CROSSING  MOZAMBIQUE

Mozambique  (formerly Portugese East Africa) is huge.  It starts out just north and west of Kruger National Park in South Africa, and continues for six hundred miles north until it splits into a rough “Y”, divided by Malawi and Lake Malawi (formerly Lake Niassa).   From there it continues up to the Zambia border 230 miles to the west, and the Tanzania border 350 miles to the east as a split entity. It is probably the least interesting country I’ve been in so far within this continent in the past 38 days.  And yet I have learned the most about Africa here.

Travelers rarely venture here.  At least in the north.  The southern half is cosmopolitan, there is Mediterranean architecture, a modern infrastructure that has taken off in the last four years particularly, and the people are friendlier than their more reserved countrymen where I am traveling.  The southernerspeak English to a greater degree than throughout most of Africa..  World class beaches and resorts are the norm for southern Mozambique.

I make my crossing from Lake Malawi and the magic of Likoma Island via a 17 foot sailing dhow to the border town of Cobue.  The three lads powering the vessel row against the wind for the first hour of the journey.  Then on the point of land closes to Mozambique, they raise their sail – the same way their kin have been doing for thousands of years.  They only know how to reach into the wind, and not tack however, so that we miss our mark on the opposite shore and the boat has to be dragged along the water like a reluctant donkey until we reach our mooring place.

Cobue has a visa fee of only $32, since there is very little electricity (solar power only) in the village and the customs office does not have power.  Everything is done there by hand.  The customs officer – who has to be summoned from a siesta to document my papers – does not speak English. He does all his work the old fashioned way -- sans computer.  Therefore my visa costs much less than the standard $82 as at the other border posts throughout the country.

There is no ATM in town.  There is no electricity.  There is next to zero running water.  Nobody can tell me how I am supposed to get south and away from here to catch a train from Cuomba halfway across the country to Nampula (and then to the rarified historical gem of Mozambique Island).  The reason for that is: nobody speaks English here.  Or Spanish.  They speak a local tribal dialect, or Portugese.

After an hour of sign language and negotiation, a friend of the border official brings Julius, who just happens to own the Khango Beach hotel in town and is used to visitors crossing over.  Julius prepares a modest meal for me of Manica beer and emaciated chicken and spaghetti.  He then describes my options for proceeding further.  They are few and far between, and offer Julius himself a better than 50% chance to benefit from my isolation.

First of all, I can wait for the morning.  A large truck will arrive.  It will transport me and about 30 others (but only when it fills up) to Metangula over what even he admitted were abysmal roads.  They are washed out, rutted, full of potholes, and cross rivers or swamps or streams about every mile.  The cost: about $4.  Time involved: about five hours.  The road surface: all dirt and rock and sinew.

Choice number two (you of course see this coming) is Julius himself can drive me to Metangula for the modest fee of $150.  But he is willing to do it that evening.   Thus allowing me to reach Lichinga early the next day, and Cuomba late in the evening. If he conforms to national averages, that one ride alone will allow him to make bank for about half his monthly nut.  He paints a rosy picture of all the advantages, little of which is heard by me.  The reason is that I am contemplating the “cost” of a day.

When traveling freestyle, your schedule (or lack thereof) is really determined by your airline legs.  Which can not be changed without significant financial penalty.  So, without knowing where exactly, you must make decent progress each day toward the true highlights of your trip.  Where will it be possible to save time between locked-in-stone airline segments?  Each day must show measurable progress.  All I can say is, the road looked good on the map …

The cost of a day IS significant.  With a day saved along the trail, you can have a rest stop.  You can savor a particular area you didn’t even know you’d discover.  You can go swimming or surfing or sailing or diving.  You have time to write.  You get bar time with locals – and hear the best stories the world has to offer anywhere.  Not even dining with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet for an afternoon will top really good bullshit from a group of inspired local renegades.

I am therefore mindful of reaching Cuomba in two days, and not three.  Julius is offered and accepts my $130 offer for the ride to Metangula over tortured washboard roads.  During the first hour, his truck never leaves second gear.  Anything headed downhill mandates first gear, due to the fear of runaway and total loss.  The trip takes five hours.  At the end, the reward is a $10 room with a wash tub for a bathroom (toilet hole at one end, tiled wash area at the other, and whatever residue remains, is washed down the drain with a toss of filthy bucket water).  The all-night mosquitos are an added bonus.

Departure is at 5 AM.  The mini-bus cruises for 45 minutes seeking passengers.  Once full (meaning five sitting where three seats are nominally suggested) and baggage is piled on top of passengers new and old equally, we take off in earnest for Lichinga.  The road is impressive since it is paved the entire way.  I take the opportunity to sleep.  Writing all night, necessitates such catnaps.

