A week in Maputo

We arrived in Mozambique with high expectations. Dreams of white beaches, unexplored world class fishing, awesome uncrowded surf breaks and some good seafood. My first impression upon landing is that it was cleaner than India. I know that's similar to saying less painful than shaving with a cheese-grater, but these are first impressions. Our house is a nice three-story building with parquet wood floors and about 5 rooms. We have a distiller made in the U.S. by GE "Durastill." I thought it looked like a great piece of machinery, but ours tasted horrible.

Whether it's paranoia instilled in the U.S. government or a true picture of the crime rate in Maputo, we definitely have bars on every window, guards and a plethora of razor wire. But just judging from our neighborhood (the nice part of town) most places have at least a serious electric fence or razor wire.

It's custom in Maputo to take your wedding pictures on the jetty; maybe it's also good luck or some such, I'm not quite sure.

But one of the nice things about Mozambique is that you can drink anywhere you want to. And that is greatly facilitated by a plethora of people with ice chests selling refrescoes. So on the way to the fish market I grabbed a beer and took in the beach. The beach is nice and there is a pretty big tide, which leaves the dhows (or small boats with a sail) stranded high and dry.

We spent the first weekend at Bilene, a small beach resort up the coast about three hours. It takes a while to get out of the city because there is only one road heading north and everybody had built along side it or at least comes there to set up shop. Turn the same road into a turning lane, and then add pedestrians flocking up and down the sides and you have the makings of a very nice African traffic jam. Crazily about thirty minutes outside of the city there is a stadium that could easily seat 80,000 and is being built by the Chinese. Maybe my development theory is incorrect, and maybe they have the infrastructure base to support such a stadium, but it seems a bit presumptuous and a huge waste of money when the per person GDP is $330. But whatever, they are building it, and Louisiana did the same thing, and I love Tiger Stadium.

It rained on us when we arrived at the beach and while trying to make it to our original accommodations it quickly became apparent that four-wheel drive has its place and that place is Africa.