Word to the wise, making jam out of tangerines is not as easy as the internet tells you. I just finished painstakingly peeling 15 tangerines, first peeling off the skin and then laboring over each individual segment to get all of the pith, filaments and inner membranes off, along with the seeds. After doing this, mixing in the sugar and then boiling it down, I came up with a grand product of one measly cup of jam. I haven’t tasted it yet, so it may or may not be the most delicious cup of jam ever to exist in the world, but at least I know that it will be one of the most inefficient intakes of calories ever spent.
Despite the culinary quagmire that was tangerine jam, I have to say that I have been pretty pleased with tangerine season here in Mozambique. Just down the road from my house I can get 10 juicy tangerines for the equivalent of about 25 cents. Not bad. Back in January I could get 10 mangoes bursting with bountiful flavor for about 3 cents. March was white and seedy watermelons, and June was the month of tiny but surprisingly tasty lemons. I’m not very used to this whole “in-season” and “out-of-season” thing that happens here, considering that back in the states I can get almost any fruit or vegetable I want anytime I want throughout the year. They’ll ship bananas in from Costa Rica, apples in from New Zealand, and oranges up from Florida, and we’ll show up at Copps pleased to see what we want right there in front of us 12 months a year. As I sit here craving a mango but knowing that it will be another four months before those plump little fruits are dangling off the trees ready for me to pluck down, this idea of all fruits all the time seems pretty nice. Of course, there are sacrifices that we make in order to eat bananas in Wisconsin in December. Between their transcontinental flight and genetic alterations, the fruits we pick up at Copps are only a shadow of what Nature intended them to be, but that is the price of convenience. If you want to eat real, juicy, flavorful fruit, and not the overripe, roided up, lab fruit that supermarkets offer, you have to come to Africa, where the fruit falls right off of the tree into your mouth.
All this is to say that I don’t mind waiting for my mangos and tangerines. It makes it all the more exciting when that one special month comes around and you are buried in figs, or pineapples or cucumbers and you had forgotten how much you missed them. Here’s the run-down, “A year in fruits,” that I have been able to surmise over the course of my ten months here in central Mozambique:
- December – The bang-bang month of litchi. A peculiar dark-red, ping-pong sized fruit that is white, juicy and full of flavor on the inside. As soon as it was here though, it was gone and I was left only to wonder what my Peace Corps service would be like in the next 12 months without litchi.
- January – We were literally buried in mangoes. Everyone, their mothers and their dogs were selling big old buckets of mangoes that they carted around painstakingly on their heads. At the price of less than a US cent per mango people were practically giving mangoes away, I think mostly just to lighten the load on their heads.
- February – Enter the not-surprisingly disappointing epoch of the fat seedy cucumbers and small non-sweet (and white on the inside) watermelons. On the upside, though, you can never get sick of pineapples. Central Mozambique is the pineapple capital of the world. In January and February the streets are dense with stacks of pineapples that rise above my eye level and the trucks are loaded down by the ton. The best thing you can do is get a veritable “pineapple cone” – imagine the idea of a cotton candy put in pineapple form. Grab the stalk on top, flip it upside down and the vendor will peel the skin away so that you can eat the whole pineapple bite by bite as you walk around.
- March – corn, corn and corn with a side of okra. Grilled on the cob, boiled, or, usually, dried and ground into corn flour to make xima, a staple here that forms the carbohydrate base of every meal.
- April – Just like the fall back at home pumpkins and squash reign supreme, along with this strange woody pod that falls from a tree and is full of a pretty gross tasting chalky substance that people go crazy for.
- June – Hmm. Lemons and peanuts anyone?
- July – I never knew what figs looked like outside of a Fig Newton. Now I know. I prefer them in Newton form.
- August – More Newton-less figs, plus, finally…tangerines. It’s a close call between August tangerines and February pineapples in the category of best overall fruit month. And the Oscar goes to…tangerines. I could eat a bag of 10 tangerines straight without growing weary of their juicy insides and citrusy bite.
- September, October and November – only time will tell. My dream which is not going to happen is that all of the fields suddenly spring up with raspberries, blueberries and strawberries and then an ice cream truck selling Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, and, what the hell I’ll dream big, Choco Tacos too, decides to start running his routes past Mangunde.
Like I said, it’s kind of exciting to show up at the market in whatever month and not know what you’re going to find. Unfortunately, half of the time you find the market bustling with a grand total of about three people each with a bucket of figs and one dude on the side selling a sac of dried sardines. On these days you languish home empty-handed, but every once in awhile you are surprised – someone had some extra potatoes, or tomatoes from their farm to sell, or there was one time someone actually slaughtered a bull and was selling beef by the kilo, what a day that was. Meat is a tough delicacy to come by in these parts. Chickens go for about three dollar a head, but then you have to kill them, and do all the jazz that goes along with preparing them. This makes your meat options slightly less appealing. Anyway, there it is, “A year in fruits.” I have gotten used to it and enjoy the cycle and surprise. While it would be nice to have a mango or a pineapple right now, I’m pretty happy with tangerines and figs right now and am sure that there will be a day when I show up to the market asking for tangerines only to get a puzzled look from the vendor be handed a mango.
