Inhambane and the Beach

The last few days have been a couple of my favorite days from my entire trip. My horrible rash cleared up completely around Wednesday or Thursday, and I've been trying to see as many things that I haven't seen yet as possible, since I may be leaving Cambine as soon as the middle of this week.

Candido has been looking for a good time to take me to the city of Inhambane, and Friday was the day that it finally worked out. Inhambane is the capital city of the province we are in, and it is located on a peninsula in the Indian Ocean. To get there, one must take a ferry across the bay the peninselu forms, from the city of Maxixe.

The two of us were joined by our German friend Elischa. He is 18 and his family has been very involved in the mission, so after finishing high school, he decided to take a year off from school and come to work here. Dieudonne drove us to Maxixe and dropped us at the ferry. There are two kinds of boats you can take across. There is one big boat that is not much different from what we would normally think of as a ferry. Then, there are smaller ones, that are basically wooden boats, maybe 35 feet long and 8 feet wide, with motors attached. That is the one we took. It was a rickety little boat but made it across without a problem, except at one point we almost tipped over because there was too much weight on the left. So a few people shifted, and we were OK.

As it is the capital of this province, Inhambane has a number of much nicer buildings where government people live and work, and it is also one of the few tourist destinations in the region. So this combines to make it a quite beautiful city. At least, the area closest to the water. As you go farther in land, it becomes like most other cities here. We met with a couple of kids from the orphanage who just begun studying at the university in Inhambane. They showed us the house they are staying at, and then we walked around the city for a little while. I stopped at a street market to buy a few gifts, and Candido got a huge kick out of me bartering with the guys. He said that I did a good job and got about as good a price as I could get, although still paid more than he would've paid. The ongoing joke is that there is one price for Mozambiquans and another price for outsiders.

After this, we went to a bar in a very nice spot by the beach and hung out for a while there. It was a beautiful spot, as we could watch the sun set over the hills on the other side of the bay, which was a great back drop as we sipped beers and munched on an assortment of fresh seafood.

Yesterday, we had been planning for a while a trip to the beach with the kids from the orphanage. This also was a lot of fun, except for the fact that I got some pretty nasty sunburn, astonishingly the first sunburn I've gotten the whole time here. All of the kids came, along with a few other people who are working in Cambine, including the 3 German missionairies, Dieduonne, myself, and others. We drove about an hour north from Cambine to get to the beach, which was called Morrumgola. It was beautiful, huge, and almost completely deserted. We all had a great time swimming and playing soccer in the sand.

There is another beach closer to Inhambane that Dieudonne had wanted to take me to see. My understanding is that it is more beautiful, but also more crowded, and it's easier to take the kids to the less crowded beach. However, with only a few days left in Cambine, I'm not sure that I'll have time to see this. If not, at least I was able to make it to the one beach, and now I only need to swim in the Arctic to have swam in every ocean.

Depending on a few circumstances, I am either leaving Cambine on Wednesday or Thursday, or next Sunday. From there, my plan at least is to see a safari in Kruger National Park in South Africa. Depending on the schedule, and how much money I have, I might also visit Cape Town. I also have no idea what kind of internet access I will have in these places. Therefore I will try to write once more before I leave Cambine, once I know what my schedule will be for the rest of the time I am here.