first thoughts on Quelimane

(wrote this Sunday night when I didn't have internet access...more soon. I've also uploaded more pics to Picasa which I'll label sooner or later.)

Quelimane is such a beautiful and sad city. It was the first “big” city in Mozambique, but all the local factories shut down after the civil war following independence in 1975 and there is literally no industry here. Ten or fifteen abandoned ships line the shoreline, and the 19th century church shown in so many pictures of this town has also been long abandoned, with everything inside stolen, including the altar. My colleague took me on a walk around the city soon after we arrived, and showed me where he saw his first movie, and told me that when he had his appendix removed as a teenager, this was the town where his family came, because it was the main city in this region. We sat for a beer at a restaurant right on the river that made Quelimane the main port in northern Mozambique, and he told me how the owner of the establishment had great plans to improve this area, but has never had the money. I haven’t felt more at peace with the wind off the water blowing gently in a very long time – it was easy to forget the abandoned buildings with my back to it all. We ended up having dinner with three other colleagues at a place called Marima Wa Zambezia – the heart of Zambezia – which is run by a French or Belgian woman (Mário couldn’t remember) and had handmade/handpainted clothes on all the benches, and had a great atmosphere in general, and is fenced off so that for a while you feel transported to a place where walking out to the street won’t bring you back to the bleak reality of the stalled economy. This has easily been my favorite day in Mozambique so far. The sun setting by 5:30 is totally playing with my head though – by the time we at dinner I was sure it had to be midnight.


My hotel is something straight out of the Sixties – and check out the buttons on the wall (which I assume no longer work):



No internet in this hotel, but we do seem to have satellite tv and a good air conditioner. Tomorrow we’re off to see some of the sites around the province where we’ve been constructing warehouses and evaporation tanks for use during the spray season.

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