"Estamos Juntos" - Moçambique

More than Coca-Cola, more than the FRELIMO posters for the recent elections... those were the two words ("we're together" in Portuguese) that I saw the most on billboards, T-shirts or painted, with bright yellow happy faces, on walls throughout the country of Mozambique whilst on a recent  visit there.  The entire country, like many others in Africa, has lept-frogged to the mobile telephone revolution and that was the ad campaign for one of the companies.  It's not uncommon to see women, at the market, bags of food on their heads, take out a cell phone tucked away in the folds of their brightly coloured 'capulanas' (sarongs).

Maputo is one of the more pleasant African capitals, laid out on a the edge of a bay on the Indian Ocean, with wide avenues, a mix of colonial and 70s modernist architecture.   Although there are still remnants of the socialist dream of Samora Machel, the country's first president after independence from Portugal in 1975,  European, South African and Chinese companies have set up shop and there is somewhat of a construction boom going on.  Despite still being a very poor country,  Mozambique is seen as a shining star in Africa, on the road to a better future from its bloody 20 year civil war that ended in the early 90s and labeled it as being the poorest country on earth.

I enjoyed the sidewalk cafes and met many locals there or on the street, in markets, on the waterfront.   Moçambicanos are easy going, friendly people.  There are in fact many peoples in this country of 20+ million souls with over a dozen ethnic groups each with their own indigenous language.   The country however functions in Portuguese and unless being in a remote area where perhaps education is minimal,  almost everyone speaks it.  I had to tweak my own Portuguese, with my Brazilian expressions and accent, even though they understand it with all the Brazilian tele-novelas on TV each night. 

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After 10 days in the south, going and coming back to the capital from a beach town called Tofo,  I flew up to northern part of the country, to a city called Nampula and made my way to Ilha de Moçambique, an old Portuguese colonial town on a 3km long island.  This was the first administrative centre of the Portuguese and it was an important link to their trade routes to Goa.   They built a fort there in the late 1500s and it remained  the capital until late 19th century, when they moved south to Lourenço Marques, what is now called Maputo.  Ilha however was an important Arab trading  port and boat building centre long before Vasco de Gama arrived.  More than half the population is Muslim and there is also an Indian influence, even though the majority are African.  Some people live amongst the crumbling ruins of the old colonial buildings but the majority are in the traditional reed huts of the local  Makua tribe.

Makua girl (watercolour)

Local mosque

I decided to spend the week.  The atmosphere was amazing.  The light was very bright,  a dry furnace-blast of heat from the sun during the day  then the wind off the turquoise sea would blow steadily in the late afternoon.  I stayed in a beautifully restored "pensão" done by an ex-pat Italian.  It's  across the street from the main mosque, which is on the beach where fishermen bring in their daily catch.   It was here where I  spent time with Rodrigo, a young Portuguese man I had met.  We were both stunned at the beauty of this charming island and its people, particularly the happiness of all the care-free children.

I was impressed with the dhow sailboats, which came in many sizes, all built right on the beach in front of where I was staying.  I spent several hours hanging out with a group of boat builders. The main man using his adze was so precise as he was hacking out square beams from large hardwood branches. These traditional Arab boats have been around for centuries along the east coast of Africa.

                        

                            

Rodrigo and I set up a one day sail on one of the dhows with a nephew of a boat owner and his friend.  Like most men on the island, they were expert sailors as they are all fishermen, the main economic activity of the island.    We sailed for the entire day to an islet out in the bay as well as to Chaga beach, across the bay on the mainland.  Despite having borrowed some sun screen from a fellow tourist at the hotel (could not be found on the island) we still got fried in the hot sun.

                       

                            

Public transport in Mozambique is indeed a trip.  Either mini-bus, a small van or the back of a pick-up truck, they pack them in like sardines.  And,  just when you thought it was completely full and  should be ready to go, they will stop yet again and pick up more people with their cargo.   There is no better way though to see the passion, laughter and friendliness of Africans than on these public buses. Babies will be passed through a window to someone on the roadside while mothers squeeze out from the back row.  There is a constant chatter amongst passengers as the music is blaring while the driver is negotiating pot holes and dangerously over-taking slower vehicles on blind curves.  Once on a slightly more modern bus,  I was not sure if it was in my honour or not  (being the only whitey-foreigner on the bus) that after playing some cool Tanzanian hip hop videos on the screen,  they put on a dvd of Shania Twain and cranked up the volume.

Further north to Pemba, another magnificent bay on the Mozambique's long coastline, the rainy season was just starting and for several hours each morning, the heavens opened wide and torrential rain created instant streams and rivers on the cracked red soil.  It would dry up later in the afternoon as the sun came out and the heat soared.  On the  way up to Pemba,  I often thought of St. Exupery's  The Little Prince as I saw many baobab trees,  like majestic monoliths in an otherwise dry bush landscape.

