"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 )
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| Driving into Maxixe on National Highway One |
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| Our street in Maxixe |
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| Our building with our apartment on the top floor |
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| Our "neighbours" |
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| 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.
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| 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….”
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