Now, onto the real story of the day. I came into this blog post with the plans of telling you all the story of the Mysterious Mountain Queen of Namuli, but I got so distracted by that damn one cup of tangerine jam that I almost forgot. Thus without further ado…
The tale began, as almost all tales in Mozambique begin, squeezed into the back on an open-back chapa. I was with three other friends, all male and in their early twenties. We had heard about a mountain in the northern province of Zambezia called Mt. Namuli. The base of Namuli was a day’s walk away from the nearest town of Gurue and boasted the title of the second tallest mountain in all of Mozambique. Now, as Mozambique is a relatively flat coastal country, this is not the most audacious claim in the world, but it was still an impressive enough title to get us into the back of that chapa heading in the direction of the mountain. We had been asking around to find out how one goes about climbing Namuli and, through various sources we were able to piece together a patchwork plan of action. We were told that, upon arriving in Gurue we must head out of the valley that Gurue sits in, through the surrounding hills and remote mountain villages on a winding path that would eventually lead us to the village of the Mountain Queen. It would be a day’s journey to arrive in front of this mysterious and hallowed queen and we would have to bring a few offerings for her in order to buy our passage up the mountain.
The next morning before dawn, we left Gurue on our way to visit the queen. The first hour or so of the hike was idyllic. We strolled through gentle green hills with the rising sun angling into the valley and casting long shadows in the golden sunlight. The path cut through Gurue’s famed tea plantations and we found ourselves surrounded on all sides by a green and verdant blanket of tea plants.
Soon enough, we had worked our way through all of the tea plantations and began cutting a steep winding path that passed through a number of small villages. At times, with the four of us scampering along on our way to see the queen of the mountain I couldn’t help but start humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and think of Dorothy blazing her way through jungles and flying monkeys on the way to the Emerald City. As we passed through these tiny mountain villages on our way up to the village of the queen, to say that we made a scene would be an understatement. We could hear the calls of ‘uzungu’ (‘foreigner/white person’) before we even arrived at a village. I don’t know if the previous neighborhood was radioing ahead to the next ones, or they had an elaborate system of runners in place to pass the message, but they knew. For at least a half an hour we were tailed by a gaggle of at least 20 kids. Adults would call out from houses and teenagers would watch us from adjacent paths.
At one point just after we had left the limits of one of the villages, however, things got a little dicey. You always have to be aware that when you are parading through a village with your fancy bags and shiny shoes, everyone is watching you. Ten minutes or so after leaving one of the towns we noticed that there were a couple of teenagers who had been walking steadily behind us for a time. They were carrying machetes and kept a good distance from us, not getting closer than 30 or 40 yards, but our sensors went off just a bit as we realized that in this context we were vulnerable. We were on an isolated mountain path and had just trumpeted through a poor village with our wealth written on our sleeves. It would not normally have been an unusual situation to see two teenage boys walking along the path with machetes as practically everyone in Mozambique has a machete and it, along with a hoe, is what they all bring to work in the field everyday. The difference with these guys, however, was that they seemed to be peculiarly interested in us and would not let us out of their sites. We sped up, they sped up; we slowed down, they slowed down. I decided to stop at a nearby house to find out what was going on. I asked a woman standing outside whether she knew those boys who were following us, and told her that I thought they were going to rob us. Then she called them over, “João, Roberto, come over here. Were you going to rob these men?” It was a ridiculous situation. They glanced at me furtively and laughed, embarrassed. It was as casual as if I had just caught them trying to sneak a cookie out the cookie jar. Somehow it didn’t seem like they understood that we were talking about armed robbery here. There wasn’t much we could do though, so as a last resort, I offered to buy their machetes off of them. It was a good try, but they declined my offer. At this point, we had no choice but to carry on and hope for the best. A couple minutes later, though, there they were again, trailing us. This time we stopped at the house of a different family to see if the hooligans would pass us by. They slowed down a bit, clearly a little confused and then proceeded to hide their machetes in their jackets, pass us by and then stop just around the next bend, waiting for us. It was like a game of leap frog, but with machetes. We were now quite sure of their intentions and had had enough of this horsing around with deadly weapons, so we offered to hire a nice man who lived in a nearby house to accompany us at least to the next village. Chances were these punks would not try anything if we were with another local from the community. We were right. We passed by the thieves and continued on our way without anymore problems. We had a greater task at hand – finding this elusive mountain queen.
