The Untamed North

After a bit more that the usual amount of arguing with the bus conductor and driver (and entire village that appeared from the woodworks to put their two cents in!) we got to Pemba town.

 

Unwilling to pay the extravagant taxi fee to the backpackers place, and being in serious need of some exercise, we decided to walk most of the way, and then hitch if necessary.

As it turns out that the guy who gave us directions wasn’t fully accurate in his description of the distance. He said “it is faaaar, when it should in fact behave been: “eish, it is faaaaaar! Thankfully we didn’t get all that far before a Chapa (a truck in this case) picked us up and dropped us at Wimbe Beach only faaar from the lodge!). We stumbled into “Russell’s Place” only wheezing slightly and I promptly set up my tent (after haggling the price down a bit) at the far end of a nice lawn (what seemed like an ideal spot at the time, but later proved to be flawed in one very serious way…).

Pim, eager as ever to catch up on his sleep took a nap while I, despite our long hike to the place was eager to get a feel for what was around (mainly to find a place to have supper – Russell’s place was pricey!

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a thing! I then changed my objective slightly to finding a way down to the beach through all the busy building sites (no housing bubbled has burst around here!). Alas in this objective I was also unsuccessful and so I returned to base where I had to settle for a swimming pool and good food!

The next day we spent wading through the Mozambican bureaucracy in an attempt to get a copy of our passports “notarized” which was eventually successful. It did give us a good excuse to explore town and we had a good lunch (fish of course) at what I reluctantly accepted as a good price – for Mozambique. The reason we went through so much grief to get the stamp was that we didn’t want to carry around our originals (for obvious reasons) and we’d already been checked several times in Mozambique. One of the times – in Nampula we didn’t have them on us and were promptly ordered to the police station. We were only a few streets down from the hotel then, and convinced the pair of well armed (think sub-machine guns) officers to allow Pim to run back and get them while I stayed as a hostage. The fantas we bought them, I think, helped our case along. After we’d been cleaned I lost the ability to translate their mixture of Portuguese and Swahili and so wasn’t able to understand that he and his friend were also very hungry, and so we got away.

Sometime in the next four days of lounging by the pool and eating freshly baked bread rolls (with fish samosas in them) for breakfast, Pim carried on to Tz and I met lots of other interesting people. One of the days another budget backpacker arrived - a Swede who’s uncle my family knew from Zambia! Small damn world we live in!

Any way that night the most massive storm raged and while the Swede’s tent had a broken pole, it did have the rainproof outer-layer that mine lacked. So when the two of us met at the coffee table the following morning it was only too clear which of us had had a more peaceful slumber!

Even before I’d gone to bed I’d set up cups and bowls to try and catch the biggest leaks. It was so heavy that when I did get to bed, I lay there for about an hour and a half repositioning my (now floating) water catching devices and thinking: “surely this can’t go on for more that 5 minutes, there can’t be this much water on earth let alone floating above it!”

I was wrong and it quickly became apparent why my choice of site had been wrong too! Being at the bottom end of the (gently sloping) garden, a lake rapidly formed, tuning my tent into an island. Luckily I’d pegged the thing down properly or I’d have drifted out to sea and would be sending blog updates from Madagascar!

As the floor of the tent rose and strained against the pegs, I closed my eyes and told myself that I was sleeping in a nice, comfortable waterbed. It was comfortable; through I failed to incorporate the constant dripping on my forehead (see Chinese water-torture) into my delusion.

Having failed to ignore the worsening problem, I did the next best thing – I ran away from it! I threw my raincoat over my rucksack, unpegged the tent and floated it to higher ground where I removed all my valuables and dashed to the bar.

Luckily I found refuge in the (mostly) unused upper deck of the bar. And thankfully it didn’t rain like that again for the rest of my time in Pemba.

The one day we (the Swede - Viktor and I) got a lift to Wimbe beach where we rented some fins and snorkeling masks (I’m getting pretty hooked by the whole snorkeling thing by now) and swam out to the reef. It was nice, but in our stinginess - refusing to hire a boat - we missed out on the best bits.

While at the diving shop I noticed a sign offering snorkeling with dolphins for 20 USD. This was something that had been recommended to me by my grandparents. (Yes, they saw it on TV!)

The catch was there needed to be a minimum of four people so we spent the next couple of days trying to convince people to join us. We got one extra person eventually on our last day and headed down to the dive shop (willing to split the cost of the 4^th person if we had to).

We didn’t have to; and so off we sped in the speedboat in search of some dolphins! While cruising out to the dolphin zone we noticed thousands of massive jellyfish forming a minefield below us just like that scene in Finding Nemo (except these jellies were huge ugly brown ones with a couple of deadly – looking blue ones in between).

Having passed the minefield, the waters cleared up, we spotted the pod and gave chase. When we were a couple of meters away we anxiously plunged in and swam after them. They fled.

It was a fairly disappointing first foray, but we jumped in the boat, caught up and tried again. We repeated this several times, each time getting closer. Once they really seemed to be playing with me, dodging this way and that, staying just out of reach. It was fantastic – one of the highlights of my trip, and we all had big stupid grins on our faces the whole time.

Well, the whole time until they led us back into the minefield! We hesitated to jump in, but our stern faced captain insisted these jellies were of a harmless variety. Not wanting to be the only fool with jelly burns, we jumped in simultaneously.

Instantly I was struck by a burning sensation all over, but I assumed my mind was fooling me. I caught a glimpse of a dolphin and gave chase. It really felt like you were in a video game, swimming unnaturally fast because of the flippers, you had to dodge the jellies in three dimensions!

I was quite enjoying myself, but, having to focus all my energy on dodging jellies (you only have one life in this game!) I lost track of the dolphins. I stopped to locate them and realised that the burning hadn’t been imaginary, and was getting worse! I rushed get out, fearing some sort of allergic reaction.  

Ever the scientist though, I paused to poke one, just to see….

On the way back the burning subsided, and we stopped for a quick inspection of a wreck (thankfully there weren’t the usual guardians – hammerhead sharks – that you’d find any movie featuring an underwater wreck! Then paused at the bar on the beach for a sundowner (helps with the jelly burns!)

The next day we got a taxi (well before dawn of course!) to the bus station, headed down south (we hoped) to civilisation.

P.S. Please forgive me if there are more mistakes than usual - being too lazy to sit and type this myself, I had a secretory do it instead, then went through it quickly and corrected the obvious ones...