I got my first ever glimpse of the Indian Ocean on the bus ride to Mozambique. I used this sparkling view to distract myself from the fact that the driver was steering with his elbows whilst eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. I sat next to a mother hen-like Portugese woman who lives in Mozambique. She diagnosed me with the condition of White Female, the side effects of which include getting robbed, carjacked, hassled by bribe seeking police and ripped off by money changers and taxi drivers (such talks have been a running theme that aside from the getting ripped off part, I don’t recall from my previous experiences traveling, nor do any of these things seem all that likely to occur when exercising the slightest amount of common sense). She insisted on driving me to my hostel and gave me her number in case anything “happens.”
Maputo, the capital of Mozambique is a funky city with good music and good food and crazy drivers. I stayed at a hostel with a receptionist who was like a docent on amphetamines. This fountain pen wielding maniac covered my map with dots, blotting out the street names as he rambled about everything from shopping malls to cassava leaves to the currency museum. I couldn’t follow 80% of what he was saying and he ruined my map. He may have been one of my favorite things about the city, and I liked Maputo a great deal. Since my map was now illegible and I couldn’t comprehend most of his verbal instructions although he spoke excellent English, I wandered around eating cashews, gaping at police officers and their giant guns and counting the number of streets named after Communists (a lot).
I was traveling with a Dutch guy in Mozambique and the experience prompted me to set up a few ground rules about future travelmate selection, specifically no Europeans during Eurocup. I am also now wary of people that travel with an excessive amount of shirts. He seemed to have packed for the sole purpose of never having to do laundry. He had 15 t-shirts, but no map or guidebook, no water bottle or flashlight, no mosquito net or spray or malaria prophylaxis. He did have a camera though, and the majority of time I spent with him, he was staring at the country through the lens calling Mozambicans who don’t speak English stupid, and everything else about the country, “so shit.” (I didn’t bother telling him that even if it was, it would be “so shitty.”) I very briefly considered smashing his camera with my Lonely Planet, but instead I ditched him mid bus ride hoping that my impromptu stop had accommodations nearby, and guiltlessly left him a lost malaria magnet.
Shortly before I jumped bus, we went to Xai Xai Beach where we met Gavin, an Afrikaaner-Portugese man who was in Mozambique to sprinkle his father’s (five years deceased) ashes. He followed me around all afternoon, stumbling, pleading that I talk to him (his exact words were “Tara, let me tell you my family history”), professing his respect for me, and demanding that I eat prawns to show my respect for him. “Kara, I respect you. So you respect me by eating prawns.” He told the Dutch guy, “I’m paying for her, but you’re on your own.” The alcohol on his breath made my contacts water, and I politely declined. However, when I arrived at the town restaurant, Gavin was nowhere in sight, but there was an enormous plate of food with my name on it. (Actually, with the name Tina on it, but the server assured me it was for me.) While we were eating, Gavin pulled up in his car, and a Mozambican kid ran out, handed the Dutch guy a folded up napkin and ran away. We opened the napkin and found that it was full of marijuana. The girl gets prawns, the boy gets weed. Later that night while the Dutch guy was searching for a TV to watch to Holland lose a Eurocup match, and I went to bed early, I could hear Gavin outside assaulting some other travelers with a pot of crayfish curry. When he got tired of that he started banging on my door, shouting at me to come respect him and meet his crayfish curry eating friends. Despite his stupor, he managed to punch one of my windows open, then forgot what he was doing and wandered away.
I spent the next few much quieter days alone in Inhambane, a Muslim town and former slave trading post. It’s small and quiet, and the streets are lined with jacarandas and pastel painted buildings. I spent my time wandering the markets and mosques trailed by a schizophrenic puppy. I later moved to a nearby beach where I continued my knack for attracting canines of questionable temper and health. When one red-eyed dog ran at me baring its teeth, I walked up to my waist in the ocean in my shoes and ankle length skirt. I gazed nonchalantly at the horizon as if it is my normal habit to go into the water fully clothed with a shoulder bag, holding my camera on my head, until someone dragged the dog away and someone else dragged me out of the water. Although the dog didn’t bite me, the mosquitoes took over on that front and feasted on my face until I looked like a leper and my eyelids swelled shut. This was unfortunate because Mozambique is just too beautiful to not, well, see. But after a Benadryl induced slumber, my cheeks and eyelids deflated to more standard proportions.
