On the second some Wednesday of the month, Kristin Addis from Be My Travel Muse writes a guest column featuring tips and advice on solo female travel. It’s an important topic I can’t adequately cover, so I brought in an expert to share her advice for other solo female travelers! Here she is with another amazing article!
I sat with my new friends on Thanksgiving night in Tofo, Mozambique. Our food was slow to arrive, so we decided to pay homage to the nature of holiday and talk about what we were thankful for.
In that moment, I couldn’t believe that I was surrounded by so many amazing people who had arrived here from various corners of the earth, all in the same way I had: by word of mouth. There were two blonde Californian girls here thanks to the Peace Corps, a cleverAussie brunet who had just finished some of his PhD studies in a town in the north, another American who had arrived on a whim and brought all the laughs with him, and a few others from North America and Switzerland. We were as happy and relaxed as could be. Each person’s giving of thanks was more beautiful and profound than the last, some even bringing tears to my eyes.
Just a few weeks before, I had been petrified of traveling through Mozambique. There were a lot of question marks, and I could find few answers online. I knew just a bit about the country from what my friends from South Africa told me: Mozambique is a formerPortuguese colony rebounding from a civil war that ended in 1992. It’s coastal, bordering South Africa’s east coast. It’s absolutely gorgeous, with seafood fresh out of the ocean for a few dollars, and long stretches of beaches with endless sand bars and baby-blue water.
But I also knew that Mozambique isn’t an easy country to travel through. The police officials are corrupt, and the buses used by the locals, known as chapas, are generally just vans with bald tires that can accommodate 20 people but squeeze in 40. There’s a bit of tourist infrastructure in a few key places, but beyond that, it’s full of bad roads and mysteries.
