Mozambique, More on Mango

The first night I was on couch duty and it turned out to be quite nice compared to my wooden plank of a bed at UB. That, combined with the fact that I got privacy and didn't get as eaten up as the others by mosquitoes, meant that I was happy with the couches. As I said earlier we rushed out to the beach. In order to do this we had to walk up a rickety set of wooden stairs surrounded by thick jungle scrub and onto the top of a dune, where the reception/bar/restaurant was located. This was a wide open wooden and cement structure with a palm thatched roof and comfortable chouches and chairs overlooking the fantastic view of the ocean. Two or three resident dogs lazed around alternating between the sun and sand and the cool wooden floorboards. We hardly took note of this though as we were too busy running down the steep slope of the dune to the water. The waves were strong here too, but not as strong as they were in Xai Xai. We had just as much fun though, and this time no one got injured. The boys went quite far out, and I went further into the water than before. It didn't get deep exactly, but rather there were trenches in the sand and the heaving of the waves was constantly changing the depth. As we were to find out later, at low tide, it's very lucky the boys didn't go any further than they did because this part of the beach was lined with razor sharp rocks. After swimming we explored the beach for a while. It was hard packed (at that time) white sand with huge dunes outlining the whole shore. Resorts, restaurants, and dive shops were all built on top of the dunes and some of them had tall rickety stairs that you had to climb to get to them which seemed somewhat less than sturdy at times. The market we passed through when we arrived was about a 20 minute walk along the beach. There were exciting shells and bit of washed up ocean life all over the beach (which I never got tired of investigating. Cuddle fish bones are fun!) We opted not to eat the gourmet dinner at Mango that night, but instead headed back to our chalet to fix our own dinner and commence drinking. The drinking jenga came out and we played for a long time because, despite the inebriation, we were getting good at it. Diana is a fighter when she gets drunk and she picked a fight with Matt and started wailing on him.

We had decided on bed rotation, since there was one big comfy bed in one room, two single beds in the other, and two couches. I was on couch patrol that night, which was fine with me. Since on the bathroom wall actually reached the thatched ceiling all the rooms were basically connected so that our conversations carried on long after everyone had actually gone to bed. It was a good start to our time at Mango.