Heads and Tails

(Written July 15 - I haven't had enough internet to post anything until now!)

Traveling here is a lot like flipping a coin. If heads are good luck and tails are bad luck (or at least obstacles you don't want to face), you know they're bound to be approximately even, and the great times you have when luck is good makes the inevitable difficult times worth handling.

But despite the probability that heads/tails, good/bad, enjoyable/difficult will even out, sometimes you get a long string of one or the other. The first week and a half of this trip were certainly bad luck, bad luck, bad luck. But I'll share here the last few days, in which things have been a much more appropriate balance of fun and difficulty:

Michael and I got up at 3:00 on Friday morning, packed up our campsite at the beautiful Wimbi Beach, and got a cab (arranged the night before) to the bus lot. We established our place in line and stood sleepily in the pre-dawn darkness. Around 4:45, our bus, which was probably retired from use in a developed country in the early 1990s, started making some very pitiful sounds as the driver tried and tried to start it up. Finally, after about 5 minutes of trying and a solid 8-second turnover on the last try, the engine started, and we filed onto the bus. The seats were small, grimy, plastic-covered with cusions too thin to offer much protection from the hard metal underneath. But we did get some decent seats.

At 5:00 sharp, the bus pulled out. With every gear shift, the entire bus lurched, and I really, really hoped we'd make the journey without breaking down. We began to drive out of town, stopping at least once a minute to pick up passengers waiting by the side of the road. After about half an hour, the sky began to lighten slightly. As the sun began to rise, I looked out the window at the villages and countryside covered in early morning mist. The far north of Mozambique is incredibly beautiful, spattered with boababs (my favorite tree!), rolling hills, and a large number of inselbergs - huge towers of basalt rock that were once the lava tubes of volcanos, and are the only part that haven't yet eroded.

As time went on, th0ugh, the journey got less enjoyable, as can always be expected. Mozambicans - and Africans in general - seem to have a much higher heat tolerance than I do, and as the day warmed up, I started sweating in the hot bus while most of the Mozambicans were still wearing sweatshirts. (Remember, it's the dead of winter here in the Southern Hemisphere.) I was dying for some fresh air. As the hours passed, everyone started getting hot, and sweaty too, and even with the windows open, the bus really started to stink. Deodorant is definitely a luxury item in rural areas like this, and while most people stay very clean and fresh (much moreso than me!) by washing multiple times a day, that simply doesn't happen on a 9-hour busride.

By 10:00, I started getting a headache from dehydration. That's another big problem with these bus rides. Buses stop only once even on a ride this long, and no matter how many buses I ride, I can NEVER guess when that stop will be (NOT the middle, I can tell you). It's a big gamble because I can either drink a litre and a half of water and then have to hold it for four miserable hours, or I can keep putting off drinking closer and closer to my predicted stop time, only to have the bus stop - my only chance to pee - before I've had a single sip of water. Ah well...

With the right mindset, bus rides can still be fun, though. At every stop (these are stops for letting people on, NOT bathroom breaks), crowds of people swarm around the buses, holding their goods over their heads at the height of the bus windows, hoping to sell. It's like Sky-Mall. From the (dis)comfort of your own seat, you can buy berries, cashews, rolls, grilled corn, boiled eggs, tomatos, cooked chickens, live chickens, cassava (cooked, raw, fried), cookies, Rhino gin in cheap plastic bottles, sodas, baskets, straw mats, and assorted other goods. Yay!

Moving on (this is getting long!), we finally arrived in the port town of Nacala, and waited on the side of the road, sweating and getting sunburned, until a man named Arthur showed up to take us to the place he and his wife run. Arthur is a 40-something South African mercenary (yes, mercenary), whose favorite hobby is underwater spear hunting. My mom and I met him on our last trip, and though we have somewhat divergent interests (!), he's a really nice guy, and Mike and I thought a day or two and his place might be relaxing after all the difficulties we'd had so far.

And it was. (Success!) We pitched our tent on a point overlooking the enormous Nacala Bay and spent the afternoon and next day lounging about on the beautiful stretches of beach next to their property. One very unexpected highlight of our time there was getting to see Captain Morgan's boat! I still don't understand the full story, but apparently Captain Morgan's is sponsoring these adventurers to sail all the way around Africa in this old pirate boat that belonged to the pirate whose face now adorns the Captain Morgan's bottle. I'd totally thought Captain Morgan was just made up, but... Anyway, we got permission from the very drunk people next to it to climb up the pirate ship and take pictures. Yippee.

Finally feeling revitalized after 10 days of setbacks, Mike and I decided to move on to our next destination: Ilha de Mocambique. Of course, this presented its own challenges. While legitimate buses, or machibambas, are available for long distances and minibuses (about the size of American 10-seater vans) can be found for mid-range distances, short trips can only be made on chapas, which may be loosely defined as something that moves. With at least 50% reliability. Maybe.

The trip to Ilha was not a short distance, but unfortunately required 2 short trips on chapas, as a direct minibus isn't available along the route.