On the subject of sleeping, my Larium dreams have started to kick in. For those of you not familiar with the side effects of this anti-malarial drug, one of them is having vivid and bizarre dreams, like that my sink drain was clogged with lizards, or that I was a model in a fashion show for invalids on Good Morning America, or that I had a travel agent who gave trip report cards and I got a “needs improvement” under “leaving” (What do you have to say about that my psych major friends?)
The farther I got from the capital, two things became apparent. One was that there is a countrywide change crisis, by which I mean that paying anything other than the exact price results either in seemingly unwarranted anger or panic-stricken faces. I don’t know why change is so scarce, but it does make drawing money out of an ATM and then trying to buy an orange a stressful chain of events. The bar/restaurant at my lodge routinely passed out IOU’s, while the local baker gave change in the form of doughnuts and the internet café owner turned away customers who couldn’t pay in small bills.
The other thing that became apparent as I drifted farther from urban areas was the more obvious fact that English would only get me so far. Whenever language barriers arise, I have a strong urge to start shouting in broken French. While Spanish-speaking travelers seemed to get by with a few shifts in vocabulary and adding more phlegm, my Franglais was useless in Mozambique. This was really only a problem when I wandered off the beaten path in rural areas and needed directions back to where I came from. But in most circumstances, attempts to understand locals were rewarding and hilarious experiences, like when inquired about an item on a restaurant menu and the cook mooed, or when a fisherman with a passion for marine biology used pantomime to explain the workings of the crustacean excretory system.
Travel became much easier when I met up with a friend who speaks decent Portugese. I lived with her in Malawi last year and locals often mistook her for my mother. I don’t know how, because although she is technically old enough to be, she doesn’t look like she is (nor, I don’t think she’ll be offended if I say, does she act like she is), plus is blue-eyed, ginger haired and freckled. My Malawian ama is quite the globe trotting wild Irish woman. She’s lived and worked all over the world, but work “depresses” her so she just went back to school for a second bachelors and is in the process of moving to Malawi. One of her classic moves is to sample questionable street meat and then swig local rum to avoid “dodgy guts.”
Unfortunately, ama was not with me on the longest bus ride of my life, and as the supposedly 12 hour drive stretched into the teens, not a single person on the bus could tell me if I was headed in the right direction. The bus was scheduled to leave at 4:30 in the morning, which meant I had to wake up at 3:45 in the morning, which meant that I didn’t sleep at all because I was afraid I would sleep through my alarm. If I believed more strongly in signs, I would have taken my unfortunate taxi ride to the bus station to mean I was not meant to travel that day. When the driver got out of the car to locate my bus, it started rolling away with me inside. I couldn’t tell if the car was going fast enough to hurt a pedestrian or if it would stop on it’s own so I reached for the wheel and steered the taxi into the nearest bus, which definitely stopped the momentum. In hindsight, it probably would have been more prudent to use the brake but please don’t expect logic at 4 am in a car with the driver’s seat on the right hand side. This collision caused a lot of shouting, although I gathered that by the end of it, both the taxi driver and the bus driver agreed that no damage had been done. I mean, these are vehicles held together with masking tape and twine, and if anything, I probably knocked a loose part back into place. Luckily, no one seemed aware that I had actually caused the collision, so I shook my finger at taxi driver and said, “you let me roll away!”
Finally locating the bus began a nearly twenty-hour ordeal of crawling up the coast that included a grand total of ONE bathroom stop. The worst sections were the first four hours, in which we essentially only moved from one parking space to another in the bus station, and the last four in which it got dark before signs for my destination appeared, and I feared that I wasn’t on the right bus. The middle 14 hours is a blur of sitting between two women and their children, Sticky and Fever. I ate cornflakes and gazed at the morphing landscape out of shattered windows held together with tape. Each time a person got off the bus, she was replaced with her volume in goods so that by the end of my trip I surrounded by about 800 pairs of flip flops.
