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Good for Something - by Octavia Seymour
In the month between the stresses of Hilary and the studying of Trinity I escaped the confines of my home life to go away to Mozambique. I went without family and without friends – I was relying on the belief that a few people that I had met there last year had not yet moved away. In my opinion this seemed like a solid foundation for a trip. Obviously the parents were less certain, and more than a little nervous, partly because Mozambique is a country with a history of political ups and downs, partly because any phone signal there is minimal and ludicrously expensive, but for some inexplicable reason, the main reason for my mother’s frantic worrying was because of the threat of sharks.
I am a surfer – or at least I try to be. The result of that declaration is that I really only travel to places with waves, and once there the moment that waves present themselves, everything else gets put on hold. The life I lead in these places revolves around the sole aim of ensuring that I will surf soon, and when the waves come I will be ready. Whether that means moving on rapidly from places that are fascinating but due to be flat for weeks, not drinking too much (or at least trying not to), spending days trying to find the right material to fix a board or just sitting on a balcony watching the swell pulse for hours until it is ready; It is a way of travelling well known to many surfers.
The result of this perpetual dependence on factors outside your control causes surfers to become strange creatures of spontaneous and unpredictable character and yet it is by these eccentricities they are united. For those of you that don’t surf you won’t appreciate the ease with which it creates friendships, but from the moment that you say hello (or howzit) to someone in the line-up, whether they be a huge Afrikaner sporting threatening tattoos, some twelve year old kook who is annoyingly better than you, or just some old local who looks like he’s not that bothered to be there, you know that there is something uniting you – the waves.
The friends that I made in this tiny province of Mozambique last year whilst passing through were two men of 40 and 62. They were unashamedly hippies, slathered in homemade mosquito repellent and both sporting Jack Sparrow –like plaited beards, and yet when I paddled out that day and ended up sitting next to them in the line-up we chatted as if we had all the similarities of age and background to ease our friendship. Bruce, the older one lent me a board and then taught me where I was making my mistakes, Sean, the younger made sure that I paddled for the right waves and cheered as loud as anything when I caught them.
So I went back to Mozambique – yearning for a little bit of the randomness of the last trip combined with some waves, some new friends and a smattering of Portuguese. I ended up getting all of that and more. I arrived in Inhambane in the early afternoon one Wednesday and was met there by my friend Sean and his younger brother Andrew (more affectionately known as Roosta). They grabbed my stuff with the obligatory comments about girls packing too much and we all clambered into the back of backie and set off along the horrendously pot-holed road towards Tofo, every five minutes or so Roosta would swerve to avoid a cow 1 | 2 | 3 NEXT |
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