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Day 3
Artur has borrowed the car to take Rita to the hospital, and the weather is still overcast, so we have a late start (again) and potter about reading and trying to make the pool table work, unsuccessfully, until lunchtime. Some fishermen arrive with some fresh prawns, so we buy a kilo (at prices comparable with a supermarket at home, which seems a mite pricy to me) and make a prawn curry for lunch.
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Day 2
The bed is blissfully soft and Paul’s mosquito nets, which he explains at length are imported from Australia and very expensive, seem to have done their job admirably. I get up at around 9am, having slept like a log, and get myself a drink and some fruit while I wait for the latest electricity outage to end so I can have a shower (water is pumped into a tank using an electric pump). The housekeeper arrives, and starts sweeping. A girl comes to the door with fresh bread, and George arrives to do whatever it is that George does. Suddenly I feel slightly underdressed and go to put some more clothes on.
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Day 1
Being friends with the editor of FT Alphaville, the Financial Times’ award winning markets blog, has its benefits. Like for example, borrowing Kaya MJ – his ‘mud hut’ in Africa – in exchange for knocking up a quick marketing website for it, so he can rent it out. Mud hut may be how Paul describes it, but by the time we come to leave he has excitedly provided a 19-page essay on the house, the car, the staff (of which there turn out to be four), the beach, the local amenities and the restaurants around the area of Barra, on the southern coast of Mosambique.