I’m not really sure where I am, but I know I have begun a journey to another time, another place.
As dusk fell during our drive, many of the women and children walking by the roadside were threaded their way home from streams and hand pumps balancing heavy plastic containers of water on their heads – children as you
ng as 5 or 6 carrying their share.
We descended to the coast and the island became apparent in the half darkness, a very few lights tracing a low line across a choppy body of water. The road is suddenly a single lane, concrete bridge, 3.5 km in length and only a few feet above high tide. Turn-offs at intervals allow cars and 'bakkies' to pull over and let those coming in the other direction pass.
As I write this, it is 7pm and I am sitting on a covered terrace of the Hotel Escondidinho on Ihla de Mocambique. Although we are over 3 km out into the Indian Ocean, the air is still heavy with humidity and only the faintest stirring in the air. A small trickle of sweat is running down my back between my shoulder blades.
This hotel must once have been a grand colonial villa. The garden and terrace merge almost seamlessly into the interior - red tile flooring, white adobe arches, white-washed, rough-hewn beams forming high ceilings. I’ve eaten my simple grilled prawn and coconut rice looking out into the darkened garden, only the shadow of palm trees against the star studded sky.
Having arrived after dark, my half-lit impression of my own room is of grandeur from another era – Colonial Portuguese architecture and furnishings, accented by imposing, dark African masks and implements. A vast, mosquito netted bed set between two huge windows, opened inwards to catch whatever breezes they can through heavy screens.
I started the trip at 4am this morning, in a chic business hotel built over the airport terminal. Through a succession of flights (Jo-burg to Maputo to Beira to Nampula) the airports got progressively smaller, hotter and easier to navigate. Security follows no such logic - Maputo, the capital, is casual. We wander through beeping metal detectors and pick up our carry on from inoperable x-ray machines. However, tiny Nampula requires detailed bag searches, pat downs, and for some poor souls, a quick trip into a side room. I felt I was wandering further and further off of the beaten track.
The two-hour drive from Nampula to the island took us through a landscape virtually untouched by the colonial powers. From the air, I had seen no roads; only a lacy network of footpaths, hut clearings and subsistence fields. Hulking elephantine shapes rose from the flat ground at intervals, barren, oddly-shaped, disconnected. On the ground, the primary architecture was mud brick and thatch.
As dusk fell during our drive, many of the women and children walking by the roadside were threaded their way home from streams and hand pumps balancing heavy plastic containers of water on their heads – children as you
ng as 5 or 6 carrying their share. We descended to the coast and the island became apparent in the half darkness, a very few lights tracing a low line across a choppy body of water. The road is suddenly a single lane, concrete bridge, 3.5 km in length and only a few feet above high tide. Turn-offs at intervals allow cars and 'bakkies' to pull over and let those coming in the other direction pass.
The city we entered, once an Arab shipping port, once a major slave trading centre, capital of the early Portuguese colony until the late 1800s, is enveloped in darkness. In the light of the headlights, I can only make out crumbling mud walls and a cobbled road along the seawall.
The driver deposited me in the pool of light outside the hotel, and here I sit, wondering what I will discover at sunrise.
