WE were met in Inhambane by a group of eight people. Four men, two women, a baby and a deaf-mute African called Aiya – that was the only sound he could make, so that was what we called him.
He was a fabulous character, with a wicked grin which split his shiny black face in two. He lived in a grass hut in the swamps and didn’t have two brass shillingi to rub together.
But as long as there were crayfish to catch, and as long as he had coconut beer to drink, he was happy.
What we paid him for catching crayfish for us was probably the only actual money he saw that year. After the previous day’s battles with officialdom in pidgin Portuguese, I found conversation with Aiya most refreshing. Communicating in mime was quite natural to him.
We piled all our belongings into Pete’s Land Rover. Pete was most impressed with our selection of luggage. I couldn’t see at first what was so impressive about an army surplus bivvy tent, a gas cooker, two boxes of food, 20 litres of drinking water, a case of beer and a bottle of brandy.
We had packed all our clothes into one small airline bag. It turned out that it was the smallness of that bag which impressed Pete. His only previous experience of taking unknown females camping had been a disaster of cabin trunks, make-up bags and false eyelashes!
Somehow we all managed to squeeze in with the bags and boxes and set out for Jangamo Beach.
Deidre and I were in the back, hanging on for dear life.
Despite all the hanging on, I still hit my head on the framework of the canvas awning twice in the first few kilometres. A petrol can leaked steadily over my foot. The baby screamed and Aiya yelled his war-cry every time we hit a bump. After fifteen miles I was feeling very hot and bruised and probably smelling a bit too. I know everyone else was!
Then we hit the swamps. Instead of bump-bump-bump, it was slosh-slosh-slosh. I was beginning to wish that I had never come on the trip at all, when we got to the pub!
Right in the middle of the swamp, 30km from the nearest road, Abdul had set up shop.
It was not exactly an olde-oake-beams sort of pub, but merely a side room off a trading store, but it was a pub nonetheless. There must have been a fair population in the area, because the store itself, with the usual conglomeration of cheap cotton prints, cans of beans, packets of sugar and tins of paraffin, seemed to be doing a pretty lively trade.
The pub area was equipped with a reasonably presentable bar counter and slightly scratchy background music, consisting of one record played over and over again. ‘I’ve Been Through the Desert on a Horse with no Name’ – I was beginning to identify with that feeling! But – oh bliss – a fridge full of cold beer.
Abdul’s biggest money-spinner was his tractor, which he used to haul tourists’ cars out of the swamp.
His tractor was spotless. His loos were not!
It was around sunset when we got to the beach. It was a highly civilised set-up. Apart from the various sleeping tents – largely redundant – we had a kitchen, built of palm leaves and a bar, fashioned from half of a wrecked dugout canoe, with a palm leaf roof and windbreak.
Aiya pitched our tent for us. He had obviously never seen anything so silly in his life. How on Earth could two girls, the size of Deidre and myself, ever hope to sleep in a thing which was knee-high to a grasshopper?
His mime was worth a thousand dollars a night on Broadway.
When I mimed how we got into it, he rolled in the sand, crying “aiyaaiya-aiya,” while tears of mirth streamed down his cheeks. He was quite incapable of any constructive work for the next half-hour.
After two days of bumpy roads and the never-ceasing sound of the car engine, it was absolute bliss to snuggle down in a sleeping bag, under the stars and be lulled to sleep by the sound of the ocean, not fifty yards away.
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