Snatch and...give back

We were blurry-eyed and half asleep at 5am as we rode in the taxi to the airport. At a junction a man leaned in and tried to grab Millie's bag through the half-open window and when we started hollering he dropped that and went for her phone. He had the most lacklustre approach in the history of robbery as after swiping it he essentially held it in the open window, which allowed me to wrestle it back. As there was a nightclub one hundred metres away with revellers still pouring onto the street we figured he was just a drunk guy being opportunistic and was conflicted in the moment about what to do. He knew we'd inevitably shout and attract attention and the last thing a street robber wants is for enraged bystanders to give pursuit, as vigilante justice can be brutal.

As Millie's been hired to produce the communications outputs for the biodiversity surveys taking place over the next couple of weeks in Chimanimani National Reserve, the loss of her camera would have been fairly catastrophic.

After that interlude we made it to the airport and focused on getting coffee.

I hadn't been able to find any seats on flights to Chimoio, the provincial capital of Manica. Instead we had to fly to the second city of Beira and meet a driver to take us westwards across one of the narrowest parts of Mozambique towards the Zimbabwean border. This road is excellent, financed by Chinese economic interests, and the drivers soundtrack was Lionel Richie's Greatest Hits, which suited me fine.

In Chimoio, pictured here from the hotel window, we met up with Andrew and Milagre of the partner NGO organisation with which I'm working. The government is involving us all in conversations about supporting conservation work in Chimanimani, which is a unique place in Mozambique, as the site of its highest mountain and being well known for its botanical diversity and fantastic landscapes. Andrew cooked delicious food and we had beers, along with Will, a British PhD student in Chimoio and a good friend of Robin and Kate, whose wedding we both attended last year. Que coincidência!

I had to stay up until some godawful hour finishing a piece of work that needed to arrive with senior colleagues by the following day. I fell into bed at a time no human should ever really witness.