As elsewhere in the country, there is an abundance of seafood.  Grilled prawns,  coconut curried crab, steamed clams, fish...  I kept returning to this one local restaurant that served excellent grilled squid with 'matapa',  a mash of cassava leaves on rice that could  almost be considered a national dish.  Everything I ate was complemented by Mozambique's famous piri-piri,  their homemade hot sauce that was slightly different each time you ordered food.  Some, mixed with either lime or mango,  had  a sweet/sour taste and reminded me of Indian chutney.

 

Pemba was windy and the dug out canoes that fishermen used varied from the ones further south.  Not only did they use a small lateen sail with their canoes but they had a double outrigger,  an 'ama' on each side.  I spoke to a fisherman repairing his canoe and he told me it takes  about a week to carve a canoe out of a single log.  The wood used is a trunk from a 'cajueira', a cashew tree, which although a hardwood, is surprisingly light.

 

My last few days were spent on the beach before flying back to the capital and then home.  As they say in Portuguese, "ja tem saudade" - I'm already nostalgic - for the warm people I met in Mozambique,   a fascinating, spicier and tropical feel, a more laid back contrast to its British influenced neighbours.

 

Baidarka

Craigslist can be a good or bad thing... Whilst perusing the site one day under the heading of kayaks, I came across a George Dyson style of baidarka for sale at $400. I couldn't resist calling the owner, went to his home, talked him down a bit in price and picked it up. Never mind that I already have two other skin-on-frame kayaks and not much room for storage.

For those unfamiliar with George Dyson, he is the man largely responsible for re-introducing the baidarka (a traditional skin-on-frame kayak from the Aleutian islands of Alaska) with an excellent book published over twenty years ago. It's part history of the boat, its design and use as well as the author's own recreations of them, using aluminum tubes and plates instead of wood. Skin-on-frame kayaks have become increasingly popular since then. Many of them are the Greenland style, from which the modern conventional kayak is modeled on.

The word 'baidarka' by the way is Russian for small boat. They were the first Europeans to explore and exploit the Aleutian islands and they basically enslaved the local indigenous people to hunt sea otters for their pelts. This they did with their kayaks. The Russians made them build many more, some of them modified to have three people in each boat. The distinctive feature of this kayak is its bifurcated bow, which is there for a combination of design, performance and aesthetic reasons. Most baidarkas have the lower jaw curl upwards past the upper jaw. This one is the version as drawn by the explorer James Shields in 1798, wherein it looks more like a sharks mouth.

click to enlarge

This particular kayak was built from one of Dyson's kits many years ago. The owner said his friend had built it and gave it to him. I doubted he used it much himself. When I got it on the water, not only was it extremely tippy, but the cockpit was way too high almost reaching under the armpits. The low stability I could deal with, but I could not see myself paddling more than 10 minutes as my arms got tired. I was somewhat disappointed and thought about selling it, once again on Craigslist, however, after talking to a few kayak builder friends, it did seem possible to modify the boat to what it most likely should have been in the first place. I decided to keep it.

I cut off the old gray hypalon skin, sawed off the deck stringer and removed the cockpit. A new 'masik' (forward deck beam) and back deck beam made of wood were added. Bringing the back deck parallel to the gunnels and lowering the forward deck beams brought the height down to a more logical profile.

Most skin-on-frame kayaks have their frames made of wood which, in my opinion, is not only lighter and easier to work with but smells good and has a more organic feel. I must admit though, this kayak did look pretty cool with the skin off and I received quite a few questions and a lot of looks while I was driving it to and from my friend's workshop.

The next step was to sew on a new skin of nylon, stitch in a wooden cockpit rim and poly-urethane it which I did at Corey Freeman's baidarka school down in Anacortes, Washington. My friend Mara was there finishing up her own boat that she had spent a week learning how to build.

Although nothing to do with Aleutians,  I drew a traditional Ainu design simply because I like it. 

Back in Vancouver, I was almost worried that I would not be able to get in as the beam of the kayak is only 19 inches and I shortened the length of the cockpit considerably. My calculations were correct though and once in the kayak, the newly baptized "rocket" was extremely fast and much more comfortable to paddle.

Sketch book

Here are a few sketches and watercolours I did on my recent sailing trip. 

Canoes of Oceania

I love that word... "Oceania" the ocean continent. My recent sailing trip in the Pacific was truly an incredible adventure in many ways; being on the ocean, learning how to sail, group living in a small space, fishing, experiencing a variety of island cultures, their food, their music and dance, their hospitality; lush mountainous islands and windswept atolls; historical sites of ancient stone ruins or old bunkers and rusting guns from WW II; underwater worlds of coral and colourful fish, sea turtles, manta rays, sharks and dolphins; stars, sunrises and sunsets, warm tropical wind, shades of blue.

