Jonclark2000's travel blogs:
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Day 3 on the buses and Pemba
Entry 53 of 125 | show all | print this entry |
Boss took advantage of my hospitality by getting up at 3am for the 5am bus! My alarm was set for 4:30, I bit more of a sociable hour, but not much!
The bus was half empty, what sort of African country had I come to! Stopping in the villages was also different, street vendors didn't sell water, biscuits or toothpaste! All the produce was fresh from the fields or sea. Fish, bananas, peanuts, watermelons, cucumbers and chickens, dead or alive, take your pick.
There also seemed a lot more poverty here. There are people with money, but there are also a lot who seem to have nothing at all and a good amount of begging goes on. I had to say goodbye to Boss after about 1 hour and he changed to get his bus to Nampala. I had been an interesting travel partner for a few days, but I was pretty glad to be saying goodbye. 2 days of him was about all I could take!
Stopped about 10am for breakfast - 2 pre-cooked tasty egg sandwiches.
The route was forested the whole way and very flat. I hope it doesn't all get felled here for firewood like it seems to have done in many other countries.
Getting further south and more vendors started appearing selling the usual biscuits, sodas, beers and also what looked like those small bottles of wine you get on planes! Must be the Portuguese influence.
Arriving in Pemba it looks like a dirty and uninteresting town. After getting cash from the ATM I took a taxi out to Russell's Place getting there for 2pm after what had been a mammoth 3 day travel experience. It seemed a friendly place and I was offered beer before I even looked at the rooms. There were a number of other backpackers there and it was located right on the picturesque Wimbi beach, very different from Pemba centre!
Got my first shower in 3 days, had a couple of 2M beers with the 2 Afrikaner guys running the place and smoked a cigarette! I was certainly glad to be off the road and all cleaned up after 3 days travel.
Sat around all afternoon, 2M close at hand and met a couple of nice Swedish guys. Also met a Spaniard Roberto and Irish Steve who had been on the road for over 2 years! He had a couple of interesting stories. Smitty and Philip, the 2 managers were like Laurel and Hardy. By the evening time they were both steaming drunk and Smitty spent the whole evening moaning at the other 4 guys because he had to get up early to give them a ride to the bus station. In the end he persuaded them to take a Dhow boat to Ibo Island, their final destination. I'm fairly sure this was just so he didn't have to get up early! Philip very helpfully spent the whole evening telling us exactly what was going to happen next in some crap film we were watching on TV!
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