Tuesday, January 11, 2011

It (was) the most wonderful time of the year

Being in the village one gets to know themselves pretty well. Let's face it, you have a lot of alone time to really figure out how you are going to react to certain things. Now I'm not saying that village life makes everything seem slightly more dramatic that it really is, but after about 10 months of self discovery I have figured out that I tend to react to things slightly more emotionally in the village setting than I may, say, in Americaland (my mother is probably the best testament to that last statement). I knew that my first Christmas away from the family was going to be rough and that I was going to need to go on a REAL vacation with a beach in order to survive it. Alright, I probably would have technically survived Christmas and New Year's in my village, but I doubt it would have been pretty. So I, along with two other PCVS from Northern and Central Province decided to head to Mozambique the holidays.

We all traveled from our respective provinces to Lusaka and then from Lusaka flew to Johannesburg, South Africa. I a bit of culture shock in Joburg when the hostel we were staying at sent a Benz (playing classical music I might add) to pick us up at the airport and there were six lane highways with skyscrapers. We then proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon at the mall, which definitely did not ease any of the culture shock. A mall during the holiday season and a Zambian village are probably two of the most different experiences I could imagine.

The next morning we got on a bus and traveled to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. The 9 hour bus ride would have been fine except the air conditioning broke and because the bus was an air conditioned bus the windows obviously didn't open so for about 6 hours of the bus ride it was a stuffy 600 degrees (no, that's not an exaggeration, you weren't there, you don't know how hot it got). On the bright side the road from Joburg to Maputo is really nice...

After arriving in Mozambique we spent the night at a hostel and then traveled another 8 hours on a shuttle to Tofo Beach which is one of the premier beach destinations in Moz. I was so excited to finally see the ocean after 10 months. Its the longest Ive ever gone ocean free in my entire life and hopefully the longest Ill ever go again- it was hard. The beaches in Tofo were beautiful (maybe one of these days I'll get around to posting pictures...) however the place we were staying in was not. We were in dorm style beds with 20 beds to a room and each night at about 10pm the dj would crank up the bass to a level that can really only accurately be described as "soul rattling". The bed frames shook-enough said. Then one of my friend's tents got stolen and I got food poisoning and we decided that it was probably time to leave Tofo Beach and move on to Vilankulo another beach town about 5 hours north. Hey, we could always come back if it was worse than Tofo.

However, that didn't seem to be necessary. In Vilankulo we ended up booking a beach front chalet that literally sat right on the water. It was so nice to fall asleep to gentle sounds of the waves every night. The town of Vilankulo was great as well...they had an espresso machine in town and because the Portuguese had such a strong influence in Moz there is really great bread  and rolls to be had almost everywhere. Quite the departure from Zambia. And there were decent restaurants to eat at, not something to be said in every town-even if it is a tourist destination.

The other touristy activities that we did while in Vilankulo were snorkeling on Two Mile Reef which is just off the Bazaruto Archipelago which is this small island about 45 min boat ride from the mainland. There's a huge sand dune on the archipelago and if you climb to the top of it you get an amazing view. We also went horseback riding on the beach which was beautiful and we got to see a lot of the scenery of Vilankulo that we wouldn't have otherwise seen. Other than that we just hung out, relaxed and spent time on the beach, which is truly my happy place so I was in a great mood the whole time.

We spent New Years in Vilankulo as well which was really low key, even though we were told our lodge was going to have quite the party...The music was particularly awful, like literally the worst DJ in history (think music you would hear at a rave mixed with terrible oldies- the real problem was there wasn't any good music to dance to). But we did see a few fireworks on the beach that evening so it was just ok.

On the 2nd it was time to leave so we headed back to the Maputo but this time spent a day in the city. We went to the art museum, the cathedral, the fort, and the waterfront. I was impressed by the amount of gelato in Maputo, it really won me over in that department.  We then headed back to Joburg on the same bus, which was a much more pleasant experience this time around due to the fact that the air con did work.
Once in Joburg we had a day to spend in the city and went to the Apartheid museum which was really interesting and had a ton of exhibits in it-we spent over 5 hours there and definitely could have spent a lot more. Its interesting being in this part of the world to see how these events actually played out and what happened. I can't say I got the most comprehensive African history education growing up or that I was actually able to process what I did learn...

And now I am back in Zambia and finally ready to go back to the village. It was a nice break but I am definitely ready to go back and start working again. Ive truly missed my village and I feel like I am going back on a very good note.