had already checked in. We deduced from this that Aurella and Adam had found the place, liked it and taken a room. And sure enough, a little while later they strolled up from the beach and we all settled in for drinks on the terrace.

Tofo Beach

Our B&B, Casa Azul

The view from Casa Azul

The terrace with Laura, the B&B owner

The next three days were just pure bliss and relaxation. I would wake up early morning as the sun shine streamed in through the window, jump out of bed and onto the beach for a refreshing dive into the ocean. After my swim, breakfast of fresh fruit salad, Italian coffee and omelettes was served on the terrace. By mid-morning we’d be lounging out on the hammocks to read a book, or go for a stroll along the quiet beach, followed by lunch of fresh seafood. Then back to the hammock for some more reading and by sunset, drinks on the terrace and dinner somewhere in town with the four of us.

Our beduin tent like room 

Preparation for the reef dive in the afternoon,
skills practice in the pool

One day we dedicated fully to Simon’s maiden dive (plus a refresher course for me). Practice in the pool in the morning and then out with the boat to the reefs in the afternoon. We were under for over an hour, which is pretty impressive for anyone, but even more so for a first-time diver like Simon. He loved it and I was delighted to be back down. We saw an incredible variety of fish, including clown fish, moraines, trumpet fish, etc. and we could hear the calls of the whales swimming by in the distance. I think it got Simon hooked so now we’ll need to get him to complete his open water accreditation so that we will be able to make deeper dives together in future as well.

In short, we had an incredible time in Tofo and before we knew it, it was time to move on to our next destination on our tourist reconnaissance trip. This was a resort just around the northern tip of the peninsula, known for its deserted beaches and quiet solitude. To be honest, we were so happy staying at the Casa in Tofo that we really had no desire to move on at all. But “duty” called and so we organised a shuttle service to Barra Lodge on the Friday.

The charming visitors at Barra...

It felt like a completely different world there. The lodge was a huge complex of cabins, restaurants, beach club, swimming pool and a big new development of apartments blocking the ocean view of all the rest. We checked into our cabana and decided to check out the beach club for lunch. The beach itself was beautiful, wide and continuing south as far as the eye could reach. But the club was run over by Afrikaners lunching on whole chickens and buckets of fries, washing it all down with litres of beer. The atmosphere was a far cry from the quirkiness and local fun of Tofo.

After lunch we went for a long walk along the beach and were shocked to see all the development going on along the shore. We could only imagine the hordes of tourists from South Africa that would flock the beach during the holiday season and we felt sad to have left our little piece of heaven behind in Tofo.

We stayed the night at Barra because we really had nowhere else to go, but the next morning after breakfast asked for a shuttle straight back to Tofo in the hope we could spend one more night at the Casa, before having to go back to Maxixe.

(to be continued)