One aspect of the trip that I was excited about beforehand and was not disappointed was to see and experience the wide variety of canoes still used on most Pacific islands. Some were dugout from a single tree, others stitch and glue planks of wood and others still made from metal. Although each island or atoll had different styles and designs, they all had an outrigger off to the side of the main hull. Here are some examples of these canoes and the wonderful craftsmanship in their construction.

Fiji was the only nation where in fact there were not that many canoes. Most fishermen these days have aluminium boats with outboard motors. That's a bit of a shame as the Fijian outrigger canoes of the past, particularly the famous double hulled 'drua' was renown to be one of the most seaworthy of the Pacific. This was a quarter size replica of one found in the Museum of Suva. We met a group of kiwis that were interested in trying to revive the use of small sailing canoes for local use in the lagoons. An excellent initiative as the price of fuel keeps rising.

In Tuvalu, there were several types of outrigger canoes that ranged from a boxy plank type construction found on the island of Vaitupu to the elegant dugout from a hardwood tree called 'feitao' on the northern atoll of Nanumea. This last kind of canoe was very prevalent as there were almost no motorboats around. We came across a group of men that were constructing two of them at once, in the shadow of coconut trees.

In Kiribati, on the outer island of Abaiang, I was lucky to have met a local fisherman named Tekieri who brought me out in his outrigger to the reef to go snorkeling for octopus. With a sail made of a plastic tarp, we had speed of about 8 knots and it felt great sailing across the lagoon.

Being a wooden boat of planks, bailing is a necessity not just from water coming in through the seams but by the odd wave splashing over the front.

The Marshall Islands are famous for their sailing outrigger canoes. They are fast. I will simply copy what is written from a tourist pamphlet as they explain it better than I can. "The remarkable skill of the Marshallese seafarers to evolve their swift outrigger combined three inventions of the utmost utility in sailing. First the masters designed a watercraft that always keeps its main hull to leeward and its small outrigger counter-balance up on the windward side. Always keeping the main hull to leeward is possible as the canoe tacks because sailors pivot their mast and move their sail from one end to the other. Thus the canoe is able to sail with either end forward, thereby keeping the outrigger on the weather side.

With these reversible ends in mind, the Marshallese were able to further evolve their sailing craft. Their second notable design invention is an asymmetrical main hull which helps lift their craft to windward, much as a bird's wing lifts its weight into the sky. This asymmetrical main hull's two sides differ: the lee side (or side away from the wind) is flattened, while the hull's side which stays to windward is more shapely for lift like the top of a bird's wing. The flattened lee side of the main hull helps pull the vessel up to windward reducing the need for a deep keel, centerboard or leeboards.

The third notable design characteristic of the Marshallese canoe is the use of a lee platform. This extension lashed out to leeward of the main hull extends over nothing but the ocean. This seemingly precarious lee platform enables the voyagers to carry a greater quantity of cargo. Most voyaging canoes had small thatch house built for women and children. There is a sophisticated balance to these wide outriggers designed for ultimate windward speed and cargo carrying capacity".

On Kosrae, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, they do not have sails on any of their canoes as the reef around their island is close to shore and there are no islands nearby. We arrived there a few weeks before an annual island competition of outrigger paddling races. Therefore, everyday just off of our anchored sail boat, we saw teams practicing a few hours a day. Their canoes for racing are similar to the OC-6 canoes used in races in Hawaii and Polynesia except that they are carved out of a single long straight log. Unlike the atolls, Kosrae is a lush, jungle covered volcanic island with a large variety of trees.

Of course there are smaller canoes as well for fishermen going out to the reef and either throwing their lines or nets. The design is essentially the same as the long ones. I came across this man who was making a few paddles. Although he carved the largest part of the plank of hardwood with a chain saw, the rest he chiseled away using a machete. I was surprised at how precise he was with each whack of the blade. (I suppose a lifetime of opening up coconuts helps).

Sailing westward to Pohnpei, we stopped at the island of Pingelap. Here again, a different variety of canoes. An old-timer paddled out to greet us and informed us that we were lucky to be there at this time of the year because they would be night fishing for flying fish. Once the half moon set and it was dark, a dozen canoes set off from the beach. Each canoe had four people. There was a small platform in the middle where one man would stand up holding a massive lit torch made of dried coconut palms. Two more men would be standing at each end with nets attached to a long pole to catch the flying fish that were attracted to the fire light. The fourth would paddle slowly. The old-timer had lent me his single canoe so I was able to paddle along side this group of fishermen in the dark, fishing the same way they had for hundreds of years. With the firelight glowing on the water and sparks flying in the breeze amongst the half circle of canoes it was almost surreal.