Welcome to our first Hollis family blog. This is the story of how we got to Mozambique
Zoe
At nine o clock at night, with the children in bed and expecting to go to school in the morning, I heard some worrying news. South Africa was intending to close their borders in 2 days’ time so we either needed to leave at six o clock the following morning on our journey to Mozambique or not go for several months. After much debating and phoning of travel agents, we decided to take the trip to Mozambique. We scurried around frantically throwing things into suitcases and trying to clear the house whilst the children slept.
Harriett
I was woken early at 6 am still thinking I was about to go to school when Mum told me the news. This came as a shock because I was not able to say goodbye to my friends. We quickly got ready and left for the airport.
Imogen
We drove to Manchester and met our grandparents who then took us the rest of the way to the airport. We then had to say goodbye to Winston (our dog) for he was flying on a different flight. It was difficult going around the airport because we had a lot of bags (all the essentials for about two months)! We eventually got to the check in, it was totally deserted except the staff, it was really weird!
Sam
Once we checked in, we flew through the airport in record time. We were quickly on the first flight of our journey, down to London. Imogen managed, with a cheeky grin, to get to visit the cockpit once the flight had landed. We got a tour of the controls with Imogen and Harriett in the pilot and co-pilot seat. We appreciated the lounge at Heathrow and I particularly enjoyed all the food and coffee available.
Harriett
We boarded the plane in London, heading for Johannesburg. It was my first time flying in Business Class and when we arrived at our seats, we were delighted to see that they looked comfy and reclined into beds. I watched a film and then had a very pleasant sleep until I was woken at about 5 am for my breakfast whilst the rest of my family slept. I then watched part of a film briefly until the plane landed.
Zoe
We had a frantic transit through Johannesburg airport, being temperature tested, passing through immigration, collecting all of our bags and then having to check-in for our flight on to Maputo. We ran through the airport, arriving at the gate in time to wave from the top of the escalator to airport staff who were closing the gate. We made it. Just.
The next worry was getting into Mozambique. We slowly approached the front of the immigration queue, hoping we would get through. As it turned out, there were no issues at immigration at all and other than some confused customs officers wondering quite what the bizarre items we had packed (electric drills, boxes full of anti-malarial tablets, desktop computer, euphonium, etc) were.
Imogen
We were met at Maputo Airport by someone from Mum’s work who took us to our hotel (he had a big truck that we later found would be ours). Once we got to the hotel -this took a long time for the person driving was unsure of where to go- we checked in and found out that we would have to be in quarantine for two weeks. We got to our bungalow and looked around we then found the pool which we jumped straight into.
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