Sunscreen

For the first time in over twenty years I heard that Baz Luhrmann ‘Wear Sunscreen’ spoken word song, although it was the Brazilian version voiced by the bloke who narrates Big Brother Brazil. The sheer popularity that ‘song’ had at the time in order to reach Number 1 in the UK charts remains one of history’s greatest mysteries, even if I can appreciate its philosophical content more now than as a 16-year old whose main preoccupation was not around life’s big questions but whether Rachael M was going to deign to speak to me at school.

In Ponta do Ouro it was hot, and overheating was combatted with iced coffee, more readily available here than other places I’ve visited in Mozambique. Lundula and I took a walk along the beach, around the headland, enjoying the blues of the water, the greens of the dune vegetation and the crabs of the little tidal pools.

By 12pm the gin was becoming tempting as we were awaiting the arrival of other friends Tshinde and Ivan. Midday bled into copious gins at a beach bar, where the soundtrack was Pure Shores by All Saints; a song that if you don’t hear whilst visiting the beach, the trip never happened. The most bizarre exchanges were with a Mozambican dude claiming to be on holiday from his current home of Iceland, and who said he’d also spent time in Vauxhall and Oxford (his accent was so strong that he may have been naming the same place).

The gin-based afternoon morphed into an alcohol-soaked evening at a restaurant where the owner was South African; a nation equipped with much persuasion and capacity when it comes to drinking. That’s how we ended up with sticky absinthe dribbling down our chins, and a generally blurry end to the night.