This gives a round up of the animals we saw in the Kruger.

This is the tour of the whole lodge-on-stilts in the Kruger.

In this one Joana gives a tour of our chalet room in the Kruger National Park.

The blog gets video!! After months of fruitless messing around with MySpace, Mark O'Neill comes up trumps and here is the first video, from the beginning of the trip when we went to the Kruger. Please leave a message if it works, hard to tell here.

Don't worry that this is black, you can hear all you need. It was so cold in the Kruger we wore literally everything we packed. We forgot Africa was cold as well as hot when we packed. But Joana was not ready to immortalise this look on film.

In the narrowest of streets is this door showing the influences of India. As it looks like an old door, and Luis Camoes was known to have visited Ilha, it is commonly known as Camoes' house. Who am I to know different? Maybe it was his house.

Sharpening a catana in a makuti town workshop

Click on this (or paste if that doesn't work) to see a video of our intrepid heroes panicking when some wildlife approached in the Kruger.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1134197840

A jeweller in Makuti town, Ilha de Mocambique.

Tailor's chum.

A tailor.

Boys in makuti town

Ilha blog – Macuti town

Almost all the 13,000 inhabitants of Ilha live in half its tiny area, in the ‘makuti’ town, so called because of the makuti palm used to roof the huts there. The makuti huts house tailors, jewellers, carpenters, convenience stores or private residences with barely anything outside to inform you. You really need a guide to give you the temerity to walk through the doorways, not knowing if it’s a public or private space. The line is blurry anyway, with many families supplementing their income by renting space to teachers or students for example, or simply sharing space with other families. Indeed, one of our plans is to give legal title to one family per house, as part of formalising the population there, and ultimately reducing crowding.

The town is especially ‘makuti’ in feel as the roofs are at ankle level, built as it is in the bottom of a lime quarry. Originally the southern half of the island was dug out to build the colonial houses of the northern half (and buildings as far south as Inhambane), and then once abandoned (or possibly deemed dangerous as it is below sea level), was used to house slaves before they embarked from the warehouses of the stone town. The makuti town evolved from there when the slave trade was outlawed.

Hafiz, one of the heads of the Muslim confrarias on Ilha, told us an amazing story about one bairro (neighbourhood), where the old slave families took to prostitution to survive, visiting the Portuguese soldiers in the fort for their fare. They gave birth to mulatto babies back in the bairro, which has meant that that bairro ever since has had more islanders with European features.


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This is the cinema. Ilha has a large real cinema but it's chained up. Instead these TVs serve as cinemas, in a barn, 2 pence entrance fee, and music videos from American R n B on show.

Joana with Hafiz on our tour of macuti town.

Joana and I tour the macuti town with Hafiz, the young popular sheikh in charge of one of Ilha's confrarias. Here we meet Luis, a guesthouse owner.

The hospital on Ilha. This shows the south wing to the left and the main central part on the right.