Living for Disco

So, my holiday was wonderful, thank you. Mozambique is a beautiful country – the antithesis of Namibia in many ways. It’s deeply lush and green, for a start, with real rivers that are filled with water, and not dust. The landscape is thickly packed with palms that hurl coconuts to the ground in abundance, and mango trees that drip with fruit. The heat and humidity is extreme, but was quelled by the off-shore breezes that we enjoyed while lazily eating samosas bought from small boys on the beach, watching graceful dhows and men with fishing baskets from the comfort of our shady tree.

The sea was like a bath, particularly in the quiet, friendly town of Vilanculos; the water was warm, still and clear, unlike the coast at Swakopmund, where the Atlantic breezes make you wish you’d worn your thermal underwear, and why, oh why, did we decide to drink a beer outside? In the party-central that is Tofo, admittedly, it got a little rough, as the tail-end of a cyclone whipped the surf up just too much to make swimming enjoyable. However, sitting on the beach, drinking a beer and watching the surfers provided perfectly adequate entertainment. I have to say that I have never been in the presence of so many finely sculpted male torsos. I am considering moving to Cape Town, and becoming a professional letch (if I can control my drooling problem).

Maputo is alive and vibrant in a way that Windhoek just… isn’t. On the way in, we passed a heaving, shouting, lively muck-filled market, strewn with piles and piles of stinking rubbish, and through which a multitude of bashed up old cars tried to navigate. Amidst the mess were stalls selling a multitude of items: piles of soft charcoal; multicoloured mosquito nets, blowing in the breeze like so many giant condoms; plastic shoes, both new and used, and other clothing; mangoes, pineapples and small, sweet bananas; soft fresh Portuguese bread; sarongs in multi-coloured African prints, sporting pictures of teapots, of scissors, or of the Mozambique flag with its AK-47 emblem. The bus jittered through the pot-holed road onto the main tree-lined throrough-fare and we headed into the city, and to the haven of our hostel, where we found a balcony overlooking the bay and the waving palms.

One of the best things about Maputo is the fish market. You can’t really get much good fish in Namibia. Seafood isn’t a priority here – it’s meat or nothing. But in Maputo’s fish market, an abundance of marine bounty is on display. Blue and pink crayfish, the size of lobsters; buckets full of squirting clams; crabs; calamari and octopus, tentacles quivering; prawns of all sizes from prince to king and beyond; scarlet groupers with blue spots; enormous, grey shiny barracuda. We bought too much, and went out back, to where the restaurants will cook it up for you, expertly and deliciously, and sell you plenty of 2M beer to wash it down with.

I’m starting to understand what people mean when they say that Namibia is ‘not really Africa’. Please don’t misunderstand me – I in no way agree with them, and still think it’s a really bloody stupid thing to say. It’s just that if Mozambique is anything to go by, Namibia must sometimes seem extraordinary in its quietude and emptiness to people coming from the relatively densely populated countries like Malawi and Zambia. Where are the people? Where is the noise and the life and the energy? The truth is, really you have to look a little harder to find that in Namibia, but it’s there, in Katutura and Khomasdal, and further north in Opuwo and Oshakati and other towns – in other words, the places where tourists very rarely go.

It was quite odd, returning from an extremely hot country to another extremely hot country. I had forgotten that after holidays of this kind I’m used to landing at Heathrow and being smitten by unforgiving winter winds and thrust into a melee of people who look pale and discontented. I almost expected Namibia to be a cool relief, but no, it’s still too effing hot.

It was bliss to leave Namibia for a while; this is the first time I have done so since I arrived, well over a year ago. But now it’s good to be back, and to be reminded just how starkly beautiful it is here.

I had almost forgotten.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Jefferson Airplane, Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.