Mozambique continued

At the last count we had driven 19 hours from Kruger National park to Inhambane and beyond, a couple of hundred miles north of Maputo, tackling potholes, dirt tracks, border police, drunken revelers, a confused GPS, local buses and a rat (the rat didn't come off very well) before collapsing in a beach hut with a few friends.

The next morning we woke early, despite the exhaustion from the day before and gorged ourselves on local avocados, similar in size and shape to an American football, bananas, croissant and coffee and took stock of the situation.

We quickly discerned that the situation we found ourselves in was not far from paradise, with a 30 second walk into the warmest sea I've ever swum in, baking sands and stunning seafood aplenty.

I shan't go through a blow by blow account of our 4 days on the beach but will mention a couple of highlights.

One of the most fantastic moments came on the second night, when we headed to the beach, the almost full moon lighting the scene, guitar and gin to accompany us and the gentle crashing of waves sending us into a relaxed delirium. As if this were not enough, we were treated for the next couple of hours to a wonderful lunar halo display, the likes of which I'd not seen before. These photos were taken at around midnight:

Other highlights from the stay were a trip out to sea as we attempted to go swimming with the largest fish in the world, the whale shark. We spent a couple of hours in rather choppy seas searching for the telltale shadow of this beast, jumping into the water occasionally to cool off. After an hour or so we had pretty much given up hope when we found a pod of dolphins and dove in with them. They were playing hard to get, so Ben headed off on his own, splashing around in the water to get the attention of any animal which may have been around. Sure enough after a couple of minutes he called over to his spot in the water where a whale shark had passed right underneath him. Sadly none of the rest of us saw it, as the animal quickly dived down out of reach of us and our snorkel gear.

Ben, Ryan and I decided to swim back to shore (a little less than a kilometer), and as the others disappeared in front of me I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, not because of anything that may have been lurking in the water, but through my own lack of swimming experience. I was a couple of hundred meters off the shore line, and beginning to flounder when the boat with the others pulled along beside me and I dragged myself into the boat, feeling rather ashamed at having bitten off more than I could chew. It was only later that I discovered that Ben had played for some time on the South African national waterpolo team and so my attempts to keep up with him had been so futile.

Since this incident I've made it a new resolution to improve my swimming fitness, and after a disastrous couple of attempts at swimming a kilometer in the pool here in Santiago, managing 50 meters at a time with coughing and spluttering, one week in I can quite happily go for the kilometer with just a single break in the middle. Some time ago I mentioned about the total immersion swimming technique which I read about in this book a couple of years back. The technique seems very intelligent to someone who is a physicist but not a natural swimmer, the idea being that to propel yourself through the water your arms are actually a pretty rubbish form of propulsion, but the twisting of your body, to push water down its length is a lot more efficient. This video gives an example of this technique and is frankly about the most beautiful swim stroke I've ever seen:

The four days on the beach passed all too quickly but it was the first time that I had truly relaxed for a long long time and there were moments where I didn't think about work at all - an enjoyable and unusual luxury.

Anyway, given that I'm back in Santiago now I have a great deal of work to be doing, getting ready for a talk here, and a trip to Cape Town next month where I hope to start a new collaboration...better get back to it for now.

African adventure, part IV

Final photos from Kruger, I promise! After this we move on to Mozambique...

A couple more from the roads around Lower Sabie, of wilderbeest, and a bull elephant, framing itself nicely in the trees.

The last night in Kruger we headed for a night drive. The tour took us out at around dusk and we spent  a good couple of hours being driven by a guide with quite incredible eyesight. At regular intervals he would stop the truck and point out a chameleon in a tree, or a tiny wild cat hidden in the undergrowth, absolutely invisible to the untrained eye.

The highlight of the trip was certainly a leopard with its cub that had been spotted close to the side of the road. The leopard probably came within about 15 meters of the jeep, which, being open-sided leaves you feeling rather exposed. I would love to have had more chances to photograph the big cats, but they are pretty elusive creatures, and we were extremely lucky to see the mother and child. I'll post it again just for good measure:

As the sky darkened, many of the night animals came out and we spent a while seeing birds of prey, sitting in the trees by the side of the road. These fish eagles and owls were rather beautiful to see, certainly in comparison to the vulture that we saw earlier in the evening (no decent photo of the vulture I'm afraid):

The largest species of owl in the world, an eagle owl:

And so, the next day we arose at 6 in the morning, to the passing edge of a storm, and unaware of the events that would unfold in the following 24 hours. This to come, perhaps tomorrow...

