A stroll through the beaches of Maputo

I’m generally excited to be travelling…especially when it’s somewhere on the beach. My two week trip to Maputo though is being filled with stressful work, tight deadlines and colleagues without a sense of adventure.

Everyone told me about the amazing beaches of Mozambique so despite my stresses I decided to explore Maputo’s shoreline. I’ve seen many a beach in my day but this has got to be the most unique beach. There’s a very small strip of shore during high tide and the ocean seems to stretch out forever. When the tide is low, the waters recede so far back that you walk for ages just to reach the waters. Little shallow tidal pools form along the damp shore. And the sands reflect the ripples of waves that were there just hours ago. Little holes dot the rippled sands with the evidence of little creatures digging themselves free.

When you finally reach the warm waters, you can wade so far in to the shallow waters. In the horizon, you see another shoreline and it feels as though you can wade right through to that island. If I had a life jacket and a friend who could swim with me, I would have totally tried out that theory. The waters didn’t even reach past my knees when I turned around and looked back towards the shore I walked from. It was intensely scary to see how far in I had gone and my mind kept thinking about what would happen if the tide quickly changed while I was standing there. If this was a beach in Durban, I’d be too far in to be able to stand on the ground and the current would be far too strong to keep me one place. Here the beach is calm and welcoming. There were even lagoons with trees – nature’s umbrellas – where people chilling under.

All week I’ve seeing people that looked like they were standing far out in the ocean and now I understand why. The calm shallow waters make it quite safe to be able to go far in. The locals live off the ocean and either fish off the piers, off the banks of the harbour, stand far out in the beach or use fishing boats.

It’s a pity that I’ll be busy at work for the rest of the week so I can’t play on the beach and be amazed by it again.  

 

Twitter Blanket Drive

Last year, I promised to donate a blanket for every new follower I gained on my blog. Then in an unfortunate turn of events, I was out with a terrible flu during the weekend of the Twitter Blanket Drive! I could barely get out of bed and I definitely couldn’t live up to my donation promise in return for my increase in blog following. To make up for that, I decided to donate blankets equal to the total number of my blog followers this year.

I donated 20 blankets and also delivered 10 blankets each from @sacred_sha, @Nellytjie and @Deepikapoona. That was 5 bales of blankets squeezed into my little Corsa Lite. They all made their way through to this year’s Twitter Blanket Drive at Melrose Arch.

We were greeted with complimentary glasses of the Fire and Ice Hotel’s famous milkshakes. While I was getting help to bring up 50 blankets, I was saddened by how poor the turnout was. I heard there were tons of people last year and I was part of the huge gathering the year before. Maybe this was attributed to the increased number of drop off points or the poor marketing to the build-up of the event on Twitter. I hardly saw the flood of #tbdza tweets on my timeline the way I did in previous years.

I eventually opened up the 50 blankets and threw them all into the blanket area. There was a massive amount of blankets considering the small turn out. I called it a night after being entertained by Deep Fried Man. And I left on that cold night with a warm feeling in my heart.

Thank you for helping me to donate those blankets so that more people can be just as warm as I will be this winter.

New priorities, new passions

I’ve been so conflicted for most of this year about my writing. In fact, it all started last year…and ended with a lesson that took me one and a half years to learn.

I started this blog because the everyday hustle of work and the little life there is after work just wasn’t leaving me satisfied that I was doing enough with all that life has to offer. I needed to supplement my monotonous life with something else that makes me excited. That’s when I started dancing and a year later I decided to start writing again – something I was incredibly good at when I was a little girl. My childhood years spent reading and writing developed a style of writing that I lost through my adult years of studying and working. A style of writing that won me competitions and made me proud of a final product. The reading and writing that I missed.

And then life happened again. All of a sudden work consumed so much of my time that I stopped dancing and had very little time to write. It took me a year and a half to realise that I let work get in the way of my passions. Never again!

So now I sit here a month after vowing to leave work to work hours and to embrace the little time I have outside of work to focus on my passions. I started dancing again and it’s like going from an advanced level to a struggling beginner. It makes me despondent and I definitely don’t feel enthusiastic about going to class. I started writing again and I realise that the self-inflicted pressure to write in certain genres is preventing me from writing what I want to write; to being able to just tell my story the way I want to.

Only recently did I become aware of the fact that life changes and it changes you as a person. Along with that, priorities change and passions change. I don’t know if writing and dancing are my passions anymore but I intend to still keep pursuing them and to not be so hard on myself. After all, it’s the stuff after work that makes life worth living. I intend to live every day how I want – happy.