Trip Report # 13 (30 June – 1 July 2009) : Niassa Reserve and beyond

The Niassa reserve borders Tanzania and supposedly has the largest wildlife population in Mozambique.  After a 15 year independence struggle, the immediate and destructive withdrawal of the Portuguese followed by a civil war that raged for 17 years, it is no surprise that ‘the largest wildlife population’ is a very relative concept. 

We camped, as a special favour, in the unofficial ‘Sunset Spot’ (of which we heard of from fellow South Africans we ran into on the way) near the reserve head quarters.  Whilst it offered absolutely no facilities, not even a natural source of water, this still has to rate as one of the top camping sites where we had the privilege to pitch our tents with wonderful views over the vast Niassa wilderness and a sunset scene to be cherished.

Sadly, bird and animal life seemed almost entirely absent. 

Nothing during the ‘game’ drive the next day changed this perspective.  Reading material about the reserve recommend walking safari’s to see animals and rumour has it that a programme to reintroduce wild dogs is in progress, but we saw no evidence of either.  In fact, the reserve seems exclusively geared to accommodate locally active vets, rangers and researchers and may take a while still before being a welcoming destination for general tourists.  This perception may be partly due to the remoteness, limited access roads and partly the language barrier, but was reinforced when Hennie and Nerina got detained  in Mecula (the centre of the reserve and a functioning town with school, market, church) and ushered into the Commissioners office for interrogation regarding the purpose of their presence?! Imagine the havoc and news headlines if this happened to foreign tourists in Skukuza for instance?  They were only released after Anita finally located them, marched into the office, looking remarkably fierce for a small fairy girl, demanding their release.

Initially the intent was to spend the next night at the official reserve camp site at the main gate also on the Lugenda river, but after our spectacular experiences at Veronica’s camp and Sunset Spot, this mediocre camp site with limited facilities served only as a lunch spot in favour of covering at least some distance on the notorious stretch to Montepuez.

On the historic bridge crossing the Lugenda as you leave the reserve we ran into six young missionaries who had just come from Montepuez apparently in a single vehicle assuring us that it was indeed slow, but doable. This certainly gave us a false sense of comfort as by now we considered ourselves semi experienced off roaders whilst these kids looked like absolute novices enticed by the romance of the African experience, adorned in local beads, the beginning of cultivated dreadlocks and wrapped in colourfully printed material sold in every street market (suckers :-)).  Surely we could do better. 

The first 40 odd km did go rather uneventfully, but within 10 km of the really rough patch we promptly parked our bus solidly in the first mud pool and broke off and lost the knob to our front diff lock.  Ouch!        Sitting precariously balanced, but with a advantageous view in the passenger seat I can attest to the inventiveness of the locals who, with minimal understanding of our frantic Afrikaans, offered unsolicited assistance, pushed, pulled, collected twigs and branches to put under the wheels and larger wood stumps as levers to lift the heavy bus.  It was however only with Hennie’s assistance and the power of his 3,0liter diesel Fortuner that we could be hauled out of the hole to dry ground under great applause from the bystanders. An honorary member of the Synchro Odyssey indeed :-)

 

 

 

 

 

Elated and grateful I dished out sweets, socks and pens to the kids that had offered assistance, but when the supply of gifts ran out things turned nasty.  We packed up tools, equipment and ropes under constant badgering by an ever growing crowd of empty handed kids and left with perceived discriminated individuals flashing fingers and jeering vindictively.  

We tried our utmost to put distance between us and the disgruntled crowd, bypassed at least two good roadside ‘camping spots’ (rare finds along the narrow single track swarming with bicycles and walkers).  But travelling at less than 10km per hour on the poor road with the sun rapidly setting we eventually had to make camp that night only a short distance away right beside the road for lack of any other facilities. 

Us on the 242 highway!

 

 

A restless night for most of us (well OK at least for me)with roadside jeers still ringing in our ears, close by drumming eating at our nerves and paranoia ruling high. 

M-L

Trip Report # 12 (28 – 29 June 2009) : Veronica’s Camp

The recommended road from Lichinga to the Niassa reserve main gate takes roughly 7 hours on relatively good roads – so quite a stretch.  Alternatively from Lichinga you can enter the reserve on the western side along a shorter route with only about 40km of poor road conditions, but then getting across the reserve to the main gate will optimistically require 2 and a half days of slow 4WD and quite possibly bridge construction in one or two instances (an exciting prospect for the six adventurers and particularly the five engineers representing almost every possible discipline in the group ;-)). 

