You meet the most interesting people: Pemba

In need of some cash for the next phase of my trip – out to Ibo Island, which apparently doesn’t have electricity, much less an ATM – I decided this morning to take a trip into Pemba town. On the Lonely Planet map it looks like a smallish town with 5 or 6 main streets, but as the taxi took me to the intersection I had requested, it became apparent that it was big and bustling.

I was dropped in front of the Standard Bank, and thought I’d better do my sightseeing before stopping at the ‘money machine’ in sight of many interested eyes. The main intersection had a few 3-5 storey concrete buildings, and there was a ‘strip mall’ development just to the north with two other banks – BIM and Barclays. The map had shown an ‘escarpment’ and a big church, so I set out on foot in search.

But beyond the main intersection, the roads and the town soon seemed to crumble away. Within a block in each direction, I found high security walls, small concrete buildings, litter choked alleys and rough bamboo shops. For the first time on the trip, I felt uneasy.

Spotting 5 other white males, probably Portuguese employees of some aid organization, I managed to amble along just a few feet in front of them, relieving my probably-unjustified sense of paranoia with a pretend posse.

And then, just as I reached a dusty, impromptu ‘shoe market’, a beaten up black truck veered off the road and a friendly face called out to me. Like a knight on a white steed, Michelle scooped me up and took me on a whirlwind of errands and bars with views.

I had met Michelle over lunch the day before. An American who has lived in Mozambique for almost 2 decades, initially running a tourist facility down south, she is now ‘hanging out’ in the guest house next door to mine as she prepares to move to Argentina. She is a smart, witty, confident woman with with her own elegant beauty and a wonderfully positive view of the trials and tribulations of living in a 3rd world country. But she claims to have grown tired of being a "wealthy" visible minority, and tired of having to haggle over everything from food to official papers. She wants to find a place that offers cooler temperatures, fresh water, rolling hills and invisibility.

Like her, many of the people she introduced me to in Pemba were in some form of transition. Bruce, her passenger in the truck this morning, is a handsome, dark-haired South African with startling blue eyes whose contract in Malawi had dissolved leaving him penniless. He was looking for work in Pemba while waiting to hitch a working ride across to Madagascar on a yacht.

Pieter, the 51 year old, who runs a successful dive shop on the beach and has built the beautiful 2-room guest house next door around a 1,000 year old Baobab tree, is planning to complete the last phase of rooms in a year (or 2, or maybe 6 months) before selling the place and moving to South America as well. Peru maybe. In the meantime, he had just been given a lovely wooden dhow that he might recondition for cruises. Unfortunately, as we drove by it later that afternoon it was in the process of sinking.

At our first stop on the tour, we stopped at a very elegant bar/café high on the escarpment with “the best view of the bay” and clearly in a better part of town. It was also the place to buy western delicacies you couldn’t find elsewhere – like fresh lettuce and frozen meats. There Michelle introduced me to a square jawed, steel-eyed Afrikaner named Arthur who had sailed his dhow into the harbour below that morning. It was a gorgeous live-aboard expedition boat that he had just finished rebuilding after an unfortunate run-in with the authorities had left it beached and breaking up. This storey sounded very familiar. Within minutes, I realized that his boat down in the harbour was “Fim do Mundo”, the Ibo-based cruising dhow that had drawn me initially to Northern Mozambique. I had longed to find myself on a traditional (yet comfortable) sailing dhow cruising for several days amongst the deserted white sand islands of the Quirimbas Archipelago. I knew that his unfortunate run in with the authorities had put him out of business, but I was on my way to Ibo in the hope of finding an alternative.

I hadn’t realized that he had revived the business, but frustrations with his incompetent skipper had caused him to shut it down again just the week before, cancelling bookings through December.

Arthur was, without a doubt, a comic book character. He had been in the South African military, but without a war, what good was that. He had run a guest house, started this ‘live-aboard’ cruise business and now was buying and renovating properties on Ibo Island. Along the way he had had run-ins with local power figures. Anger management issues, he claimed. But he “knew how to handle himself” and had come to an ”agreement” with those he needed. I didn’t know whether this involved his military experience or his superior negotiating skills, but he certainly exuded the vibes of a hardened mercenary.

In this little corner of Northern Mozambique, the characters are larger than life. The ‘rules’ are frustrating for some, but for others, it’s an opportunity to set your own rules. Survival is a common theme. “This new generation has no clue how to survive in a place like this” Arthur growled at one point.

Not to say that there are none of the ‘next generation’ here. My dinner companion last night was a delightful and earnest young man from England, managing a partnership between ophthalmology departments and based at a private university in Nampula. In fact, everyone else seemed to be arriving from or departing to some international aid program – young, clean cut Europeans in sandals and tidy cotton clothes.

But my own romantic view of this adventure – the dissolute Englishman drinking Gin and Tonic in the courtyard in Cochin – makes the ‘characters’ far more fun.

If Ihla de Mocambique was about the ambience, Pemba is about the people that move through it.

(PS: Sorry, still no ability to upload photos. May have to figure out how to make them smaller. I'll probably be out of contact for the next 5 days on Ibo Island. Apparently it doesn't even have electricity.)