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Bon dia, amigos! (Good day, friends!)

I have now been in Mozambique for 2 weeks, and arrived in Lichinga (my home for the next year) last week. We (me and my partner in Mozambique, Tim) flew to Johannesburg on Friday the 15th August and stayed there for one day, where we got a small taste of South Africa.

Lunch that day was a 'braie', what the Australians call a 'barbie' and we know and love as a BBQ. The so called nibbles consisted of bits of steak barbecued and I was full by the end of that. We also tried beetroot soup, very novel. The worrying part is that the soup was about the same colour as my rabies injections...!

The 8 hour bus journey from Jo'burg to Maputo was fairly uneventful, until we reached the border crossing and didn't know what was going on. We abandoned the bus (because everyone else was doing the same) and got our South Africa visas stamped, got back on the bus, drove about 500m, got off the bus, got our Mozambique visas stamped, got back on the bus, got back of the bus while our baggage was checked, got back on the bus and finally were on our way again. Madness!

The most exciting part of the journey was seeing a yellow VW Beetle coming along the road towards us. (Which will make sense only to people in the BB, and maybe a few other select individuals! Yellow!)

Our week in Maputo was fairly relaxed with a few meetings with Suimo, the group of lawyers who run Nakosso, which in turn runs the Learning Centre in Lichinga. Complicated!

We saw a bit of Maputo, and a few photos are included, most notably a yellow mini. (Which, again, will make sense only to people in the BB, sorry! Mini punch!) We were staying in an apartment in Maputo rented by Suimo, and staying with two other of their employees: a South African lawyer called Louise, and a Swiss agronomist called Heinz, who were both very nice and hospitable, and Heinz had a bit to tell us about Lichinga and some of the people there.

In some ways Maputo reminded me of India: dry, hot, dusty. The streets are pretty noisy with horns and chapa (taxi) drivers cruising and shouting for passengers, and the traffic is pretty mad and lawless, with no stop rules at junctions, however not as bad as the traffic in India.

The rich poor divide is pretty apparent, but there is not the caste system as there is in India. Those who can afford it have maids and butlers who are on a minimum wage as oppose to servants being paid peanuts in India. However, seeing nice houses hidden behind security fences and gardens on the opposite side of the road to the much poorer one room wood and corrugated iron shacks is quite bewildering.

Maputo is however very cosmopolitanal and not the 'real' Africa at all. The Portuguese (who left in 1975) influence is still very apparent, with little coffee shops on every corner, and there is a lot of western influence in the architecture. The train station (picture enclosed) was designed in part my Mr Eiffel of Eiffel tower fame, although it is suspected that he never set foot in Mozambique!

We visited the Africa Bar in Maputo on two occasions, a bar with some very good live music, if you like that sort of thing. A kind of African blend of blues and jazz. On our second time there we were approached by a bloke called Tom, who is from the UK and has just completed his gap year in South Africa with Project Trust! Very scary coincidence!

Also during the week we had a go at handwashing our clothes, which was a novel experience, but I'm sure the novelty would wear off if I had to do it for any length of time!

We flew here to Lichinga on Saturday 23rd August on a 3 leg trip via two other towns in Mozambique. The final leg (Nampula to Lichinga) we got to Lichinga and couldn't land because of the weather, so flew back to Nampula for a two hour wait while the weather cleared. Lichinga is very different to Maputo, with much fewer cars on the road and more bikes. Only the centre of the town has tarmac roads and the rest is dirt tracks, which will get interesting in the rainy season! (December to about May/June.)

It is winter at the moment but the weather is still hot, about the same sort of temperatures we had in the UK during the heat wave just before I left. At night however it gets pretty chilly, as there is no cloud cover to retain the heat. Winters are dry and cool, summers are hot and wet. The sky here is quite amazing! There seems to be more stars in the sky then back home, but it may be because I can see more due to the lack of light pollution. The moon last night I noticed was a thin crescent, but the crescent was at the bottom of the moon, like a smile or a bowl, I don't know if that's because of my location on the earth?

Our accommodation is fine, nothing spectacular but I am (so far) enjoying the relatively simple lifestyle! Electricity has been on most of the time so far. It was off when we arrived, then was on the next day, then off, and has been on most of the time since then. Apparently we live in a bad area though so I am expecting it to get worse! We have running water most of the time too, but again, that goes off and on, and hot running water is a definite no.

We have a single floor house with 3 bedrooms, dining room/lounge area, bathroom and a kind of utility room area with a sink. Cooking is done outside on an open clay furnace on which charcoal is burnt as fuel. No fridge, no television, no microwave, no freezer, no computers, no games consoles.... its a hard life(!) We can pick up the (mainly) English speaking radio station FM2 from Malawi, and that's about it. However I was quite impressed to hear them mention Northampton in a news broadcast, in relation to some scam someone was trying to pull of in Britain.

We start teaching on Monday 1st September, and I am quite nervous to say the least! I am looking forward to it though, as I have had two weeks hear now and am looking forward to doing some work! The Learning Centre is about 5 to 10 minutes walk from home (I am calling it home already, that's quite scary!) and has 6 computers in one room with a white board, and 13 chairs and a white board in another, for teaching English. I am taking the English class first, so there will be 13 more excellent speakers of English in Lichinga in 10 weeks time, hopefully!!

We have met a few of the ex-patriots locals from the UK, we met Deb in a shop in Lichinga, her and husband James have been here about 2 months. Last night they introduced us to QC, a guest house a little outside of Lichinga, which is where many of the ex-pats and other foreigners can be found on a Friday and Saturday night. A very pleasant and enjoyable evening was had, and I guarantee, the route to get there is one Jim (Sandall) would love to bring his Land Rover down in 4WD!

Well I think that's about all the news I have to date, enough to satisfy your curiosity for what I have been up to I hope!

Thanks again for all your support in helping me to get here, you are all wonderful people!!

Adeus!

Nic

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