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Ilha de Mocambique; a "UNESCO Cultural Heritage Site".

The island is connected to the mainland with a 3.5 km long causeway with space for only one car at a time. They have built in small side extentions where you can turn to the side to let an aproaching car pass. No vehicles larger than ours are allowed on the island and there actually isn't even room for anything larger on the bridge.
Ihla, as it is called locally, used to be the former Portugees colonial capitol and consists of old buildings that were obviously beautiful in the past. Besides the town itself, it has a large fort built between 1546-1583 that was never captured although the Dutch tried a few times, plus a museum and some churches. All in all though, for us it wasn't that facinating. Perhaps this is because we'd been through a hundred other african towns that are generally in the same state (falling apart), with much of the same attractions; forts, churches etc. that are all alike, especially on the coast of west africa. We had been warned about this from others, but still had our hopes up for a bit more than there actually is. As others told us, there isn't much to see in northern Mozambique that we hadn't seen before, coming from the regions we did.

Narrow streets of Ilha de Mocambique with just enough room
for a goat to pass us on each side.

On the way home to the mainland, we drove past the beach were fishing boats are pulled up. Lots of fishermen were busy with their catch and we had a look around before deciding to buy 2 crayfish (clawless lobsters) to cook for dinner. After haggling for a while I got the price down to a fair 3 Euro per kilo! The fisherman was happy, as he would get only a little more than 2 Euro from a local we later found out. The crayfish were delicious and we retired to our tent for a good nights sleep stuffed from our luxurious dinner.

The next morning was not such a great hit, as it turned out that A.C. was inflicted with intestinal worms!!! She was definatly at that point, not a happy camper... I was called in to study the culprits and had to confirm that they were indeed disgusting worms, some of a considerable size! This was one medical contingency that we had not prepared for, and thus had to find local help to dispel the beasts within! Chances were, that I also was inflicted with these things as we eat the same local food etc. We did a little reading in our medical book "Where there is no Doctor" and saw that you can easily get worms from "unhygienic" food sources. A lot of african food stalls and restaurants have less than hygienic conditions. Beware since some worms can enter the brain, undoubtably not to do anything benificial!
After talking to our doctor friend; Jørgen, on the satphone, we decided to go to the local hospital on Ilha the next day to see if we could get the right medisin to kill the parisites. It was Sunday, and the hospital was closed, so we just had to wait and see.
Finding the hospital on Ilha wasn't totally staight forward, as it looked just like lots of the other semi-falling apart buildings. We drove around it 2 times by mistake before realizing we were right next to it! Inside the hospital compound were lots of people with every imaginable sickness and disease. Lepers missing bodyparts, aids pasients and who knows what. We finally were showed into a doctors office with blood on the walls and rubbish on the floors. The doctor was a young Mozambiquen man who unfortunatly didn't speak a word of english. Luckily we had brought our medical book with us and could point out the problem as there are illustrations in the book. He quickly agreed with books suggested medisin and took us over to the window where medisin is distributed from. In africa you don't get a packet of medisin, you get a plastic baggy with loose pills inside. The outside has symbols for morning, noon, night etc. and the correct dosage is numbered in the appropriate square for those who are illiterate. Since we don't read portugees, I guess that applied to us at the moment. The downside of these loose pills is that you have no idea what you are receiving and if they expired 10 years ago for that matter... They didn't have enough pills for the required follow up of pills after a week, but we could get these at the local pharmacy according to the doctor.

Some days later we continued southwards, and after some days of travel we reached the Zambezi river.

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