Upon arrival in Lichinga – a market and crossroads town with much litter and a dirt track feeder road system , my first stop is the ATM machine.  I pay Julius, and send the money back with a gopher he has sent along – a very helpful young man named Vincent with an excellent command of English and an entrepreneurial disposition.  He then helps me find a vehicle bound for Cuomba, still (allegedly) 300 kilometers and eight hours away.

It is a  stake-side truck, with room for cargo and perhaps 25 to 30 passengers.  It is impossible to tell, due the talent of the driver’s handlers and money counters in continually getting fresh passengers on to the flatbed at each stop.  Of which there are many.  Perhaps one each two kilometers on average.  Luckily I am able to negotiate for a seat in the cab and avoid shifting loads in the rear, the omnipresent smell of stale sweat, and  the 95 degree Fahrenheit sun.

Before even beginning, the driver circles about town, delivering preliminary loads of cargo and produce, and prompting passengers to join in for the ongoing journey.  Nobody dares leave the truck through all this posturing, in fear they will lose their only ticket out of town.

The road resorts to dirt once more.  We are in isolated northern Mozambique.  The wild and unexplored portion of the country.  This is like a wild frontier, and a complete bonus to a curious freestyle traveler.  Most of the locals are unemployed, ethnically tribal, don’t wear shoes, walk rather than ride, live on subsistence farming, and – though more prosperous than Malawi – are still decidedly Third World.  The landscape is once again rich, eloquently green, varied in topography, and beautiful.  Acacia trees grow to full girth since here are no giraffes to rob them of their foilige.

Distances are deceiving.  It might be the light.  It might be the hot (still) air.  It might be a lack of fluids, until the next spontaneous market gathering or quick bathroom stop is attained.  Then you are assaulted by 1000 hawkers from three year-olds peddling bezel nuts, to women offering live chickens, youths tempting you with cold soft drinks, tomatoes, chips, candy, sugar cane, peanuts, hot grilled corn, squashes, cookies, cell phone time vouchers, beans, onions, garlic, firewood, various tubers and roots, goat meat, grilled entrails, bread, boiled eggs, and cashews.

All of these and more are thrust through the window into your face.  Each vendor realistically expects a sale.  As the only white man on the truck (and the only member of my race I’ve seen all day) I find this all utterly fascinating.

The day cannot end without some controversy.  The driver who drove around recruiting passengers, apparently was a stand-in.  He covered the first two and one-half hour shift.  He asked me for payment.  I naively provided it.  When we arrived at the halfway point after 150 kilometers of hard fought dirt road at Machingo, I am asked by the primary driver for payment once again.  I tell him I have already paid 500 metacal (about $17) for my ticket all the way to Cuomba.  He advises me that I am stupid, you only really pay at the end, why didn’t I watch and pay when everybody else did, and just pay me now – for a second time.

The new driver in the smaller truck we switch to with a smaller passenger load wants payment also.  Another 500 metacal.  He is interested in getting his money up front, since he has observed my disagreement with the first driver.  I refuse to pay the first driver, and tell the second he will only get payment once actually delivered to my destination at the train station in Cuomba.  I tell the first driver to take up the issue of payment with the fellow who occupied his seat for the first two and one-half hours and pocketed my up-front payment.  The new driver grudgingly accepts half payment of 250 Mtc (his actual share, since 500 for the full trip would be that same amount in reality to him).  In this way, I am only partially overpaid for the day’s arduous trek, but wiser for the low cost of the lesson.

Shortly after this exchange, one of many amusing episodic incidents takes place.  The second truck had supposedly driven past a load we are supposed to pick up, in addition to transferred passengers.  We turn around to retrieve it.  Dusk beckons.  To speed things up, I offer to help lift cargo up into the hold.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, four barely clothed youth materialize to help me.  We put the two pallets of equipment on the back of the new truck in rapid time ... Yankee time.  Now-Now time.  Not African time.

I brisk my hands and walk away.  The other helpers confront me with palms outstretched and jabbing fingers, demanding payment.  I protest that it is not my load, that I was just helping.  This is a concept they don’t understand.  “You are white.  You are the boss.  You pay us,” they demanded.  I had to get another man nearby who spoke Portugese and at least some English to explain that the cargo was not mine, and I was not getting paid either.  They refused to believe his story.  They had never seen a white man work before.

We finally arrive in Cuomba with a second set of drivers after a twelve and one-half hour combined recruiting session and then actual road journey.  Once again, the hotel is a hovel.  The bathroom sports the same dump hole, fractured tile floor, and tub of water for either pouring over yourself (a Mozambique shower) or sluicing residue into the waste hole.  Places like these are where you learn to take two pairs of slaps on such journeys – one for pleasure and foot ventilation, and the other for gingerly wading through standing water near “glory holes.”

