We spent the night in Inhambane on our way up the coast to Vilankulo. Inhambane is located on the same peninsula as Tofo and Barra, and the bus to Vilankulo left from Maxixe (a larger town across the bay from Inhambane) in the morning. The most expeditious way to reach Maxixe from Inhambane is a twenty minute ferry ride. We figured that spending the night in Inhambane would make it easier to make it from the ferry to the bus on time and wanted to have some time to wander around the city, which is supposed to be one of the nicer provincial capitals in Mozambique.
Low tide in Inhambane (the gradual slope of the surrounding area causes the tidal change to be rather dramatic)A random building that Katie liked
We enjoyed wandering around the central part of town, checking out some of the cool art deco buildings, the old mosque built in 1840, and the 18th century Catedral da Nossa Senhora da Conceição. Also mixed among the tidy houses were a few errant abandoned buildings, with subtropical foliage dramatically taking over the manmade structures. Overall, things were very quiet as it was Sunday evening, and the sidewalks were completely rolled up in most of the town. Continue reading Transiting & Wandering Through Inhambane (Or, when Marc Drafts a Post)→
On Saturday, we left Tofo for Barra, a beach town just north of Tofo. The beaches were just as beautiful as those in Tofo, white and serene, and we had them almost completely to ourselves. We alternated between drifting in the water, splashing in the waves, and digging for sea snails, crabs, and other tiny creatures.
Beach in Barra
The accommodation in Barra is farther and more spread out from the actual town than in Tofo, and most of the lodging is self-catering. We stayed at the Bay View Lodge, a pleasant collection of chalets each equipped with hot water, air conditioning, and cooking facilities, including a kitchen and an outdoor grill (or, if you are South African, a braai); alas, we had nothing to cook. Continue reading The Barra Interlude→
As mentioned, we sampled a lot of restaurants during our nearly one week in Tofo. What follows is our rather haphazard guide to dining in Tofo, with a special note that we visited during low season. In most cases, we were the only or some of the only people eating in the restaurant; things might differ (they might not be out of hummus!) during high season.
Mozambeat. We had a delicious prawn curry here, but the best part of our dinner was the atmosphere: relaxing on a couch, listening to great music, and watching the fire flicker. We also had breakfast there, and, while the kitchen was a bit rushed in the morning, the food was delicious: I had a huge bowl of fruit, yogurt, and muesli (so big that I couldn’t finish it), and Marc had a good-looking egg, ham, and cheese sandwich.
We went to Tofo to unwind, and, between frolicking in the ocean (including diving), reclining on the beach, and drinking beer while watching the sun set, I think it’s safe to say that we unwound.
We arrived in Tofo, a staple in the Southern Africa holiday circuit (which as Americans we had been blissfully ignorant of until the New York Times beat us there by a month and a half), last Monday via the Fatima’s shuttle (more on that in a future post). The shuttle terminated at a backpacker place called Fatima’s Nest, which was a substantial walk to Mozambeat Motel, where we had made arrangements. While we waited for the Mozambeat staff to come get us (“Come get your people,” the guy at Fatima’s had said during a phone call), we ogled the view: a stunning spread of soft white beach and brilliant turquoise ocean.
our end of the beach (as seen through Instagram)
Mozambeat Motel was, for lack of a better phrase, really cool. The cabins have outdoor showers and hammocks, and everything is decorated with a funky vibe. The bar/restaurant (which has one wall that is open air) played awesome music, and the food was good. The night that we stayed there, we enjoyed prawn curries and worked on our blog, while relaxing on a wide couch and listening to the music. Mozambeat isn’t on the beach, but it has an inviting-looking pool.
But, for us, not being on the beach – especially this early into our trip – turned out to be a deal-breaker. As we discovered that first afternoon, although Mozambeat might have been just a couple of kilometers from the water, it was a dusty slog to the beach, and it’s a long, dark walk back after sunset if you forget to bring your torch (which we did, and ended up having our wits nearly scared out of us by an errant dog that raced past us). Worse, your inclination to carry money and entertainment items to the beach with you, since you have to walk such a long way, means that you’ll be unable to relax in the water, as you will constantly be keeping an eye on your stuff on the beach, jumping up whenever anyone walks near it. (For the record, no one seemed to show the slightest interest in our stuff, although there were lots of hawkers who were keen to sell us additional things.)