The tannery at Fes, take II

Apologies to those for whom this is a repeat of yesterday's post, but I realised that the people reading this in Google reader would probably not have noticed the slide show unless they clicked through to the post. So, I'll simply repost the photos in normal format. If you were using Google reader and you could see the slideshow from that, please tell me.

The tannery at Fes

I spent a while today getting a paper near to completion so I'm going to treat myself to another quick blogpost from Morocco. Things become out of sequence at this point and there's a whole desert/sandstorm/escaping drunk angry locals/camel riding saga to explain at some point. However, skipping that for now, having stayed in the desert for a night I took a bus for ten hours and then a train for 6 to arrive at Rabat where I spent a night and a morning, looking around the local souk. It's an extremely relaxed city, with a lot more colonial influences than Marrakesh. For this reason alone I didn't particularly feel like spending a lot of time there, simply as it didn't feel like the Morocco I was looking for, so the next day I took a train another 6 hours to Fes, which truly felt like Morocco real, even with the hordes of tourists.

I spent an extremely enjoyable couple of days there getting outrageously lost in the old market area and eating as much street food as I could lay my hands on (the avocado juice in particular was stunning, even if it contained more refined sugar than it did avocado). Anyway, the main reason I'd wanted to go to Fes was to see the tannery and it didn't disappoint. Down a dark alley in the heart of the medina you are drawn by the stench of tanning leather, up a series of winding stairs and through a maze of escheresque buildings, until suddenly you come upon a sight quite out of this world. With colours and activity absolutely in your face, this uncovered factory has been like this for an age. So, I stood there and watched from the platform above as the very real activity of turning animal hide into a usable clothing material unfolded before me.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
This flickr set can be found here and the current batch of Morocco photos, here. More to come.

Morocco in a flash, part I

As always I simply don't have time to sit down and write the blog post that I'd like to, or indeed that my trip to Morocco deserves. Every day was full of adventures and somehow we managed to pack a huge amount into very few days. I traveled for abour five days with four others from Santiago, and took off for a couple of days on my own, to get lost and meet other travelers and locals, something I find much easier to do as a lone traveler.

After an overnight train ride to Madrid with no sleep, we took the plane to Casablanca. The plan was then to go down the coast to Essaouira but a bus strike thwarted our plans and we ended up on a train to Marrakech, where we were met with the full force of the Medina's nightlife on arrival at about 10 in the evening. The sights, sounds and smells of the central square in Marrakech simply can't be described accurately, but the clamour of street sellers, the smoke of their barbecues and the smell of their tagines, together with people playing instruments and running around after tourists is simply an incredible sight. So much would be lost in a photo without the sound, so I'll try and track down a video of this place.

We spent a couple of days in Marrakech, including one night with a Couchsurfer, who introduced us to his friends and let us stay in one room of his family's home. Normally there are nine of them in a beautiful but relatively small home in the centre of the old quarter of the city. It was a real privelage to be able to stay with a local and his generosity towards us was incredible.

After our time in Marrakech we hired a car and headed South East towards the desert, crossing the high Atlas mountains and winding our way through dusty, but stunningly beautiful countryside. Our aim was to camp out in the desert in a Berber tent but it took us a couple of days to get to the site, on the way passing through villages, markets, mud-brick towns and sampling every tagine and couscous combination we could find.

As I said, time doesn't allow for the many details right now, with the final stages of a paper due next week and work this weekend, so I shall have to offer a rain cheque for when we are next sat, relaxed in pleasent surroundings to fill in the many blanks. I'll also try and write up the next stage of the trip some time this weekend. For now I'll leave you with a few photos from along the way.

My travel companions for the first leg of the journey:

Outside our hostel, a woman sat on the corner of the street in the medina, asking for money:

the tourists flock to the school of the Koran in the centre of the city:

On our way into the desert, from the hill fort overlooking the jagged landscape:

and the mighty vista of Ait-benhaddou taken just before the not so mighty river-crossing on a donkey:

Click through for larger sizes and more photos. More to follow