When I finally got to experience Vilanculos my destination, in the daylight, it was more or less worth the hideous trip. This beach town is located across from an archipelago where ama and I went snorkeling with a semi-silent Australian miner on a five YEAR holiday. I was an absolute mess at snorkeling. I kept trying to breathe through my nose instead of my mouth and would become convinced that I was suffocating. That is, of course, when I could manage to orient myself face down. Most of the time I couldn’t get my flippers to stay behind me and kept winding up on my back with my feet in the air. In this position, I kept drifting away and Ama would have to come collect me. When I got tired of having to get dragged back to the reef, I stood on the edge, put my face in the water and looked at the fish that way. That night ama and I exchanged a local jewelry maker a cooking lesson for a bottle of Tipo Tinto, the local rum that is sold in plastic bottles and smells like hospital and cake. We learned how to make matapa, a staple of cassava leaves, coconut and peanuts. His instructions included to “smash everything like a flower” (“like a flour?”) and that “it will tell you when it’s ready.”
Ama and I were anxious to get to Malawi; she needed to start work and I wanted to arrive before the school where I used to teach goes on holiday. We essentially waited until I could stomach the thought of getting on a bus again, and began our marathon to the border, which involved a steady stream of 3 am wakeups for 4 am all-day bus rides. The further north we traveled, the worse the roads became in nauseating combinations of tarmac, dirt and gaping holes. Although you drive on the left side of the road in Mozambique, whatever patch of road is smoothest is de facto fair game, so vehicles tend to speed toward each other until one swerves out of the way. If the chapas (minibuses) weren’t overheating and breaking down, we were getting pulled over for speeding by police looking for bribes. On one such occasion, the driver tried to convince the police that it was the bus we just overtook that was speeding. The officer didn’t buy it and he entered into some sort of negotiation with the driver that ended with him leaving the conductor behind as collateral.
Tete, the closest Mozambican city to the border has the distinction of being both incredibly humid and incredibly dusty, and markedly hotter than the surrounding areas. When the air turned steamy and tan and 20 degrees warmer we knew we were close to Malawi. There are six kilometers between the exit post for Mozambique and entrance post for Malawi. There were several houses in this stretch of non-country, which just baffled me. Part of me wanted to get out of the taxi and inquire about the particulars of living in a border, but I was too excited to stop. Into the warm heart of Africa!
Maputo, the capital of Mozambique is a funky city with good music and good food and crazy drivers. I stayed at a hostel with a receptionist who was like a docent on amphetamines. This fountain pen wielding maniac covered my map with dots, blotting out the street names as he rambled about everything from shopping malls to cassava leaves to the currency museum. I couldn’t follow 80% of what he was saying and he ruined my map. He may have been one of my favorite things about the city, and I liked Maputo a great deal. Since my map was now illegible and I couldn’t comprehend most of his verbal instructions although he spoke excellent English, I wandered around eating cashews, gaping at police officers and their giant guns and counting the number of streets named after Communists (a lot).
I was traveling with a Dutch guy in Mozambique and the experience prompted me to set up a few ground rules about future travelmate selection, specifically no Europeans during Eurocup. I am also now wary of people that travel with an excessive amount of shirts. He seemed to have packed for the sole purpose of never having to do laundry. He had 15 t-shirts, but no map or guidebook, no water bottle or flashlight, no mosquito net or spray or malaria prophylaxis. He did have a camera though, and the majority of time I spent with him, he was staring at the country through the lens calling Mozambicans who don’t speak English stupid, and everything else about the country, “so shit.” (I didn’t bother telling him that even if it was, it would be “so shitty.”) I very briefly considered smashing his camera with my Lonely Planet, but instead I ditched him mid bus ride hoping that my impromptu stop had accommodations nearby, and guiltlessly left him a lost malaria magnet.