We arrived at the chapa station around 8:45 in the morning and immediately found a ride in a 3-axle truck bed. It was about average for what you see here. By the time we had "enough" people to make the trip worthwhile, I counted 28 adults, 7 children, 2 chickens, 5 50-pound bags of cassava and about 10 pieces of luggage crammed on. Yay. We hopped off about 1.5 hours later, at the Monapo junction, and only had to wait a few minutes before another truck came along, bound for Ilha. We climbed on, unaware that we'd just hit another stroke of bad luck...

You see, it's the drivers who choose what a "reasonable" number of people and goods on their trucks is. Most (well, all) of the time, this is a very unreasonable number by American standards. But sometimes it's unreasonable by everyone's standards. This was one of those times.

This second truck was much smaller than the first - only a little larger than an American pick-up truck. It started out with maybe 20 people in the back. Then 23. Then 25. At each stop, we thought, "no. way." There just wasn't any more room. People started climbing on and just getting part of their body in the truck - one leg in, one leg dangling out.

We pulled up at perhaps the eighth village, and found a man sitting by the side of the road with 10 50-pound bags of cassava. I'm talking a full truck load in and of itself. I thought we just HAD to keep going and leave the man to try his luck with the next truck.

Nope. On come the bags. People are pushed off the truck as bag after bag is loaded on, almost up to the front of the bed, near the cab, where I'm crouched. When the bags are finally loaded, on come the people. All 25. I'm wedged between two people whose faces I can't even see. An anonymous foot is standing on my right toes. We start moving. After five minutes, we stop at another village. More people on. Passengers started taking off their shoes (myself included), because bare feet can more easily be wedged in the tiny spaces between bags and legs and bodies. Eventually, I find myself smushed against the back of the cab in the tiniest ball I've ever been in, legs hugged against my chest, someone sitting on my bare feet. The cab and bed aren't nicely connected like in American trucks, so all the engine heat blasts against me as we barrel down the road. At the next stop, I decide it's too much to bear and stand up, nearly knocking someone off the truck. Michael joins me, and for the next 15 minutes, we ride the truck like a chariot, holding onto the luggage rack above the cab as the wind blasts our faces. Much more pleasant. There are now 35 people on the truck (seriously - I'm counting at each stop) and as numbers 36 and 37 get on with sacks of 2nd hand clothing about 5 feet in diameter, a bag (or person?) shifts agains one of my legs, trying to bend it in a way it can't go. I pull, pull, pull, and finally free it from the deep within the pile of bags and people and chickens. Oops. I can't find another place for my left foot. Really. The next 45 minutes - yes, 45 minutes - I ride along standing only on my ride foot. Ahh.

And then we get there! Ocean! Island! We check into a beautiful little B&B with a lovely, quiet courtyard, then move out into the town. Ilha is an island 3 km long and 500 meters wide, in the Indian Ocean just offshore from Mozambique. (So close that it's connected by a bridge.) It's an amazing place. Originally a Swahili trading post, visited in the early part of the millenium by Arab traders, it attracted Portuguese explorers (Vasco de Gama himself) in 1498 and soon became the Portuguese capital of Mozambique, and a major slave trading hub of the continent. Its old chapel is actually the oldest European building in the Southern Hemisphere, and it has a massive fort built in the 1500s. It's a fascinating place to visit, with half the buildings utterly dilapidated and crumbling, half beautifully restored and painted brightly. The ocean is visible from every street, and its breeze keeps the temperatures pleasant.

As we walked to lunch, where we were to have the BEST local matapa (cassava leaves in cashew/coconut sauce) I've ever had, we quickly attracted a following of 5 or 6 teenage boys eager to show us around. Three of them - Mohammed, John and Anrahne, ended up spending much of the next 2 days with us and were in fact very knowledgable and helpful, and we were happy to tip them well at the end.

After spending the days walking all over the island, Michael and I climbed up to a rooftop balcony at our B&B and enjoyed the view of the island from above at sunset. Across the street, the main mosque broadcasted its evening prayers over a pretty terrible speaker system that could nonetheless be heard across the entire island. I think it would have been pretty if the speakers weren't crackling the entire time. At any rate, I can tell you I enjoyed the evening prayers a lot more than the morning call to prayer, which started at 4:15! Ech! I think they time it to be just long enough that you can't fall back asleep afterwards. And it sure was loud and energetic! The first morning, I thought that Ilha was 30% Muslim, the national percentage, and was really annoyed that the mosque would awaken the entire island for the sake of 1/3 its population. But I was much less upset after learning that 98% of the island's population is Muslim, most of whom do indeed pray five times a day. I think the fact that I remembered to leave earplugs by my bed the 2nd morning also made me less upset...

After a really lovely time on the island, we decided it was time to keep working our way back south. The owner of our B&B called a "good" minibus driver he knew and asked him to pick us up as he started his route to Nampula. What an amazing surprise! It was still more crowded than such a bus would be in the US, but was without a doubt the most comfortable and reasonably stuffed minibus I've ever ridden in in Africa. The "three" hour drive was only 30 minutes longer than we were told - amazing! - and we got to Nampula well before dark.

Yes, things were looking up.

(Read on, my friends! I've only gotten luckier and luckier - unbelievably so - as the trip's gone on...)