Ponta D'Oura, Mozambique

Over the last weekend in September, twenty-five of us squeezed into our 4-wheel drive vehicles and headed for the beach in Mozambique. It was about a 6 hour drive and the last 20 kilometers were on a sand road, which made for lots of fun driving but a little less fun riding if you were one of the unlucky ones squeezed into the backseat!

The road to Ponta…

Driving into Mozambique we saw this fantastic sign welcoming us to the Maputo Nature Reserve, but if you look closely at the images on the bottom of the sign, you’ll see a little less ‘welcome’ and a lot more ‘warning!’

We made it to Ponta around 7:00pm on Friday evening and quickly divided ourselves between the two houses and got down to making dinner and drinking a few beers. A ‘barbeque’ in southern Africa is called a ‘braai’ and that’s just what we did.

Here’s the view of the Indian Ocean from our patio.

On Saturday morning, we woke-up to a glorious beach day. About 1/3 of the group headed to the dive shop to go scuba diving, and the rest of us spent the day on the beach. The only exception was Doug…he got up at 7:00am and scurried to the closest board shop to rent a surf board for the weekend. He was in Doug heaven and spent the better part of Saturday surfing. By late afternoon, he did share his board and spent an hour or two giving pointers and pushing others into waves.

Beach view: right point

Beach view: left point
We played frisbee…Mallory and Jordan are pictured here…
Sandcastles were built…Mallory is being eaten by her sand spider as Allison looks on in terror
Waves were caught…almost…
And Doug cried a little when the kite surfer he borrowed had a puncture and wouldn’t fly…next time…
Saturday was such a good one we stayed at the beach until sunset
After another braai and way too many beers, we got up on Sunday for more of the same: scuba diving, surfing, and beaching it. Ponta D’Oura is a tiny little beach town that is largely populated by vacationers, so on our way out I took a few pictures of ‘town’ to illustrate the size.

This is the ‘main drag’
This is the market
This is one of the three beachside restaurants
On our way home, the sand road was a little less forgiving and Michelle’s car got stuck on multiple occasions. Here’s the crew pushing the car and then catching a ride on our hood because Michelle often drove away once her car was freed.
And of course, what would a road trip be without the CR-V overheating? This is becoming a familiar site on our blog!