Cuomba to Nampula is a 400 kilometer exercise through north-central Mozambique that has the reputation of being one of Africa’s classic train journeys.   While to most it is a 12 hour exercise in patience, to me (despite the 4:45 wakeup call again) it is a quality run that beats the living tar out of the previous 22 hours of slogging over impassable roads to arrive here.  The ride is smooth and uneventful (except for the classless pushing and line butting practiced by the locals to supersede those already in line, the women being the worst offenders in the lot). I get a chance to catch up on sleep, and have a firm writing desk in Executive Class for keeping ahead of the curve on observations and writing.

Along the way are at least 150 massive granite dome bulges that are mindful of my favorite place in the world, Yosemite Valley in California.  I give them imaginary names, based on what their profiles and massive faces suggest.  Some are needlelike in appearance.  Others rounded and domed.  Most have probably never been climbed on their massive granite faces and ridges, and offer untapped potential to the bold spirit who can get close enough to them to pioneer new routes.

The dramatic granite spires and domes remind me of a series of fossil molars in their regular placement along the horizon.  Some look up close like whale sharks.  Others like dinosaurs.  Others like Moby Dick, about to breech dramatically up out of the waves.  Some have human faces. Still others are representative of mesa shaped tepuys, as found in Venezuela.   Several are dead giveaways for the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro.  Merely without the aerial tram cables strung from peak to peak.

A brand new road paralleling the train track (sadly demonstrative of Mozambique) is already deteriorating.  For while the Mozambicans love to inspire others to build things for them, they are loathe to maintain them once built.  In this case, a brand new ribbon of fresh raised asphalt keeps pace with the train track for 100 kilometers.  Yet the road shoulders (if you would care to call them this) are riveted with erosion and will soon undermine the road even before its completion.

As dusk turns to deep night, many campfires are seen just a few feet from the road.  Most of the route is not electrified, and if artificial light is present, it is the result of solar panels which individual families can invest in, largely to power their living room and kitchen lighting.

Along the way, I learn a bit more about Mozambique from Armando, a Portugese ex-pat working in this country as a surveyor, primarily as there is little work of this kind at home in the current economic climate of the European Union.  Over the lazy discourse of the lengthy ride, I learn primarily two things about how things are really sliced here.

First of all, I am told, the blacks are much more racist than whites ever were.  They are racist toward whites, for having been colonialists for such a lengthy period of Mozambique’s history, and for being suspected of “having more” and “wanting too much” and “being rich.”  The White Tax or Mzungu tax is based on this “Whites are all rich” attitude.  It  fuels a desire to whittle down to size or equalize in some fashion the assumed class and economic differences between whites and blacks that the latter takes for granted.

Whites are also viewed as cash machines.  It is the job of the locals, to get as much money out of the cash machine and yet with as little effort as possible.  Even friends can’t be trusted, I am sad to hear.  One example given to me: two colleagues who had worked with a Portugese lady named Barbara for two years.  Two blacks she thought to be friends who were work colleagues (at a church together), tried to cheat her over an extended period of time.

They are even more racist toward poor blacks.  Those who have landed to new money in the last decade especially, are now arrogant and disdainful of lower-class or economically challenged blacks in a manner that could in the United States get a man indicted.  Sometimes the disdain and disrespect gets physical.  There is much abuse that is suffered at the hands of upper crust nouveau riche blacks, by common workers or village dwellers in this section of the world.

It is said that Barrack Obama got elected to the Presidency of The United States as a result of white guilt.  (I personally feel it is because the Republican party paraded a series of buffoons with entitlement mentality to the nation’s highest office in opposition to the Democratic Party, making the choice easy for many voters who thought they were electing a moderate).  Nevertheless, I doubt many white voters in the US would ever again display this guilt if they knew what true racism was and how it so rampantly rears its ugly head in Africa.  My white guilt and latent racism– at whatever level it lay dormant, is now purged after watching these players in action.

On top of that, tribal and national differences are endemic.  Mozambicans make fun of the Malawis.  Tanzanians mock the Mozambicans.  Everybody distrusts the Tanzanians. The Nigerians are assumed by all to be the world’s biggest liars and con artists.  Only the South Africans seem to be respected by other nation’s black citizens on this continent.

As a result of these travel all day only to arrive exhausted at night and get nothing done journeys, my travel plans begin to change.  I know now, it will be very difficult to visit the alluring Indian Ocean beaches and archipelagos of northern Mozambique.  If the roads are anything like I’ve just experienced, it will simply be impossible to maintain any sort of regular progress.  Additional flight segments to make up for road impediment delays will have to now become part of an adjusted itinerary.