Welcome to our blog! Taryn's an old pro based on her practice blogging in India, and Kraemer has had to report on his ridiculous amount of world traveling to so many friends and family that blogging is really just second nature. No, but really, we do hope you find an entry or two entertaining. Otherwise, this is just our way to let our parents know that we're still alive and kicking, even on the continent of Africa.

As a disclaimer, though this is written in tandem, please recognize that some things would only come out of Kraemer's mouth. :)

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Bandit

O Escondidinho

Taryn and I went to Ilha De Mozambique because everybody says its awesome. It was briefly the capital of Portuguese East Africa and, as you do when you're conquering foreign lands, you build a big-ass fort. The fort on Ilha de Mozambique is appropriately named the Fortaleza, which I translate to mean, The Big-Ass Fort. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which in my mind means that it has been recognized as of such significant cultural importance to the world that the United Nations will step in and insure that it will be here for our grandchildren to see. Apparently that is not the case and a lot of people I talked to on the island indicated that it might lose its designation. They didn't really seem to care as UNESCO hadn't really done anything to help the island.

The island is quite the dichotomy of cultures. The north is composed of stone houses built by the Portuguese and is appropriately named Stone Town (you have to like a town with a no bullshit naming convention). The southern half of the island is made up of a town of locals. Some of whom fish, but most of whom just hang out for the day in relative poverty.

But what a place to be poor. The beaches are beautiful, the weather is pretty darn nice because of the sea breeze, and there is a fair amount of tasty quality seafood. Apparently, this high-life of the do-nothingness has attracted quite a few people to the island (or convinced nobody to ever leave). The unsustainable overpopulation has lead to some bad outcomes, such as the inability of the island to support the amount of waste its inhabitants produce. Most of the locals grab a squat in the ocean, so it's not exactly a swimming beach. I kind of think having the gentle waves lapping at your feet during your morning movement sounds refreshing...until I realize your movement will also soon be lapping at your feet.

That said, Taryn and I stayed at an idyllic restored Portuguese house in Stone Town named O Escondidinho, which means the bandit. It was nice and peaceful and had one heck of a restaurant where we ate bolo chocolate (the best brownie in the country) and had a Lobster that was better than anything I've eaten in Maine.

We hit up the Palace, or governor’s residence, which is still decorated with colonial style furniture and gives you a pretty good idea of how everyone lived circa 1500. Apparently it was still in use around 1970 when the president sat on an antique bench and broke it. He declared on the spot that the place was becoming a museum.

In addition to the palace there was also a maritime museum that wasn't half bad. It had all of the regular stuff: cannons, swords, anchors and the like. But it also had a ton of Ming dynasty porcelain. Apparently a shipwreck nearby the island was carrying porcelain and in 2002 a Dutch archeologist team found the largest collection of porcelain ever. I thought that they did a pretty good job of donating some back to the island for the museum but according to the locals, they didn't do enough. I always think that unless the shipwreck contains something that's of "significant" cultural importance (like the lost crown of Botswana or some such) then finders, keepers.


The Fortelasia was also a huge slave trading port. They would put slaves in small boats and string them together forming a daisy chain of rowboats filled with slaves. I'm sure that a bit of the explanation was lost in translation but you essentially picked up a few slaves on your way out of the harbor and then set sail for Indonesia or some other little spice island. The guard also seemed to be quite proud of the execution site. I guess that's the part of the tour that elicits the most reaction, and on a sleepy little island town, about as much excitement as the guard expects.





Another strange happening on the island is the complete lack of fresh water wells. You would think that before you declare a place a capital you would at least get past Maslow's base level, but instead the Portuguese built all of the buildings to channel water into basement systems that are still used today (though the majority of water is piped in from the mainland).





On the way to the airport we passed a little village that was next to what use to be one of the largest soap manufacturers in Southern Africa. During the war it fell into disuse and disrepair and the locals put the scrap metal to good use, making it into roofing tiles.




When we were in the airport I came upon this wonderful window into the Mozambique psyche. For those of you who do not read Portuguese, the note says, "Be advised, Do not use this urinal"...it's difficult to read because someone pissed on it.

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