Welcome, Whites!

With visas in hand, we headed for Mozambique, South Africa’s neighboring country to the northeast and originators of the Peri-Peri sauce that we now use obsessively. We drove eight hours to the capital of Mozambique, Maputo. Here is an excerpt from wikitravel on Maputo:

There are few tourists or white people to be seen and at times the atmosphere is as much South American as African (this is written, in part, because the official language is Portuguese). Buildings range from old colonial palaces to new high-rise constructions, but the dominant architecture consists of Stalinist-looking concrete-walled boxes, generally with badly eroded paint and rusty security bars.

This description is perfect. We arrived in the late afternoon and seemed to be the only white people in the vicinity, let alone tourists (it is low season right now). We stayed at a hotel called Catembe Gallerie located across from the Maputo harbor in an area called Catembe. Apparently, there are no decent roads from Maputo to Catembe, so we had to drive our little car onto a rusty ferry that taxied us across to a fishing village. By the end of the ten minute ride, it was pitch dark out. We set out on the dirt road and with a little bit of luck, found our lodging pretty quickly. The hotel, an old colonial mansion refitted as a little inn, had a quaint atmosphere and a beautiful view of the capital city’s skyline. Dining entertainment was provided by two rambunctious kittens. (This first picture is the hotel’s pier).

The next day, we walked around the city and took lots pictures of the downtown buildings, observing the interesting juxtaposition of old and new architecture and the still visible overlay of colonial and communist eras. We stepped into an art museum and walked around a park, the harbor, and a trendy neighborhood. We had the most AMAZING pizza at a recommended restaurant, Mundo’s. We ate peri-peri chicken twice during our stay and since we don’t like seafood, give us a break with the pizza, okay?!

After our day of walking the city, we took the ferry to Catembe and enjoyed the three km walk back to the hotel. We experienced an amazing sunset, view of kids playing soccer in the fields, and a lot of dust from the passing cars. At one point, a pair of friendly men passing us on foot shouted: “Welcome whites!” And here we thought we had started to blend in!

We had hopes of taking a ferry to some islands nearby; however, we learned that the ferry we needed only operates on particular days and we had missed our chance. (We wish our hotel clerk had told us when we specifically asked about this island the day before when it would have been possible to catch the ferry). Instead, we hit the Internet at 9 PM looking for another tourist option the next day. The spontaneity of it was exciting! We read a single short review of an area called Bilene and after viewing some pictures of its white sand beaches, decided to drive the two hours north of Maputo to get there. We set out that next morning. It was a great drive as we passed by many people, animals, buildings, and colorful markets along the way. Once we arrived in the Bilene area, we felt a bit uncomfortable in our white skins, and even unwelcome. We were being gawked at as we putted down the labyrinthine dirt roads, especially by some small school children who sneered at us.

Anyway, we did get our beautiful white sand beach. And, we had dinner with a friendly German couple who we unsurprisingly ran into (seeing that it is such a small town) at every turn: driving past each other during several attempts at finding our guesthouse, lying on the beach at the same time at our guesthouse, and ending up at the same restaurant in town.

The glory of travel often seems to be the misadventures that occur. They often comprise the best stories, at least. And we guess we thought we were somewhat immune to travel blunders after eight months of traveling, including 12 countries with Semester at Sea. Immune, we are definitely not, however. Our first major blunder—something we realized only after sitting in noticeable humidity as it turned dark and we were crossing the water to get to Catembe—was that we had forgotten our malaria prophylaxis. Yep. We left it right in it’s cozy home in our medicine cabinet in Durban. As you might guess, we were intensely paranoid of mosquitoes the entire trip (and Chris had a nightmare scenario as he was trapped in a tiny Maputo bathroom stall mid-business with a large, elusive mosquito). The rest of our blunders occurred at the end of our trip, after we thought we were home free. Our drive back to Durban ended up taking thirteen hours, due purely to our own stupidity. Thank goodness again for our collection of “This American Life” episodes and some remarkable land and townscapes. First, we hit the border of Swaziland (another country we were able to see in Africa) and were asked to pay 50 rand to enter (as we were asked to do two days prior). We didn’t have 50 rand; we had 20 rand. Now, consider that we had been trying to manage three different currencies over the past several days and we had attempted to keep our cash to a minimum in case of theft. Clearly “keeping cash to a minimum” here refers to the deeply dim-witted idea of crossing a national border with the equivalent of $3 US. So after searching our car for every last dime and asking several times if we could pay by credit card, the best compromise available was for Jodi to stay at the border post as collateral while Chris drove over 30 km to find the nearest ATM machine (yes, this border station is in the middle of nowhere, without an ATM or means of accepting anything other than cash). This misadventure cost us almost two hours and our precious bottle of water. You see, the border guards are known to take “bribes,” which we were worried about and lucky to not encounter. But when Chris arrived at a security checkpoint just beyond the border, one guard not so casually mentioned his apparent thirst as he eyed our water bottle in the back seat of the car. So, I guess we will consider that a “bribe,” albeit an odd one. Once we set on our way again, it wasn’t long before we were pulled over by the police for “speeding.” We are not completely sure if we were speeding as we weren’t going very fast and we’ve heard traffic police can be corrupt as well. When they told Chris the ticket would be 60 rand (less than $10 USD), he told them we had only 50 rand (a longer story, but we still did not have much cash on us), and they happily accepted and wrote out some meaningless ticket that we are quite sure will not make it into any official system. We also had to stop again at an ATM because we were worried we didn’t have enough money for the tolls. Why do we not learn?! So after all this, it took us 13 hours to get home. We were exhausted, needless to say.

Hopefully, we got all our traveling misfortune out of the way before Chris’ parents arrive on Monday. We are so excited to see family and more of this country. It was getting lonely for a while. J