So on Tuesday morning, after only one night at Mozambeat, we packed up our things and headed for a spot closer to the beach. We checked into Casa Barry, and settled into a little cabin for the next four nights. We didn’t have an ocean view, but we were close enough that we didn’t need to bring anything with us – we could go right from our front door to the ocean in a minute. (This was exactly what we did as soon as we had checked in.)
Most of the hotels in town are located along the beach, and Casa Barry is located at the northeastern end of the beach. We were initially pleased because this end seemed to retain sun the longest and also was far enough away from the other hotels and bars we thought might be loud, but we were later even more pleased to discover that our end of the beach had many fewer jellyfish than other stretches. We enjoyed beers from the deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset almost nightly, but we were in easy walking distance from the other restaurants and hotels around town. (We sampled just about every restaurant in Tofo, which we’ll tell you about in a future post!) The staff at Casa Barry couldn’t have been nicer.
Casa Barry (sorry, Mozambeat, I didn’t get a photo of you)
We really only had two beefs with Casa Barry. One, the electrical outlets only took South African plugs and we had not yet picked up an adapter for such, and were unsuccessful in our efforts to procure one in town. (The staff helpfully let us charge our devices in the office.) Two, the night that it rained, it also rained inside our cabin – only in one place, but that place happened to be directly above our heads. (We moved the bed, and the next morning they changed our sheets for us.)
We would whole-heartedly recommend either Mozambeat or Casa Barry as places to stay in Tofo: Mozambeat if you’re looking for a cool place to stay, and Casa Barry if you can’t be bothered to carry your things to the beach and enjoy sunsets over the water.
Since we arrived in Tofo on Monday, we had done nothing but laze about and frolic in the Indian Ocean. We figured that it was high time we did something with ourselves, and so we signed up for a SCUBA review course with Peri-Peri Divers.
We first tried diving in Thailand during our bar trip in the summer of 2008. We did an adventure dive off the coast of Koh Pha Nagn, and we had an amazing time. So amazing, in fact, that we got open water certified in Honduras in early 2010.1
We had packed our PADI cards and our dive log books (neither of which had seen the light of day since we completed the open water certification four years ago), and figured that Tofo – which our guidebook tells us is the unofficial diving capital of Mozambique – was the perfect place to put them to use.
We met our dive master Frida, a friendly Scandanavian woman with an apparent affinity for the color pink, at 8:30 this morning,2 and she wasted no time in administering a quiz. This was, after all, the reason that we had signed up for the SCUBA review course rather than doing an adventure dive: we wanted the chance to review how much dive knowledge we had retained (or lost) and to brush up on our skills.
Here’s a type of fish we saw: Moorish Idol
After we finished the quiz (on which we both performed admirably), reviewed the Recreational Dive Planner3 with us, and practiced setting up our kits, we moved on to the pool to practice our skills. Going under in the pool was at once both familiar and strange. Continue reading Our First African Dive→
We originally planned to leave Maputo on Saturday morning at the ungodly hour of 5:00 am (the pick-up for which we were instructed to arrive at the even more ungodly hour of 4:30 am) and head north for the beaches of Tofo, but we were convinced to stick around through the weekend. While our decision was admittedly somewhat based on how unappealing a 4:00 am wake-up call sounded after a late night playing Cards Against Humanity, it was largely based on the promise of beaches that weekend.1
Macaneta Beach
On Saturday morning, we left Maputo at the much more reasonable hour of 10:30 am and headed for Macaneta Beach. The trip to Macaneta was an adventure, taking us over a dusty road with literal hills and valleys for around 45 minutes until we reached the ferry across the Incomati River at Marracuene. After the ferry was loaded with passengers and what seemed to be an inadvisable number of cars (six!), we were ferried across the river, where a safari-style vehicle was waiting to shuttle us another 30 minutes down the road (and a stretch of sand that was only a “road” in the loosest sense of the word) to our destination. Continue reading Macaneta Beach Weekend→
It’s Thursday morning in Maputo,1 which means that we are starting our fourth day in Africa. I know I’ve only updated social media in that time period to the tune of zOMG SOOO TIRED, so I’m going to do my best to cram the last few days into this post. (Spoiler: We do a lot of sleeping.2)
On Monday, we arrived in Maputo. After much-needed naps and showers, we plodded about the house slowly, trying to gather our thoughts, until our friend Tiffany and her friend Jeff arrived home. They took us out to dinner at a restaurant (the name of which is lost in a jetlagged blur), where we drank Mozambican beer (Laurentina Preta) and ate the best fried calamari I’ve ever had and grilled prawns.
