The Swazi king

Today I read in the news that Christer Zettergren, secretary general in the Swedish Red Cross, argued that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is so severe that it should be classified as a catastrophe. This based on the fact two million people died in the illness last year and 7000 are infected every day worldwide.

My thoughts went back to Swaziland, which I passed by a couple of weeks ago. Swaziland is currently the most HIV infected country in the world, with at least 26% of the population infected. It is believed that two thirds of the country’s 15-year old children will die in AIDS within 10 years if the trend continues.

The country is neither helped by its (by many people referred to as somewhat stupid) king Mswati III. He has earlier expressed wishes that all HIV infected people in the country should be sterilised and branded. This has however not been implemented. In 2001, the king announced a 5-year ban on sex to stop the spread of the virus. The king himself did however not show much support to his new law as he during the period got married to several new wives.

The king also banned sexual relations for under 18s but this apparently didn’t apply to himself as he in 2005 got married to his 13^th wife, which at the time was only 17 years old.

The sex ban was ended one year early as it apparently didn’t work and rather had the opposite effect. It resulted in an increase in prostitution, decline in marriage and increase in abortions. And of course, the number of HIV infected people was increasing even faster. At this time, when HIV was booming in the country, the king ordered a private jet for $45M, to be paid for by the public funds. This amount corresponds to the whole country’s health care expenditures for a two-year period.

On a separate note, in December 2000 he launched the so-called Millennium project including a multi-million dollar international airport outside the tiny capital Mbabane. The current airport was seen "inadequate" as it could not handle transatlantic or inter-continental flights. Swaziland has around one million inhabitants and is located just 300 km from Johannesburg International Airport.

I really like this cool king, too bad I couldn’t meet up with him.

Delays

In Sweden we sometimes refer to something which can translate to "the law of every thing's inherent evil". South Africa is a good example of this. I would love to have made it all the way to Cape Town but my plans were set back by a number of misfortunate happenings along the way and at one point, I realised that there was no point trying to rush it as it would involve a lot of travelling and very little spare time for sightseeing and enjoyment.

I don't know if I was extremely unlucky or if this happens all the time when you are in Africa or if it was a combination of the two.

One example of misfortunate happenings was buses breaking down. While in South Africa, I was sitting in a total of twelve buses. Of these, four (yes, its not a joke) broke down on the road and had to be replaced by another bus, which caused massive delays. This resulted in that I had to readjust the original itinerary due to late arrivals.
Travelling also had to fit around the fixtures for the Euro 2008 and the bus company's schedules, which only departed on certain days of the week and could cause short delays to escalate to several days.

Broken bus on the highway between Durban - Mhtatah. In the rural areas in the mountains, there were no large towns around and very difficult to get hold of replacement buses.

Coffee Bay

I made a couple of stops along the south coast of South Africa. One of the nicest places I found was undoubtedly Coffee Bay, a small isolated village with nice beaches dominated by backpackers. Here they also offered water activites such as surfing, which I tried. A day on the beach and a half days surfing lesson cost me the horrendous amount of £2.50, lunch included.

Some pictures from Coffee Bay follows.

One of the Coffee Bay beaches
Another Coffee Bay beach
Me at a "make-your-own-fancy-hat-party". It was matchday and Sweden beat Greece 2-0. I tried to make a blue and yellow viking-hat but it didn't work out that well.

Itinerary

Before leaving Africa and heading over to Americas, the plan was to spend some time in South Africa. I flew in to Jo'burg and will also leave from this city after around two weeks from finishing the project. It should prove that the two weeks was a very short time for touring South Africa, especially as three days were spent in Maputo and two in Swaziland. The original plan was to travel from Swaziland along the south coast from east to west. I did not quite make it all the way to Cape Town in the southwest corner of South Africa, in fact I only got to East London before having to head back towards Jo'burg.










Zululand, South Africa (between Durban and Mhtatah)

Mattias in Swaziland

From Maputo, I crossed the border into Swaziland and stayed two nights in the Ezulweni valley. It was a quick visit but as the country is quite small, there are not a great deal to see either. Swaziland is good for hiking but I decided that my time was too limited to stay longer and go on hikes.
While in the country, I managed to see the sparesly populated Ezulweni valley (which is where most tourists stay and where most of the action takes place; its large distances though and difficult to get around without a car), Manzini (a market town, also the largest city in the country), Mbabane (the capital, which offers limited amounts of sights for tourists), Piggs Peak (a small town in the mountains in the northern part of the country) and Bulembu (a small village on a detour from P/Peak).
All this I managed to see only using minibus taxis to get around. They are the main form of public transport in the country and are small white 20-seat minibuses (with very tiny leg space) but fortunately they don't pack them as full as the corresponding ones in Mozambique. Minibus taxis are a really cheap way of getting around but one has to ignore all the warning notices in Lonely Planet of not using them if you are not entirely certain of what you are doing and where you are going.

