I knew that Chessie, Andy and Jamie would be hard acts to follow in the travel writing front, but now I have to follow Dan too! I am not aiming for poetic here -- just words. It is 11 pm and we just got back from dinner in Nampula. We waited over an hour for our pizza, Zach asking and requesting several times during that span. Finally, when he asked if we should leave -- perhaps they could just bring the check if not the pizzas, we saw them carry the pale rounds to the grill. There is a different sense of time and urgency here. I have been super patient so far and do not mind the wait, but at 10:30 I was really getting hungry and tired.

I'm pooped, sweaty, sticky, slightly dehydrated and spaced out. I feel very far from home (in contrast to Dan's sense that his brother being here creates some sense of home). Actually, I feel very far from myself. That self that was a therapist back in Bozeman, who just completed grad school... all that seems like a story someone told me about some college friend. And it is not that some other self has come and replaced the me that I knew, rather, the Bozeman me just feels very far away and irrelevant. Perhaps untethered or uprooted are words that touch on what I feel like these days, but that doesn't really cover it. It feels like some form of amnesia. It is not a bad feeling persay (or a good one for that matter). It is what it is. I am wide-eyed, taking the sights and smells in, trying to order them, but finding no known catagories in which to place my experiences. At least Nampula has been less excessive in its stimulation than Maputo was -- broad boulevards, much less trash and street vendors, fewer people in general, less traffic -- a little more my pace regardless of the continent.

For those following our travels, we'll leave Nampula tomorrow morning for Mouseril and then to Isla de Mozambique. Sue and Peter leave to head back home on the 15th. At this point, Dan and I are not sure where we'll go next. Here is the general outline now: 15th-25th-ish -- travel in northern moz - the coast or the shore of lake malawi. Then meet up with Zach again in Malawi after x-mas. Meet up with Anna in Mazuzu, Malawi on the 7th of January. Leave Malawi on the 14th or so and go to Tanzania/Zanzibar for two weeks. Over to Madagascar for two weeks. Then back to Bozeman via Jo-burg/London/Chicago/Seattle.

I expect we'll be out of email contact for the next week.