férias (vacation)

yup, i finally had a vacation...it was surreal and wonderful. jeff came to visit, and he gets 1000s of bonus points for being the first person i know brave enough and willing enough to make it all the way over here! we met up in maputo, which was a bit overwhelming to me as i hadn't been there (or any big city) in almost a year. just the fast pace, the number of cars (instead of bikes!) trying to run me over, having to worry more about pickpockets, etc. but it was fine, i shockingly knew my way around more than i thought. we had fun, jeff indulged my desires for thai food, macaroni and cheese, coffee, and other things i can't get in quelimane. we walked around the city, did some souvenir shopping, saw a really bad (but new!) movie. it was fun. only spent about a day and a half there, then we came back to quelimane. here jeff got a whirlwind tour, and because he declined to experience the wonders of bike taxis, we did it all walking! we saw the city, bought capulanas, made him some capulana pants; he met my pc friends, and we made dinner with my neighbor and good friend gina. jeff got along fabulously well with his spanish, he learned how to take a bucket bath, he ate zambezian food. i think i showed him a good time!

from there, we took the LONG bus-ride from quelimane to maputo. we chose this option a) so jeff could see some of the countryside and b) so he could experience the wonders of the mozambican public transport system. now, his report will probably differ a bit from mine, but this was by far the NICEST public transport i've been on in this country: new, comfortable seats; no trash on the floor; no farm animals; no people in the aisles. it was truly incredible, and i thought that long trip was going to suck a lot, but it actually wasn't that bad with a friend. i'd do it again. the only downside was that we made SUCH good time that we got to maputo at like 1 am, and had to wait at the bus stop (a place i saw another pcv aptly describe as several football fields full of buses) til dawn, so that was kind of a drag. but we headed out of there bright an early, got to downtown maputo to catch a chapa to namaacha, where i'd done my home-stay during training.

it was really cool, but weird, to go back over roads and into a town that was so familiar but that i'd been gone from for so long. it was made a little weirder by the fact that when we got in my family wasn't home (they were all at school). but i gave jeff the short tour of the town, and when we went back to the house the girls started coming home one by one and it was SO awesome to see them - the little ones especially have grown so much! they were so sweet and i was so comfortable with them, it was almost as if i'd never left. they were really wonderful to let me just drop in, with a male, non-portuguese speaking friend, and it made me feel even more than i already did like they really are family. it also made me sad i'm so far away; i love zambezia, but volunteers further south get a chance to drop by more, something i wish i could do. ah well.

the real adventure started after our night in namaacha! we walked to the border of swaziland, negotiated that without too much hassel (travel note: highly beneficial to travel with a hiking backpack, customs guys almost never want to take the trouble of digging into them!), and caught a bus to manzini, the second-largest town in swaziland. the landscape was beautiful, understandably similar to namaacha, and although we didn't partake of any tourist activities there, the newspaper we picked up said it's full of hostels and safaris and all kinds of cool things, so i'd really like to go back there. in manzini we had lunch, and we were supposed to meet up with a friend from college who lives there, but that didn't work out. so we had to figure out how to get from there to joburg on our own. the bus lot there is not as big as the one in maputo, but possibly more crowded and confusing, and after jeff struck out finding transport i went to give it a try. as i was asking around for buses to joburg (in english, very odd), a guy volunteered his services to help me, which i accepted because we really needed to get on a bus that day, although i was a bit wary because, well, life has taught me to be wary of strange men offering to help obviously foreign women. but he was super nice! he walked me all the way across the maze of buses, found a kombi (chapa in swazi) going to joburg with a company he knew, made sure i was all set and they weren't ripping me off, and wished me luck and went on his way. amazing! so jeff and i made it to joburg fine, and there we had our second it-could-have-been-sketchy-but-people-were-nice experience. through a planning error on our part (and trouble figuring out the swazi cell phone system) we didn't have a hotel in joburg, and we got in after dark, in a strange city known to be less than safe, so we were a little nervous. but our kombi driver offered to help and walked us to the door of a safe, clean, cheap hotel right by where we needed to be the next day. amazing!

the next day we went to the train station and got on a train to cape town! the train was really fun, it felt very romantic (in an old-fashioned movie sort of way). we had our own room with a bench, a drop-down table, a tiny sink, and an upper bunk that folded into the wall when we weren't using it. a porter came around to offer us coffee and tea, and to take our meal orders, so 2 meals we ate in our room, and one we opted to eat in the dining car. the scenery was beautiful, and we (or at least i) got a great night's sleep. it got amazingly cold! the next morning the scenery was even more beautiful, and i could totally see why europeans settled here, low green rolling hills, perfect for farmland, probably looked a lot like where they'd come from. we rode through vineyards, passed ostriches, cattle, and sheep, i even saw a baboon from far away! and there were gorgeous rainbows to top it all off.

we got to cape town, managed to get supremely lost walking to our hostel, but checked in and all was well. our first afternoon we had mexican food (yay!), and just walked around and saw different parts of the city. i'm having trouble remembering the order of the rest of our adventures, but we did the rest of this stuff too: we went to the district 6 museum, a museum dedicated to the former residents of district 6, a black neighborhood that was cleared out for whites to live in during apartheid. (a new movie, district 9, is based on this story, although with aliens....i need to see this movie.) it was an interesting museum, with a concept that i'd never heard of before: it's intended just as much for the residents of the district to tell their stories and connect with each other as it is for outsiders to visit and learn, so it had a very home-grown feel to it. we went to the top of table mountain, a cape town must-do. this impressive mountain sits, ridiculously, SMACK in the middle of cape town. it's known for being moody, from minute to minute it can change whether it's under a cloud or not. we went at the only time it really made sense for us, and unfortunately it was pretty cloudy, but we got a few breaks in the clouds with some incredible views of the city and the bay. we went to robben island, the site of the prison where nelson mandela (among many others) was imprisoned during apartheid. we took a bus tour of the island with a really smart, funny university student, then a tour of the actual prison with a former prisoner. it was very interesting, although made me wish i knew more about the history....i want to get my hands on nelson mandela's autobiography that he wrote while in the prison. our last day in cape town we took a tour of the cape peninsula. we drove down through beautiful, sea-side villages and windy mountain roads, into the national park that covers most of the cape. it was gorgeous, i loved it, reminded me of maine a bit. we went to cape point, where you could actually see where the atlantic and indian oceans met. we had lunch in a cute little town in the wine-making region, and ended the day with a (slightly disappointing) wine-tasting.

all-in-all, it was a good trip. it was great to get away, to spend time with a friend i hadn't seen in a year, to just remove myself from all of my realities for a bit. but honestly, i didn't love south africa that much. yeah, it was beautiful, but to be perfectly honest their harsh, and recent, racial history makes me uncomfortable, and being in super-white super-wealthy cape town didn't help. seeing prices that i know were cheap in dollars but outrageous in meticais was very weird. and cape town is the only place on the trip i felt unsafe, as we were approached by a lot of disturbingly aggressive panhandlers. so, i suppose in the best of both worlds, i enjoyed my vacation, but by the end was homesick for quelimane and ready to come home.

and yes, now i've been home for about another month, and, as usual, i'm going to remain behind on this blog cuz i don't feel like writing more right now. sorry! i've been trying to put up pictures as well, but the internet is not my friend today. i hope everyone is well. you are all hereby ordered to go out and enjoy at least one of the following for me: a nice walk in crisp fall air, rolling in the leaves, hot apple cider, hay rides, pumpkin pie. it has definitely started getting hot again here, so i'm back to complaining about the weather. don't worry, there will be more of that to come i'm sure. until the next time, abraços all around. :)