Ezulweni Village









Mountain town of Piggs Peak








Minibus taxi rank in Mbabane








Bulembu village

Pictures from Maputo

Some pictures from Maputo. The Cathedral (at Praca de Independencia), the Central Station (designed by an associate of Gustav Eiffel; from Eiffel Tower fame), The Olof Palme Avenue and the city skyline as seen from across the bay in a village called Catembe.

Zombie-experience

After the Tofo adventure, I headed back south from Inhambane to Maputo.  The journey was again carried out on one of the jam-packed 30-seaters with dwarf-seats, an unforgettable seven hour bus ride.  After this I spent three relaxing days in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique.  I quickly found my favourite spot in the city, the Mundos bar, in which I could use their free wireless internet for emailing and chatting while sipping on a cold local beer.  On my last night things got a bit crazier as I met an Irishman at the hostel.  As all other Irishmen, he loved beer and after having started the evening at Mundos, we finally ended up at a bar in one of the rougher areas of town.  It looked fairly alright as we arrived to the door in a taxi so I didn’t think more about it while inside but when heading home a few hours later, there were all sorts of weird people hanging around outside, all from prostitutes, pimps, robbers, beggars and other varieties of loose folks.  There were a couple of taxis parked 10 metres from the entrance on the other side of the street and I still can’t believe how it was possible to get past everyone and get into the taxi (and lock the doors) before they all saw us.  As we obviously were the only white people around (and here white people are often synonym to $$$), they flocked around the taxi and tried to open doors and windows from outside. They only moved away from the car when the taxi started to move to save their feet from the wheels.  Now I think I know how it feels to be in a car surrounded by zombies who try to get in and kill you; the classic scene that is reoccurring in every other B-class horror movie. Maputo is a very scary place and I didn’t think places like this existed outside the Hollywood imagination.

 

 

 

Mission Maputo

I was originally scheduled to stay around one or two nights in Maputo.  This was extended to three nights as a result of the combination of tiredness from the volunteering and ‘Mission Maputo’.  Anan Allos, head of Transportation department in Basingstoke, offered me a generous amount of wine if the mystic CD could be located.  Anan had been in Maputo around 10 years ago and bought a CD which he later lost.  This was a CD containing (supposedly) fantastic African music but he has until now not been able to find a replacement for the lost disc.  The mission was made more difficult as both the title of the CD and the singers name was unknown.  The only possible identification available was the image on the CD cover, which was communicated to me via a rather poor sketch.

After two days in Maputo, I did not find the disc so I decided to look through some more shops during day three.  However, it was all in vain and I regret having to inform everyone that Mission Maputo failed.

Last week of work

As the team has been working so marvellously well over the last couple of weeks, we managed to finish the last part of the concrete floor on the Tuesday.  This meant that we were far ahead of schedule.  Furthermore, on the south side of the school we had at the time already put the blocks up to window level, which was work that we had “stolen” from the second group.  This took us even further ahead of schedule.  In order to find enough tasks for the last couple of days we decided to steal more work from the second team.  We built the foundations for the east veranda and put blocks up around the whole building.  It is now not much blockwork left and the remaining part requires scaffolding, which for the second group will be a much slower process as there is limited length of scaffolding available on site.  Last week also had a few days with early finishes due to low workload.

The Friday was supposed to be the last day on site.  No work was planned but we had a few farewell sessions, listened to a few speeches from the chef and the school director and finally rounded the day off by playing a football game against a local team.  First we were supposed to play a friendly game against the teachers but as almost none of the teachers could or wanted to play, the director found new (and better) players to play for him.  The Mozambiqueans were individually better football players than us but they turned up without shoes and were not very well organised on the pitch.  This took the match to into our favour and it finally ended 1-1 after they had equalised our lead by a give-away goal that didn’t even look like a chance.

 

The mine-flowers

This is not really related to my blog or my trip but as nothing happened today, this is more interesting.  On the same note as the “mine-sweeper rats”, we came across some “mine sweeping flowers”.  Someone somewhere (not Africa) has created a genetically manipulated flower that is white, but changes colour to red if it reacts with chemicals found in land mines.  To find the land mines you have to first saw the flower seeds over a whole minefield and then wait until they bloom to see if there are any mines around.

 

Rat magic

We have many flies around us in Mozambique.  Someone in the team asked one day in despair “what is the purpose of flies?”, I guess with a small hope that God should realise his mistake and instantly wipe all flies off the planet.  I can confirm that it did not happen and so I draw the conclusion that either God doesn’t exist or either flies does have a secret purpose.  However, one could also ask “what is the purpose of cockroaches?” or “what is the purpose of rats?”.  The answer to the last question I am now able to give you as rats recently have a been upgraded from a fairly useless animal that only could be used for cosmetic animal testing and occasionally feeding cats, to something highly valuable.

