August 2011 - North Mozambique - Pemba Ibo Pangane

Greetings from the North of Mozambique (posted from the South of Tanzania). The part of the country that we were mainly aiming for and which truly met all of our expectations.
We spend a couple of days in Pemba, the capital of the North, to stock up on supplies. This included filling up our gas cooker, buying Rizla and posting cards. While we were on those missions we even managed to find a lonely Nutella jar in one of the shops 
Doing your shopping in an African city teaches you a lot of patience and that personal relationships are required to make things happen. Rizla were nowhere to be found until Fred made friends with some street vendors who apparently knew the one, only and confidential place where one could get some. They said they need 20 minutes to go and get them. It took them about 2 hours. In the meantime, we headed off to refill the gas cooker. We managed to find the place after asking numerable people who pointed us into all sorts of directions with the help of Russell a British expat. The person responsible for the refills was not there and was expected back in about 3 hours. A good opportunity to walk to the main post office (in its other branch we were told that they had ran out of stamps and were only getting new ones hopefully in a week’s time). The person responsible for the stamps in the maian office was also not there and back in 2 hours. With 3 ongoing missions we decided to have a coffee break.
After 6 hours we had 5 packages of Rizla, a full cooker and the post cards will be send from Tanzania as the North of Mozambique has ran out of stamps... Although this ‘delayed’ our stay in Pemba by one more day it was a great experience. Anything can be done or arranged even if it seems highly unlikely; one simply needs a great deal of time and patience. .

We stayed in the Pemba Magic Lodge Camp, owned by Russel. It has a beautiful beach just in front with some amazing coral reefs so we spend a decent amount of time in the water being fascinated by all this diversity and colours. In the evening we treated ourselves with some more than usually Mozambican beers (excellent!) at the bar.


From Pemba we headed off to the Quirimbas Archipelago, a marine nature park, including some two dozen islands along a 400 km stretch of coast. All of them have the whitest sands and are surrounded by the most turquoise waters, on them grow either coconut palms of dense forests of mangroves. We chose to take the more local option to reach the islands compared to the in US-Dollars quoted motor-boat alternative from Pemba
This included driving 3 hours along a dirt road to the little ‘port’ of Tandanhangue (one baobab tree, a cabin and a couple of fishing boats). From there we wanted to take the dhow to Ibo, the main islands of the Pelagos and a trading port from the 15th century. The dhows (fishing boats) can only go to Ibo during high tide which was at around 8am and the time for which we arrived. Being the only non-locals it was easy to make our presence noticeable.

We thought that we had made our intention clear of wanting to go to Ibo (there is really no other reason why people come to this tiny place) as the captain of the one and only boat leaving seemed to understand perfectly. We parked Cruisi under a big tree where a guard would take care of it for the next days and in the meantime (10 min) the dhow had left, without us... We quickly accepted the situation and sat under the huge Baobab tree to wait for the next high tide.
Sitting around is a national and most probably continental occupation. You sit, and sit and sit some more and do nothing else. You don’t even have to necessarily be waiting for anything specific it seems. Great meditation opportunity, but tell that to a hyper-active Frenchman! It took Fred about 2 hours before he stopped asking (in Portuguese....) at what time the next dhow would depart.
The answers varied from 1to 4 hours although nobody has a watch to actually measure the time. The tide is the clock. So we sat there (Fred in intervals of 5 to max 10 minutes before jumping up again) and chewed on some sort of root that all the locals eat here, quite tasty and filling and entertaining for the locals to see the Umzungus (white men) eating them.

Strangely, just when so much time has passed that you start thinking that what you have been waiting for is not going to happen anymore, everything happens super quickly. Within minutes, after 3 hours of waiting, we were on the boat along with some other 10 people, huge piles of ‘the root’, luggage and a goat.
Again, after an hour on sea and many time-related questions from Fred all of a sudden we hit the sand bank and after walking for a kilometre we arrived on the island. Ibo is beautiful! Here in a cuter and more remote way than on Isla de Mozambique, the colonial architecture is slowly giving in to time and vegetation and it feels like walking through the past. One could say that time has stopped but it rather feels like it never existed here. We visited the Quirimbas island next to Ibo with our guide Mandoo, 15 years old (looking like 8 and behaving like 38). He guided us though a thick, muddy labyrinth of mangroves to a sandbank where a dhow was waiting for the last stretch. The island was picturesque like everything here and gave us the feeling of walking through a Microsoft wallpaper. For the way back the tide was low and we could walk in-between the islands, maybe we were not fast enough as Mandoo and Luisa, the shortest of the crew needed to swim for some stretches.


After Ibo we reached the highlight of Mozambique so far; Pangane, a little fishing village quite a distance from the main road along a gravel and sand track. Here we stopped for 3 days in Hashims camp site and recharged our batteries (don’t think that this is an easy life!!) .
while living on the beach like on a remote tropical island. We indulged in Hashims sea food dishes and treated ourselfes with lobster A huge lobster fresh from the beach in front with the traditional coconut rice costs about 5 euros! This was truly paradise, extraordinarily beautiful, extremely remote and very welcoming!

Life is good! Next stop Tanzania!