Mozambique

29th May

We crossed into Mozambique at Goba.  It was fairly easy compared to some crossings and not as expensive as we'd heard.  A woman latched onto me when we arrived and proceeded to take care of just about all the paperwork for me relating to the car including the insurance which (predictably) she sold.  3rd party insurance was R170 and tax for the car R50.  A cinch.  Jo had a bit more trouble with a really sulky, surly and rude immigration officer.  He initially messed up and charged us R20 for a South African entry visa (half page) and then with bad grace realising his mistake took half an hour and R172 to cover a whole page with the correct visa.  Customs intitially wanted me to list everything in the car but I went back with a short fudged list and they relented.

We drove into Maputo and stayed the night in a backpackers.  We had an amazing meal in a Brazilian style barbeque restaurant where we filled our faces for about an hour then drank with some South African tilers who all coveted Rhubarb.

30th May

We decided to try and see the sea for the first time and checked out of Fatima's and headed a couple of k's to Maputo backpackers on the beach.  Following the stupid Garmin lead me to turn right when I shouldn't have and two AK47 wielding policemen waved me over with a minute of leaving the lodge.  They walked me back to where I'd committed the offense and proceeded to try and extract 3000MT's (About R1000 - £75) from me.  I got them down to less than 25% of that and handed over the money in an as obvious way as possible - thieving bastards.

Five minutes later we were pulled over again in a random (racially-registration plate, profiled) stop.  Not having done anything wrong the traffico was reduced to saying that since the South African tax disc stated "Licensed to carry 6 passengers" we had to carry the luggage in a trailer and reserve the boot for the 4 further passengers.  I told him where to stick his thoughts on RSA Tax discs and we were allowed to move on.

Found the beach...

...and had an awesome seafood lunch at a place overlooking the boats...

We then went out and had a really good simple meal for dinner too.  My dietary habits seem to have changed lately.  3 square a day - I'm in danger of becoming fat like my brothers.

1st June  

We left Maputo convinced we were going to get pulled over by every traffic cop out there (and there are thousands) but we weren't pulled over once.  We kept strictly to 5km below the speed limit everywhere we went so as not to give them any chance to separate us from any money.  At every roadblock SA plated vehicles were queued up paying fines - but then the only vehicles overtaking us had CA, GP or MP plates on so go figure...

We travelled up through Xai - Xai slowly and stopped and saw this amazing lake as we travelled up towards Zavora beach...

We stayed the night at Zavora Lodge and chatted to some Danish guy called, I can't remember actually.  We were thinking about doing some diving there but he proceeded to tell us it was all far to difficult and technical for us and we should go to Tofu beach - in a Terminator type voice.  He must have said To-Fu Beach maybe twenty times.  There was the dives being too challenging and the fact it was just him and the dive master there - not because he didn't want to have to do easier dives, no?

I had some spaghetti at dinner which lasted a total of 15 minutes in my stomach so the next morning we decided we'd head off.  The dodgy food and thirty South African fishermen had put us off.

2nd June

We stopped at the little town of Inhambane to try and buy some swimwear as we'd both managed to leave without any (well you don't really have call for it in Cape Town, do you?) and failing that headed into Tofu where Jo spotted these Impressionist style palm trees.

and we stayed at the lovely 'Casa Barry' with this view our first night having spannered around looking for camping for three hours...

3rd June

Jo went on a diving refresher course and I messed around watched a bit of tennis and then we watched the Lions v. The British & Irish Lions and generally didn't do much apart from see a rather nice sun set.

4th June

I did a Discover Scuba Diving Course.  It was generally pretty boring - you spend a couple of hours sitting in a cold swimming pool doing lame hand signals to each other.  I was with five other people who were all doing their first water work on day two of a four day PADI course.  When we went out to do the Open Water dive in the afternoon.  Three of them felt sea sick on the trip out to the dive - all 300m of it.  I had a girl land on my head as she exited the boat and got kicked by just about everyone thrashing about trying to swim a couple of metres to the dive line.  I decided that I didn't fancy it - so learning to dive will have to wait for the calmer, quieter and hopefully warmer waters of Lake Malawi.

We went out for dinner to a Seafood restaurant that bizarrely had no seafood so we cancelled that and went back to the lodge for dinner and a chat to Amanda the Zimbabwean receptionist.

5th June.

A bit of breakfast then I've been typing this before the Federer match later.  We leave Tofu tomorrow for Beira, about 650km.  We then rest there a day or so before we go on to our next country which is... welll there's been a bit of a change of plan.  My favourite country of all from our last trip and also the one we spent least time in.  I just hope the crocadile doesn't eat the sun.

Got back from writing all that to find that Jo hadn't done all the maintenance stuff she was meant to do but had instead been playing beach golf from the sand in front our balcony...

We watched the tennis and went to bed but this was awesome albeit at 4:30pm...

6th June

We left Tofu and on the way out opposite the Impressionist Palm trees Jo spotted some Lillies - Monet anyone?

I kid you not they were genuinely opposite the palms.

We were planning to drive way up north but only made it as far as Vilankulos another neath resort used as a jumping off ground for some amazing islands.  Since you're looking at a minimum of $400 a night here we stayed in a quiet little place after 360km and some had some food and planned to get up really early to get to Cubibio for 1:30pm to watch the Turkish GP and the Men's Roland Garros Final.  

Some mug driver...

 Balances out the previous few pictures.

Villanculous was quite pretty tho...

and the Supreme Ruler approved...

7th June

We got up at 6am and left thirty minutes later to drive 500km on a national road to get to some fairly large town to watch lots of sport and relax.  The first 30km were fine then we hit the worst potholes yet.  Average speed the first 2 hours? 50Km/h in fog.  The potholes were so bad it was 20km'h - 5km/h - 20km/h for thirty minutes at a time.  When we got there not one single bar or hotel had satellite sports.  To top it off all of central Mozambique was cut off from every cellphone network and internet access and the icing on the cake all 12 ATM's were offline in town.  For anyone who doesn't know - you have very low daily debit card withdrawl limits in Africa and we needed lots of cash to change to enter Zimbabwe.  A shitty day that we might have argued a bit on.  Drank real French wine though as it was cheaper than nasty South African stuff - only R70.

Highlight of the day was this view from a bridge on the way after we'd decided not to throw ourselves off it...

8th June

I went to 6 ATM's to draw enough MetaCais (MetaCash prn.) to change into Rand for Zimbabwe then spent 2 hours in the bank changing it.   Of the 20 people in the queue I had one of the smallest transactions the reason being the town is close to the Zim border so is used as a big currency exchange point.  One guy in front of me most have received $100,000USD in change for his MadeupCash.  Amazing the amount of currency floating around. Having kept Jo waiting in the car there was just one more stop - I found a new pressure lantern and paid way less than the last time (that's what I told her anyway)  We drove off to Mutare across the border which was pretty quick and were in Zimbabwe.  Oh, apart from rounding a corner at a whopping 55Km/h to overtake a Coca Cola truck and getting pulled over by a traffico - he said the line 500m back meant I couldn't overtake and confiscated my driver's license and paperwork.  When I walked back to the lines to check I could overtake and then wagged my finger at him and asked to take his details he smiled and told us we could go.  Lying cheating portuguese speaking traffic cop bastards...

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