Shortly before I jumped bus, we went to Xai Xai Beach where we met Gavin, an Afrikaaner-Portugese man who was in Mozambique to sprinkle his father’s (five years deceased) ashes. He followed me around all afternoon, stumbling, pleading that I talk to him (his exact words were “Tara, let me tell you my family history”), professing his respect for me, and demanding that I eat prawns to show my respect for him. “Kara, I respect you. So you respect me by eating prawns.” He told the Dutch guy, “I’m paying for her, but you’re on your own.” The alcohol on his breath made my contacts water, and I politely declined. However, when I arrived at the town restaurant, Gavin was nowhere in sight, but there was an enormous plate of food with my name on it. (Actually, with the name Tina on it, but the server assured me it was for me.) While we were eating, Gavin pulled up in his car, and a Mozambican kid ran out, handed the Dutch guy a folded up napkin and ran away. We opened the napkin and found that it was full of marijuana. The girl gets prawns, the boy gets weed. Later that night while the Dutch guy was searching for a TV to watch to Holland lose a Eurocup match, and I went to bed early, I could hear Gavin outside assaulting some other travelers with a pot of crayfish curry. When he got tired of that he started banging on my door, shouting at me to come respect him and meet his crayfish curry eating friends. Despite his stupor, he managed to punch one of my windows open, then forgot what he was doing and wandered away.
I spent the next few much quieter days alone in Inhambane, a Muslim town and former slave trading post. It’s small and quiet, and the streets are lined with jacarandas and pastel painted buildings. I spent my time wandering the markets and mosques trailed by a schizophrenic puppy. I later moved to a nearby beach where I continued my knack for attracting canines of questionable temper and health. When one red-eyed dog ran at me baring its teeth, I walked up to my waist in the ocean in my shoes and ankle length skirt. I gazed nonchalantly at the horizon as if it is my normal habit to go into the water fully clothed with a shoulder bag, holding my camera on my head, until someone dragged the dog away and someone else dragged me out of the water. Although the dog didn’t bite me, the mosquitoes took over on that front and feasted on my face until I looked like a leper and my eyelids swelled shut. This was unfortunate because Mozambique is just too beautiful to not, well, see. But after a Benadryl induced slumber, my cheeks and eyelids deflated to more standard proportions.
On the subject of sleeping, my Larium dreams have started to kick in. For those of you not familiar with the side effects of this anti-malarial drug, one of them is having vivid and bizarre dreams, like that my sink drain was clogged with lizards, or that I was a model in a fashion show for invalids on Good Morning America, or that I had a travel agent who gave trip report cards and I got a “needs improvement” under “leaving” (What do you have to say about that my psych major friends?)
The farther I got from the capital, two things became apparent. One was that there is a countrywide change crisis, by which I mean that paying anything other than the exact price results either in seemingly unwarranted anger or panic-stricken faces. I don’t know why change is so scarce, but it does make drawing money out of an ATM and then trying to buy an orange a stressful chain of events. The bar/restaurant at my lodge routinely passed out IOU’s, while the local baker gave change in the form of doughnuts and the internet café owner turned away customers who couldn’t pay in small bills.
The other thing that became apparent as I drifted farther from urban areas was the more obvious fact that English would only get me so far. Whenever language barriers arise, I have a strong urge to start shouting in broken French. While Spanish-speaking travelers seemed to get by with a few shifts in vocabulary and adding more phlegm, my Franglais was useless in Mozambique. This was really only a problem when I wandered off the beaten path in rural areas and needed directions back to where I came from. But in most circumstances, attempts to understand locals were rewarding and hilarious experiences, like when inquired about an item on a restaurant menu and the cook mooed, or when a fisherman with a passion for marine biology used pantomime to explain the workings of the crustacean excretory system.
Travel became much easier when I met up with a friend who speaks decent Portugese. I lived with her in Malawi last year and locals often mistook her for my mother. I don’t know how, because although she is technically old enough to be, she doesn’t look like she is (nor, I don’t think she’ll be offended if I say, does she act like she is), plus is blue-eyed, ginger haired and freckled. My Malawian ama is quite the globe trotting wild Irish woman. She’s lived and worked all over the world, but work “depresses” her so she just went back to school for a second bachelors and is in the process of moving to Malawi. One of her classic moves is to sample questionable street meat and then swig local rum to avoid “dodgy guts.”
