Seafood & Souvenirs

Thursday, July 17, 2014

After about 6 weeks in the park, we were invited on a trip to Beira (the second-biggest city in Mozambique) last weekend by one of the other people here at the park. His name is Andre, and he’s an agricultural specialist who works for the park and helps local people improve the efficiency and sustainability of their farming practices. Anyway, he was going there himself for a little R & R, and knew that we wanted to get out and see more of Mozambique, so he invited us to come along. He has friends in Beira and he knows the town well, so it was perfect opportunity for us. We left the park Sunday morning and got back Monday afternoon.

It was a short trip, but pretty cool all the same.

The drive is about three hours, and Caden didn't need any entertainment the whole way there. Being in a car and driving around is something he's been begging for, for weeks now, and he soaked up the whole experience, staring out the window at everything he could see. At one point he and Andre had a little game going. Andre would give the car horn a "Beep Beep," and Caden would copy and say, "Beep Beep!" This went on for a while. I'm not sure who was having more fun.

 Public transportation, Mozambique style. I think the goat has the best seat on the van. ;-)

We got to eat great food at several seaside restaurants, we got to do some souvenir shopping (a few very cool wood carvings are now on the shelf in our cabin!) and grocery shopping, and most importantly, Caden got to see the ocean for the first time ever!

And it was the Indian Ocean too!

When we arrived in town, the first thing we did was head to a cool little restaurant that was right on the beach. We had beef roast. It was good.

The original restaurant burned down a few years ago. What they did was convert the old store room into the new restaurant.

The restaurant. 

The beach.

Caden didn’t waste any time letting us know what he wanted to do, and he started exploring the beach and the water in the typical Caden fashion...he went straight for the ocean with no fear, which caused mommy a bit of stress in the beginning. Luckily though, we had our handy little baby leash, which gave Caden the opportunity to explore without giving mommy a heart attack. It wasn’t long before a knee-high wave (knee high on a two-year-old) bowled him over, and he was a little more thoughtful about the water after that. One of the funniest things about all this was that he was totally naked, other than the baby leash. The few local kids that were running around playing in the water were doing the same thing, so we thought hey, why not! It was so much fun watching that little naked toddler run around in the sand and the ocean for more than three hours, and it was an experience that we’ll not soon forget. And we weren’t the only ones that enjoyed it! The local Mozambicans were fascinated by that little naked white kid, and we were approached twice by people who wanted to know if we could take a picture of them with him. He played with some of the other kids for a little while, and also got to pet a really nice dog that a lady was walking on the beach.

 Baby leash!

The wet sand fascinated him!

Can't stop to chat, Dad, I got things to explore!

The baby and the doggy both have similar leashes... probably for very similar reasons. ;-)

 

He splashes nature and nature splashes back.

 Don't step on my sand!

Marching to the ocean, gonna make a splash!

Hi there.

 Naked baby on the loose!

What a fun day, and it's only lunch time.

For dinner we went to another really cool restaurant on the beach. It's called Club Nautica. You have to pay to get in. The food is worth it though.

 At this one we got a seafood platter and a pizza. Pizza! It's been so long since we've had a good pizza. I miss Papa Murphy's so much! :-(

Funny coffee-related pictures in their menu. 

If the one on the top left was a tea cup instead of a coffee mug, I would wear it on a t-shirt!

The moon was amazingly bright that night. I tried to take a picture of it, but sadly, my camera wasn't quite up to the challenge.

A better pic.

Beira has been described to me as what Portugal would look like after the apocalypse, and I believe it.

It’s a big town, but almost all of it looks like Downtown Slum. There’s garbage piled up here and there, the buildings are all old and many are abandoned or full of squatters, the people are a strange mix of everything from business suites to traditional capulanas.

Random picture of a colorful wall separating the road from the ocean. Couldn't decide where it would fit best so I'm just throwing it here.

The one exception to the slumminess of Beira (is that even a word?) would be this street that Andre drove us through, where they've tried to preserve the buildings that were built by the Portuguese back when it was a colony.

Imagine how they must have looked when they were new.

We drove by the Grande Hotel. What a sight! It was built by the Portuguese, but taken over by impoverished squatters after Mozambique gained independence in 1975.

We drove past, but didn't stop for the grand tour.

What a history that building has known! Much like the rest of Beira and Mozambique in general, it has seen the best and the worst of the people who reside in it. 

Let me switch tracks and spend a moment on something more bright and cheerful: the capulana. The capulana is the traditional dress for women in Mozambique. It is a long piece of fabric that comes in many colors, shades and designs and it is gorgeous! The crafter in me is just dying to get her hands on a few yards of that lovely fabric. Now I only have one picture of women in capulanas that I took with my own little camera.

Here's my one picture. ;-)

This is mostly because I didn’t want to be one of those “annoying tourists,” who takes pictures of all the locals, (aren't their capulanas gorgeous, though?) but I also didn’t have a lot of opportunity for pictures anyway since we didn’t do a whole lot of walking around in Beira. In a two day trip we didn’t have time for much other than, “Okay, we want to go here so let’s drive to it on the way out of the park” and “We want to go there, so let’s drive there on the way back to the park.” At the same time, though, I really want you guys to see more examples of capulanas, so I found this cool pdf, written by a woman living in Mozambique, that explains many of the ways a girl can use this amazingly versatile fabric, and here’s a video slideshow of African women in capulanas. I didn't make it so don't gimme credit.

I’m told there’s a good shop in Chimoio for capulanas. I want to go there. I want to go there with lots of money. Badly.

Anyway, back to Beira. As I said, it was a short trip, but we had fun, got some great seafood and some very cool souvenirs. And on the way back to the park, we stopped at this convenient store for lunch, and had hamburgers.

Glorious hamburgers!