DAY 90 Friday, April 14. Mayotte, French Comoros
After two days at sea we landed at Mayotte. It was apparent to me that this was not a place where many tourists visited. They did provide a welcome though: a group of women, dressed alike, sitting under a pavilion and singing to us, to the beat of a drum. The beat and the singing reminded me of Bollywood music, but much simplified and a lot calmer.
The city had a very third-world look about it. We walked a couple of blocks inland from the pier, past a variety of shops, to a supermarket. We hoped to find some more of the Monkey Gland sauce we had bought in South Africa. The supermarket was stocked very strangely, with shelves packed with a single item, French mustard, for example, and others bare. A variety of 20-kilo bags of rice, though.
We returned to the ship, stopping at the market at the foot of the pier. This was crammed with a lot of shops aimed at what the local people needed. One of these little stalls that sticks in my mind had an amazing variety of things for sale. Here’s just some: knockoff Gucci handbags, plastic bins, bowls and chairs, wooden spoons, shoes, t-shirts with “FASHION” and something else I couldn’t read, a pile of plush red pillows with gold tassels, baby dolls and Barbie dolls, some kind of elegant boxes in a carton with Turkish writing on it, a 12×18-inch mirror, thermos bottles, rolls of shelf paper. A bored-looking woman in traditional dress sat beside it all.
Speaking of dress, the rules seem to be this: Men can wear what they want, for example a white shirt with jeans and sandals, or a long-sleeve athletic shirt, Nike shorts, and shower shoes. Women, on the other hand, all wore some sort of traditional dress, like these four, who I think of as “three young women and someone’s mother-in-law.”
I didn’t notice anyone wearing makeup—in Brooklyn the traditionally dressed women from Islamic countries certainly did. But we both saw some people, particularly women and youngsters, wearing Burmese-style cream on their faces for sun protection.
Day 90 marked the half-way point of our 180-day cruise. Mary texted her friend Ann to let her know “We’re on our way home now!” But we looked at ourselves and thought about it—neither of us are feeling homesick. Truly.