Neville (again coming to our rescue) offered us petrol available from a forestry station at  Chiconono on this alternative route making this option even more enticing.  But no matter how we looked at the calendar and how we routed the looong return trip from Northern Mozambique (have you ever noticed the size of the Mozambiquan coastline?) for Adri, Anita, Nerina and Hennie who were due in South Africa again mid July, an extra 2 or 3 days spent building infrastructure in Mozambique was a luxury we simply could not afford.

Furthermore, having by now been warned from several sources that the road from Marrupa to Montepuez (on route to Pemba) is a extended nightmare best avoided, but knowing that we will in all likelihood have to make that crossing therefore satisfying the adventurers amongst us, we opted for the safer and quicker Plan A. 

Plan A entailed Adri and Anita with the Dokka and its fixed second fuel tank to make a detour to Chiconono with all empty tanks, canisters, jerry cans and vessels we could spare to collect fuel whilst the rest of us, in the interest of saving petrol, would travel to a campsite on route (Mt Mosale) just developed and not yet commercially operational offered to us by Veronica (YES again!).

A leisurely drive for us  [Bytheway, we did stop at the little rumoured-to have-fuel station on the way: dry]. A bit of a stretch for Adri and Anita who had to cover an extra 160km, locate the local forester and fill fuel tanks.  But, at least this meant making progress towards Niassa and saving us a day of waiting for fuel in the black hole.  

The tented camp is roughly 50km off the road on a beautiful section of the Lugenda river bank and exquisitely integrated and sensitive to the environment offering all the critical luxuries such as hot water showers, porcelain and flushing toilets and unbelievably friendly staff (Benson, Kaptein and their crew) who welcomed us like VIPs after their very brief initial surprise at our unexpected arrival.

Covering the 50km is best accomplished with closed windows, as we discovered.  Tsetse flies infested our vehicle and proceeded to literally slip stream the vehicle in what was a very bizarre scene better suited to a Stephen King horror movie. At one time a particular fly was hovering outside the driver window at about 30km/h!  Scary, to say the least.  These things bite you through your clothes and generally are only killed by separating limbs, a skill we mastered on the way to the camp.  Surprisingly almost completely absent from the camp itself – fortunately!

Adri and Anita would arrive only after dark. The entrance to the access trail (4WD necessary) leaving the main road is somewhat obscure and Adri unfamiliar with Hennie’s borrowed GPS (containing important indicative way points provided (again) by Neville).

So, in spite of our best efforts for sign posting, ‘Worry’ followed shortly after our arrival. 

The lot of us suitably impressed with ourselves after erecting an authentic Odyssey sign post, using one of the left over stickers.

 

Probable timelines where calculated and recalculated, possible scenarios in a variety of permutations and combinations considered, but nothing prepared us for Adri and Anita walking into camp (only just having survived a tsetse fly bombardment) at 20:30 that evening. 

The Dokka died (loaded to the brim with fuel) 7 km outside of camp and refused to restart in spite of Adri’s best efforts.  It miraculously started when a rescue party was dispatched after dinner (rump steak, the last of our Danish feta and English cucumber in a huge salad, garlic bread and bottled red wine that had survived the trip with Hennie and Nerina).  But it necessitated a thorough inspection and routine maintenance session the next day costing us another day, further abusing the generosity of our hostess, but affording us the privilege of another night in the spectacular bliss of Veronica’s camp amidst the grumbling of hippos mere meters away. A VAST improvement to spending a day waiting for fuel in Lichinga!

M-L

Trip Report #11 (27 June 2009): Cars run on fuel…

While I have the opportunity and before we leave Cobue (pronounced Cob-Way according to the ‘Lonely Planet for amateur phoneticists and travellers’, but probably the best way to explain this awkward word to English speakers) I need to note that I had my first shower in one of Carl-Hein’s ‘gadgets’: solar-jerry-can shower with submersible pump and pop-up shower cubicle the evening before leaving.  Please may I express my sincere gratitude in black and white for a hot replica of a normal shower after my longest stretch without running water – surprisingly Mozambique-ans living along Lake Niassa/Malawi equates the lake with ablutions?! I am officially appreciative for another of the gadgets we schlepped along on this journey :-).