A couple of kilometres outside Inhambane is the rat training centre located and I had the pleasure of meeting one of the guys from there in a hotel bar.  He presented to me the “mine-sweeper rats”.  In a large training field, rats are taught to smell the chemicals in mines.  They can therefore be used to identify the location of land mines left since the civil war.  Mine sweeping is today an expensive, dangerous and time consuming task but is necessary as many children are killed or wounded by land mines each year.  New methods for mine-sweeping are developed all the time and trained rats is one of these methods.

And for all the animal activists, I should mention that the rats are not sacrificing their lives.  Land mines are designed to detonate when adults or children step on them and they can not be set off by small animals.  The rats are therefore only used to find the location of mines.

Impressed?  I thought so.  And I didn’t even have to mention the “rescue-rats” who can find people buried in demolished buildings after for example earthquakes or other major incidents.  Who knows what comes next.

 

Week two and three

Week two and three continued the work with the foundation.  The team made great progress and lot of time was spent mixing concrete to first fill the foundation trenches and later the whole floor. 

A normal day we wake up at around 6:00, walk the 2.5 km to the site, have breakfast which have been prepared by the weirdest character in the village (a former 5-star hotel chef who shows up serving breakfast in a Santa Claus-hat) and then start the days work.  The breakfast is really good and always with lot of variation.  Lunch is also cooked in the village by some lunch-ladies.  This tends to be more traditional local food but not with a great variation so some people have quickly got bored of the local main dish “matapa”.  Matapa is prepared from coconut milk and peanut paste, cooked together with the leaves from a particular plant.  Sometimes it contains a few small crabs for giving an additional touch to the taste.  The matapa is then eaten with rice and is really wonderful.

Other news is that we have got hold of a cement mixer.  This was a blessing as mixing concrete by hand was a strenuous task, particularly considering the sizes of the rocks.  The cement mixer should however prove to be highly inefficient as it was small and also way past its “best before-date”.  Before week three was over we had already broken it but fortunately, the site manager managed to buy a new mixer that wasn’t too expensive.

Another major job during these two weeks was the levelling of the floor. Since the school is situated on a slightly sloping ground, huge masses of sand was to be transported into the foundation before the floor could be concreted.  There is of course not machines available so the sand was moved using spades, buckets and wheelbarrows.  I estimate that we moved around 50-60 tonnes of sand in total.  The huge hole we dug at the end of the school can probably be used for a septic tank.

A minor frustration is also the many times we run out of material.  To make the concrete, we need a steady supply of rocks, sand and cement.  These demands can be hard to meet considering the reliability of the transport firms in the country.  Therefore, some time had to be spent waiting for more material.

 

A penny for your thought, and a years wage for a whale shark

Warning:  this blog entry does not contain the slightest trace of humour or sarcasm and is purely of an educational nature.  If this doesn’t appeal to you, please stop reading here and jump to the next entry.

 

The organisation we work with (Quest) has been based here in Tofo since ten years back.  The main operation is circulating around research and protection of the marine life.  Quest believes that this place is unique in the world because of its returning population of whale sharks.  Nowhere else in the world are there so many whale sharks regularly visiting.

Sea safaris with whale sharks exist in only a few places around the world.  In Australia for example they send up a spotter plane to locate a whale shark, the safari boats are then speeding huge distances to the location to allow for swimming with the big fish.  For this participants can pay over £300 each.  In Tofo however, there are lots of the fish around and it is enough to just go out a little bit outside the beach for an hour or two and people will see whale sharks.  For comparison, a safari here with similar experience costs £25.

Quest’s aim is to create a protected area with national park status, which would allow for implementing restrictions in order to protect the animals.  The whale shark is an endangered species and is hunted by many fishermen because of their fins.  The fins are valued a huge amount on the Chinese market as status symbols for the ever growing number of Chinese dollar millionaires.  Lots of whale sharks are therefore regularly captured, having their fins cut off and then dumped back into the sea, often alive.  The fishermen can potentially earn what would correspond to a years wage for capturing a whale shark.  Without knowing anything about animal rights and the importance of marine life protection, who can blame them when their ancestors have been fishing on the same beach for centuries.

Quest’s mission is to work closely with the community to establish a support for a national park and to act as lobbyists to also gain support from the local government.

 

Mattias and the whale sharks

On the first weekend we organised a sea safari outside Tofo.  Tofo is the unofficial diving capital of Mozambique and is famous for its rich marine life.  The key feature is the whopping presence of whale sharks and tourists are regularly coming to dive and snorkel with them.  Whale sharks are sharks and not whales.  The term whale only refer to its size as the largest fish in the ocean but unlike white sharks and similarly dangerous species, whale sharks are plankton eaters and will not harm humans in the water.

The safari lasted for about an hour.  We were cruising the ocean in a boat and as soon as any interesting animal was spotted, we could jump in with our snorkels and fins and swim along until being picked up by the boat for more cruising.

Only one whale shark appeared during the safari but for anyone passing by this area, it is strongly recommended to go on one of these tours.  A great experience.