We had been expecting Inhambane town to be something like Stone Town in Zanzibar (fading colonial splendour blah blah) but it was really run down. We felt good there and did some admin. We went shopping at the Chinese supermarket – new Chinese immigrants having taken over from the Indian general trading stores.
There is a remarkable lack of diversity of food: no chocolate! All food is extremely expensive, almost none locally produced – the water we bought was imported from Portugal and a carton of longlife milk costs $4. I asked a local what they did for milk, thinking there may be a parallel market for locals – but actually they just don’t have milk except from kept livestock (of which we saw almost none).
From the town we headed to the coastal peninsula of Barra – there were dozens of Piri Piri roadside stalls on the road up. The map of Mozambique actually notes this phenomenon (no offical mention of the hanging cow’s head though). Ralph, with all his attempts at Consolidation of Stuff, bought a MASSIVE bottle of Piri Piri sauce which we will be (happily) shlepping through the rest of Southern Africa.
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