Unfortunately, ama was not with me on the longest bus ride of my life, and as the supposedly 12 hour drive stretched into the teens, not a single person on the bus could tell me if I was headed in the right direction. The bus was scheduled to leave at 4:30 in the morning, which meant I had to wake up at 3:45 in the morning, which meant that I didn’t sleep at all because I was afraid I would sleep through my alarm. If I believed more strongly in signs, I would have taken my unfortunate taxi ride to the bus station to mean I was not meant to travel that day. When the driver got out of the car to locate my bus, it started rolling away with me inside. I couldn’t tell if the car was going fast enough to hurt a pedestrian or if it would stop on it’s own so I reached for the wheel and steered the taxi into the nearest bus, which definitely stopped the momentum. In hindsight, it probably would have been more prudent to use the brake but please don’t expect logic at 4 am in a car with the driver’s seat on the right hand side. This collision caused a lot of shouting, although I gathered that by the end of it, both the taxi driver and the bus driver agreed that no damage had been done. I mean, these are vehicles held together with masking tape and twine, and if anything, I probably knocked a loose part back into place. Luckily, no one seemed aware that I had actually caused the collision, so I shook my finger at taxi driver and said, “you let me roll away!”
Finally locating the bus began a nearly twenty-hour ordeal of crawling up the coast that included a grand total of ONE bathroom stop. The worst sections were the first four hours, in which we essentially only moved from one parking space to another in the bus station, and the last four in which it got dark before signs for my destination appeared, and I feared that I wasn’t on the right bus. The middle 14 hours is a blur of sitting between two women and their children, Sticky and Fever. I ate cornflakes and gazed at the morphing landscape out of shattered windows held together with tape. Each time a person got off the bus, she was replaced with her volume in goods so that by the end of my trip I surrounded by about 800 pairs of flip flops.
When I finally got to experience Vilanculos my destination, in the daylight, it was more or less worth the hideous trip. This beach town is located across from an archipelago where ama and I went snorkeling with a semi-silent Australian miner on a five YEAR holiday. I was an absolute mess at snorkeling. I kept trying to breathe through my nose instead of my mouth and would become convinced that I was suffocating. That is, of course, when I could manage to orient myself face down. Most of the time I couldn’t get my flippers to stay behind me and kept winding up on my back with my feet in the air. In this position, I kept drifting away and Ama would have to come collect me. When I got tired of having to get dragged back to the reef, I stood on the edge, put my face in the water and looked at the fish that way. That night ama and I exchanged a local jewelry maker a cooking lesson for a bottle of Tipo Tinto, the local rum that is sold in plastic bottles and smells like hospital and cake. We learned how to make matapa, a staple of cassava leaves, coconut and peanuts. His instructions included to “smash everything like a flower” (“like a flour?”) and that “it will tell you when it’s ready.”
Ama and I were anxious to get to Malawi; she needed to start work and I wanted to arrive before the school where I used to teach goes on holiday. We essentially waited until I could stomach the thought of getting on a bus again, and began our marathon to the border, which involved a steady stream of 3 am wakeups for 4 am all-day bus rides. The further north we traveled, the worse the roads became in nauseating combinations of tarmac, dirt and gaping holes. Although you drive on the left side of the road in Mozambique, whatever patch of road is smoothest is de facto fair game, so vehicles tend to speed toward each other until one swerves out of the way. If the chapas (minibuses) weren’t overheating and breaking down, we were getting pulled over for speeding by police looking for bribes. On one such occasion, the driver tried to convince the police that it was the bus we just overtook that was speeding. The officer didn’t buy it and he entered into some sort of negotiation with the driver that ended with him leaving the conductor behind as collateral.
Tete, the closest Mozambican city to the border has the distinction of being both incredibly humid and incredibly dusty, and markedly hotter than the surrounding areas. When the air turned steamy and tan and 20 degrees warmer we knew we were close to Malawi. There are six kilometers between the exit post for Mozambique and entrance post for Malawi. There were several houses in this stretch of non-country, which just baffled me. Part of me wanted to get out of the taxi and inquire about the particulars of living in a border, but I was too excited to stop. Into the warm heart of Africa!
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