Somewhere around the three-quarters mark of our 11-hour flight from London to Johannesburg (the second of three flights), when I was tired, hungry, cold, and unable to remedy any of the aforementioned problems, I thought that we would never reach Mozambique and that we would be on that flight forever. (I may occasionally tend toward the dramatic.)
Happily, I was wrong, and we made it to Maputo, Mozambique this morning. We arrived tired and in desperate need of a shower, and, while we’ve each had a nap and a shower, I think I still need a good ten hours more sleep before I feel like a human again. (If this post rambles or is incoherent, now you know why.)
We left cold, snowy Chicago on Saturday afternoon for our three-part journey to Maputo. The first leg took us to London, where we lucked out and had a gorgeous day. It was sixty degrees and sunny, and so we wandered around the city, soaking up sunshine and admiring the springtime flowers. We ate samosas alongside the Thames and watched the London Eye spin, and met a former colleague of Marc’s for coffee and got a tour of her neighborhood.
London Eye & River Thames
We boarded the plane to Johannesburg exhausted and prepared for a nice long nap, but we ended up only sleeping minimally. (I got four hours, more than Marc.) Instead, we watched movie after movie (and, in my case, three episodes of Cheers, which I was delighted to find in the British Airways in-flight entertainment system) in the darkened cabin and lamented our inability to sleep.
Finally, that flight ended and, after some typical international transfer formalities, we boarded a plane to Maputo. The flight from Johannesburg to Maputo was short (basically just long enough to be served a tiny bagel sandwich and cheese danish). It seemed like we spent more time waiting in line for a visa at the Maputo airport than we did on the flight, but that’s probably just an exaggeration. (After all, no one was serving me cheese danishes to distract me while in line for the visa.)
Our friend picked us up at the airport and brought us home, leaving us with the all-important decision of what we should do first: nap or shower. Having done both, it may finally be time to pick up the guidebooks and decide what we are going to do now that we are here.
I almost can’t believe it, but TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WE LEAVE FOR AFRICA.
After months of dreaming, planning, and anticipation, it’s finally here. Our bags are (mostly) packed, and our farewell tour (which stretched from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Indianapolis to Champaign to Galesburg to Chicago) has concluded. (Thanks to everyone who came out to see us and/or sheltered us at various stops along the way! We love you all.) We’re just finishing up some last-minute details, and then, before you know it, we’ll be boarding the plane …
If you’ve read Part I of our trip from Brooklyn to Illinois, you know that our road trip had hit a snag before we had even left the city. (Or, more accurately, a snag had hit us, in the form of a huge bus.1) We figured we had probably just reset our moving karma and the rest of the trip would be cake, but, alas, it most certainly was not.
First, the good: On Friday night, even with the delays attendant to being hit by a bus (dealing with the police and the rental car company and then hitting rush hour because we had been delayed in the city), we made it to our goal town of Weirton, West Virginia.
Now, the even better: On Saturday, we traveled on to Indianapolis, only about 5 hours away, and visited some friends (also former Brooklynites) who live there. We hadn’t seen them in over a year, so it was nice to spend some time with them and their son (who had turned two since we had seen him last and acquired a huge vocabulary).
Everyone had been warning us about the impending snowstorm, and we were compulsively checking the weather. The last thing we wanted to do was be stranded on the highway in a minivan full of 95% of our worldly possessions during a snowstorm, and we were trying to determine the best time to leave Indianapolis to avoid this fate (or if we could leave at all on Sunday as planned). When we woke up on Sunday, we found a few inches2 of snow on the ground (and on our vehicle) but there didn’t appear to be any ice at that point. The weather showed snow continuing to fall in Indianapolis for the rest of the day, but the remainder of our drive looked pretty clear. Continue reading Brooklyn to Illinois, Part II (Or, Do You Know Where the Jack Is Located?)→