Coffee break in Miombo forest between Cobue and Lichinga

We have jokingly said that Lichinga is like a black hole that, in spite of its severe lack of charm, makes it difficult to escape from.  Can’t exactly recall why this was even discussed before, but with unease it is recalled and repeated this morning. We arrive in Lichinga on this Saturday morning with a tactical plan of distinction.  Parallel details to the market, cell phone shop, Supermacado, bank to exchange currency and fuel station to procure petrol to rendezvous at exactly eleven o hundred for the first stretch to the extremely remote Niassa Reserve. Stumped by: No petrol in the whole of Lichinga and none expected until Monday if we understood the Portuguese correctly.

In desperation we called on Neville Slade – one of the network of contacts provided by Willem Olivier whom we hoped never to have to bother. With his assistance and Portuguese we got 80liters of fuel reserved for pre-paid customers from one fuel station. Awesome, but hardly making a dent towards the 300 litres required to take us through the Niassa and across Mozambique to Pemba.  Hell, who can contemplate roads without shell ultra cities, Engen One Stops or even a dodgy small town lonely petrol pump (we would later understand however).

With the leave clock ticking we regrouped over surprisingly spectacular espresso machine coffee at a dingy petrol station to deliberate and deliberate AND deliberate options.  Rumour had it that a tiny town on the way had bought some fuel on Friday from one of the fuel stations in Lichinga so with a high appetite for risk we headed in that direction choosing to move towards our destination and get out of Lichinga.  But we quavered and when the road deteriorated and the sun started setting shortly after leaving town with no clear plan of where to spend the night and no certainty of whether we would get fuel, we turned with our tails between our legs and headed back to Lichinga to knock again on the door of Neville, Veronica and their son Lawrence for assistance.  [And I thought fickleness was a feminine trait only?!]

We camped that evening close to their home (with Veronica acting as chief negotiator and interpreter with the relevant and eccentric (check the crashed plane he bought, disassembled, transported and reassembled which he displays on his plot) landlord) just outside (phew!) of Lichinga giving serious reconsideration to plans, routes, leave days and fuel constraints. 

Neville and Veronica are both Kenyans working in the impoverished Niassa province of Mozambique to develop commercial and sustainable forestry and eco tourism respectively.  They, along with their menagerie of pets briefly joined us for drinks and input into our planning session that evening.  We blatantly picked their extensive knowledge of local road conditions (appalling at best), local contacts and sights worth seeing. 

And still the generosity and kindness of these complete strangers were hardly exhausted.  I will say this again in the next few posts, but can’t say it enough: Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to the Slade family!

M-L

Trip Report # 14 (2 July 2009) : The farce named Route 242

We found on several occasions that Mozambiquan roads, boldly indicated in solid lines (tar) and numbered on every map/resource available to us, simply exist in the imagination of MapStudio et al.  Some inside info. The mapped route between Marrupa and Montepuez in the North of Mozambique does not in fact exist.  The erosion trench masquerading as a road between these two towns follows a completely different track and seems to change with every successive rain season.  Indeed, fixing the apparent road is definitely more expensive than building a new one.

No worries about exceeding the National speed limit of 80km/h here (not surprisingly however no police stops as we have grown to expect on the most obscure roads) as we averaged around 22km/h negotiating ditches, trenches, sand, swamps and tree stump bridges.

Imagine therefore our astonishment when we found neat, stark white road markers indicating distances to nearby towns and villages along the ‘sidewalk’ as though this was actually considered a road by authorities? 

It took us 7 hours to cover the stretch from our makeshift road side camp to Montepuez: roughly 160km (Av = 22km/h).  I imagine a tourist brochure for the area reading like a property add: ‘An off road enthusiast’s (ala renovator’s) dream’. 

We passed two Pietermaritzburg boys (South African clearly do not get the concept of REALY bad roads) doing the reverse of our route. We shared with them the secret of the ‘Sunset Spot’ and they shared with us information about Brenda’s Dive and Bush Camp in Pemba.  The light at the end of the tunnel for this day :-)

M-L