Bilene again

no time for more photos, I have to go to bed now and sleep, getting ready to load that car with suff for camping tomorrow and hit the road north along the Moz. coast ; we're going to Inhambane, 300 km north of Maputo and spending christmas on the beach with some friends of Ruja and Gareth..

the storm's coming closer .. almost here

a tropical storm on its way to Bilene...


the coast of the Indian ocean next to the Bilene lagoon

Bilene

waves...


me and the big waves, wish I had my bodyboard there


ghost crabs running along the wave break

the boat that took us to the mouth of the lagoon

chasing ghost crabs at the entrance of the Bilene lagoon

on the road to Bilene, up the coast north of Maputo, 3 hours and 200 km

a few days earlier at the fish market in Maputo

sunset scenes

fixing the boat at low tide

the Maputo skyline at sunset

weird watersports

We met these South African family at the Inhaca beach.. and the two guys were trying to get this weird water'hopping bike thingie to work. Basicly you get pushed off the pier and you step on this thing, you start pumping with your legs up and down , and if you do it properly the thingsie hops on the surface of the water , it has large water wings underneath which aparently do the job. Needless to say I couldn't go more than a few meters and I tried hard.. The guys were doing much better, they could go for up to a 100 m.. quite impressive.. quite weird too, well I guess I should learn how to do it some day..

Inhaca village life

people getting off the ferry from Maputo
local dog pissing at the sky

the vegetable market

the observer

going home with some drinks

the coconut tractor and the kids

one week in Maputo

It's hot here, which isn't a surprise since I'm in Africa and its the tropics.And I'm online since I don't feel like going out in this heat. Things are kind ofslow these days in Maputo, I've been living the life of the happy europeans in Mozambiquerecently, with my Ruja and Gareth, apart from not having a job I have to do like them.Really it's like one bis summer holiday here and I'm looking forward to next week whenwe will hit the road again and go to all those faraway deserted beaches north of hereand then to the savanna hills of Swaziland...My impressions of this country have been piling up in a rather slow and easy paste, a bit like the rhythm of the life on the streets here.. you walk down avenida Mao Dze Dung,Vladimir Lenine, 24 de Juhnio, or any other revolutionary street ( Mozambique was one of thehappy revolutionary communist countries after its independence in the 70s), past concrete 10-15 storeyblocks, built with a lot more imagination and creativity than their versions in Bulgaria and you are one of the few white people around, and noone cares, besides those guys trying to sell me sunglasses, souveinirs, electric plugs, watches, wooden statues ( beautiful traditionalart), anything, you name it. Then you are sitting in a cafe on the side of the main streetand all your friends are passing by in their cars on the way to some place in Maputo ( pluspeople trying to sell you stuff , if you need something, anything you just have to wait longenough and they will come and sell it to you ). I went to visit the local market ( bitak) with Carla, my cousin's embrigada ( you know , the lady who does all the cooking and cleaning in the house..), that was quite an experience. We got onone of the local mini buses going from point a to point b stuffed with mozambicans, blastingmusic from speakers. The market was the African version of a place where one can buy stuff you needfor a better modern life, food, clothes, shoes, house utensils, + a bit of magical touch on the stallswhere items for curandeiros are sold ( local magicians, voodo pracitioners, withc doctors). The curandeiros aparently need loads of herbs and spices, amulets, dried monkey hands, monkey skulls,and .. well dried heads of vultures.. the last items were quite shocking, keeping in mindthat the number of dead vultures for sale here were at least 3 times the European populationof these endagered species. The rest of the market was a labyrinth of stalls selling things andcrowds of mozamicans walking around as if it was some spacy air-conditioned shopping mall..quite an experience, and I was the only white person there, I'm pretty sure.The whole city is quite an experincea actually, its an amazing blend of african traditions, portugese colonial architecture and city planning, civil war decay, green tropical plants andbeautiful views at the Indian Ocean, communist-style blocks of flats and modern African city lifestyle ( don't know what I really mean with that, but anyway, that's the shortestway to describe the place). I've been trying to find the time and the motivation to upload photos from the Inhaca island and I hope I manage to do it later today, or tomorrow. That was quite a different experience, my first oceanic tropical island experience , coral reefs, sandy beaches, little villages with coconut palmtrees and locals included..

that's me in the local museum, blown by the winds of the Indian ocean

this guy wanted me to take a picture of him in the local museum, he wanted to make sure though that people wouldn't think he was a statue when they saw the photo..

the local train station
kashu sellers
a view from the window of my cousin's appartment

so then I flew to Cairo ( saw the Nile in the night), flew over the Equator, on to Nairobi and Johannesburg, and ended up in Maputo airport which looked like some socialist era building in Sofia... I'm uploading a few random photos from the last 2 days , hoping o give an impression of what's happening here..

scenes from Istanbul

cups of black tea/chai, mosques, muslims, fishermen,bridges across the Bosphorus ( I managed to set foot on three continents in one day ' Asia, Africa and Europe :), the airport airports ( sorry for the messy order , still dont know if I can arrange the photos in one post in thie blogger)

on the way to Istanbul

the bus on the way to Istanbul.. 6 more hours to go ( including 2 hours spent at the border waiting for stamps on the passport in the cold)

well Im in mozambique, and things look rather nice here... of course Im in no safari park with elephants and lions running around, rather in a concrete socialist block from the portugese colonial times in the capital Maputo.. that's where my cousin and her husband live. I can see the Indian ocean thru the window of the room I'm sitting in , there's a 20 storey building right next to it and a portugese lady is smoking a cigarette on the balcony..
The first day was rather messed up arriving at the Maputo airport after a 40 hour trip was quite a surreal event. ( Sofia -Istanbul by bus, 12 hour stay in Istanbul, 7 hour flight to Nairobi via Cairo, 4 hours flight to Johannesburg and another 1 hour flight to Maputo from there). I had a quick look around the city yesterday and today and things look rather nice.. I will leave the photos speak for themselves.. they are mostly from the trip actually, chai cups from Istanbul, views of night-time Cairo from the airplane, people on the streets of Maputo..
We're hopefully going off to an island 20 km from Maputo tomorrow to spend the weekend with friends of Ruja and Gareth, that's if the weather doesnt turn bad and we can't take the boat to there..

Istanbul

Istanbul letishteto.. a onzi den katerih Cherni vryh prez zamruznali prespi/ Ne znam koe e po -goliamo = letishteto ili grada/ Pristignah v 7 sutrinta poluzaspal i po spomeni ot liatoto se ozovah otnovo v centura na Sultanahmet... chai otnovo, za subujdane, dokato se subudia i si biah kupil bilet za niakakuv feribot, iskah da mina na aziatska teritoria, ot drugata strana na Bosfora, taka che dnes kato kacna Kairo na put za Nairobi da sum bil na tri ! kontinenta v ramkite na edin den/// e razbira se okaza se che feribota e 6 chasov exskurzionen, taka che sliazoh v dalechen kvartal na evropeiskata chast na bosfora i sled chas i polovina put po krajbrejni ulici s reis se vurnah otkudeto trygnah... Istanbul veche mi se struva dosta po hubavo miasto otkolkoto sled jegaoto poseshtenie prez iuli.. i sega tova letishte.. pulno e s turci, imashe cialal tulpa babi i diadovci s ednakvi kustumcheta , maj otivaha v Meka na poklonenie... 4 chasa do poleta, leaving Europe
na vhoda na letisteto me pitaha Are you a passenger? ideshe im da im zapeia I aaam a passenger and I rise and I rise .. iggi pop : )
adios