All in all, it took us about 8 hours to wind our way through 30km of fertile valleys and green hills and arrive in Macunha, the infamous and unassailable village, no, I’ll even say kingdom, where the queen reigned. None of us were entirely sure what to expect from this mysterious queen. Maybe a palace? A golden crown and a hen that laid golden eggs? Maybe we were just delirious from the long walk, but we couldn’t help but dream of some ridiculous fantasy involving a seven course meal and soft warm beds when we would arrive in her spacious palace. Well, we got the feeling that we were getting closer and closer to the center of this kingdom but hadn’t yet seen the spires of the palace or reached the mote and guards. When we finally asked another peasant in the village they pointed us to a tiny little hut just over the next hill. We were crestfallen. I think our stomachs had been communicating with the naïve palace fantasies of chicken, pastries, potatoes and big steins of beer that were being conjured in our brains and had started to feel the pangs of hunger. It was not to be. This place was a shack at best. Maybe 10 feet wide by 10 feet long made of crumbling bricks. No electricity, and as we would later find out while choking on smoke all night, no chimney, just a fire burning in the middle of the floor. At that point, though, we were still hopeful. You can’t judge a palace by its meager exterior. Surely its ornate throne and regal court servants were awaiting our arrival inside the hut walls. Hmm.
When we arrived we were greeted by a fat woman who pulled out a floor mat and beckoned us to sit down in front of the house. She apparently knew what we had come for. I looked around for the throne, jesters and servants; nothing. What kind of a fraud was this queen? Finally, a group of people approached us and introduced themselves. The leader presented himself as the queen’s son, the prince, if you will, who kind of controlled the purse around there. He gave us the run-down. The fat woman who put the mat down for us was the queen. There are no servants, no knights, no damsels, and disappointingly, not even any jesters. Damn; our stomachs growled. “You brought the whiskey and flour, didn’t you?” Shit. This could be a problem, we were told. The gods were going to need an offering whiskey and flour before anyone goes on the mountain. If we didn’t present the offering, the queen, who seemed to moonlight as a sorceress sitting there on her righteous floor mat, would put a curse on us while we ascended and we might have been met with a blizzard on top of the mountain and die – her words, not mine, seriously. We didn’t want to mess around with a curse of that magnitude, so, after consulting with the Prince, he told us that they conveniently sold flour and whiskey, actually the only two things that they did sold. Perfect, we bought the offering and averted danger once again.
The next morning, when it was time to climb the mountain, we had to go through our initiation rites. The queen dumped some flour on the ground outside and then started pouring whiskey over the whole thing. We were trying to respect their culture and take it seriously, but it was hard when the night before, nearly all of us had though that the initiation circle – a couple of bricks stacked in a semi-circle outside the hut - was the latrine and almost relieved ourselves all over their sacred grounds. Luckily we had decided to go a little further away from the house and avoided a foul-smelling morning ceremony. It also didn’t help that the queen seemed to be just flinging the whiskey and flour around haphazardly. It seemed like a joke, but be didn’t dare laugh. We all said later that she was probably thinking to herself, “God these Americans will believe anything.” What made it worse was that the queen was chatting with another old woman the entire time she was tossing flour and whiskey around in our supposed sacred mountain journey ritual. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t sound like supplications to the Gods for a safe passage. I’m pretty sure they were just chatting about the weather, or gossiping about the latest goings-on in the mountain village. In any case, we paid our money, she finished the ritual, and we headed off up the mountain. I have to say, after all of that hubbub, I had kind of forgotten about the mountain itself. It turned out to actually be a really hard climb. It was steep! It took us almost 4 hours to summit the mountain and there were times when the grade had to be at least 45 degrees. The Prince who had welcomed us and also played the role of our guide up the mountain had made it seem like this was a walk in the park; everyone and their mother could do this hike in a few hours tops; we’d be back down by noon. Haha, maybe for a mountain Sherpa like himself, but man, there were times when we were crawling up rock faces looking down these sharp drop-offs below us wondering whether we would ever make it. One of our friends had to stop about half-way up because it was just too much to handle. Nonetheless, we toiled away and scratched our way up to the top of Namuli and felt pretty gratified for it after it was all said and done. Oh, and I forgot to say that we did this on my birthday! So I popped a Jolly Rancher that I had been saving for the summit and we celebrated my birthday right there on the top of the second highest mountain in Mozambique. After all of the trials and challenges that we had been through in the past couple of weeks, combined with the sheer challenge of climbing the mountain, it was a pretty rewarding way to celebrate 24!
Okay, I’m going to leave it at that. I can’t seem to avoid writing ridiculously long blog posts. So I’m sorry about that, but I hope if you made it this far, either you are unemployed and don’t have anything better to do or you actually enjoy reading my stories, so I’m grateful for that. I hope that life back in the states and all parts of the world is well. I will try to post some photos soon of my trip and I hope to hear from all of you soon. Take care!
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