One weekend I hit up Maputo with a group of colleagues. Traveling with a group of 12 reminded me why I will never travel with more than three for any longer than a weekend, but it was a great time. Highlights included someone getting clotheslined by a roped goat, eating calamari three times in as many days, and going out with some locals to what was one of their favorite places and I’m sure would be one of mine, too.
When you arrive in Maputo you must get a visa. Why you must get a full visa rather than just a stamp, I don’t know. Actually, I have a suspicion: because they are very proud of their visa system. You get fingerprinted, your picture taken, and then they print a sticky visa out and stick it in your passport. Sounds simple, but it took ~1.5 hours for the 20 people in line in front of us to get through. There were three people behind the counter using one of two cameras, and they would only do one person at a time (no parallel processing). Our Portuguese-speaker convinced them to speed things up by doing things in parallel, but we later found out why they don’t do this: they put a visa in the wrong person’s passport, and it took quite a while to back everything up and re-do it.
Mozambique was ravaged by a long and taxing civil war, and the result is a country that is very poor even by African standards. They've been having riots as a result of increasing prices of bread recently.
Maputo (the capital) might be one of the most relaxed places I have ever been. The seaboard was lined with old cars with doors opened, and car radios provided the soundtrack for the night. I split from the group and met up with a Mozambican and a place and then we headed to Mafalala Libre. It’s nothing special at all, but I loved it. In the back a great band was playing some interesting electronic/rock mix music and the crowd was very into it. Out in front the patio was packed and the crowd spilled out onto the street. If I wanted to blend in I should have worn a Che t-shirt over jeans and flip flops, and maybe disguised my short-cut hair under a rasta-type beanie. It was a beautiful evening, a mixed crowd, and everyone was very laid back. Having been warned that a typical Friday night ended at 7am Saturday, I called it a night early because of a tiring week, but reluctantly.
The next day we took the ferry to Inhaca island off the Maputo coast. There is a stretch of beach facing Maputo that has a hotel, a couple of lodges, and a tiny town (50m of dirt road). A cruise ship had disgorged its passengers onto the island, and we arrived just as they left, leaving us alone with as much beach as we wanted. The two restaurants in town have regular menus and “cruise ship menus” with doubled prices. Since the ship was gone we ate on the beach and watched the sunset. The beach goes out so gradually that low tide means almost an extra 0.5 km of beach exposed.
The next day we hired a guy to cram 11 of us into his pickup (imagine 11 people in a Ford Ranger) and drive us to the NE corner of the island. The SW corner has the “tourist town.” People living here frequently go back and forth from Maputo, and many are only on the island to cater to tourists during the day. The rest of the island is inhabited by the “true locals” eking out a living from the land and the sea. Our drive took us through their outposts, though at a fork in the road we turned left despite the sign for the king pointing right.
We passed obviously cultivated blocks of land, but it must be difficult to grow anything in the extremely sandy soil. We also passed some locals walking back from church in full suits, some also sporting black baseball caps. I doubt the suit gets drycleaned very often (as in never).
On this drive we encountered the “goat rope.” Our driver didn’t notice until too late that there was a rope across the road; it went up over the hood and clotheslined (goatlined?) a guy in the bed of the pickup pretty badly. One end was tied to a tree, the other to a goat. The poor goat had decided the grass was greener on the other side of the road, and he got a nasty surprise when jerked back by a truck hitting his tether.
The ocean pounds the east side of the island with its full broadside. We shared the beach with a crowd of local women and kids picking mussels from rocks exposed by the low tide. Parts of the beach were craggy rock formations pockmarked by crevices, some deep enough to swallow the kids playing in them. Each was a tiny tropical aquarium featuring the standard kelp and hermit crabs along with whatever tropical fish were unlucky enough to be stranded there until the next high tide.
Back in Maputo we wandered around the city some. Maybe the air itself makes one lazy, but the whole town had that feel. We got a drink at the old train station known for its architecture and ID’d some of the art deco buildings that were once new and now look their age. It’s easy to remember street names here because they are all named for revolutions or Marxist leaders.
We went through a big market that was about half fruit/veggies/fish and half beauty supplies, which primarily means hair extensions. I’d never walked around a lot of stalls selling hair extensions in so many colors or styles. Slightly odd. As we entered the market we were pestered by a guy trying to sell us a D60 (SLR camera). I’d guess that there was another guy somewhere in the city trying to figure out where his camera went.
We got stopped by police that night at a road block. They wanted us to all show our passports, which we didn’t have on us, and they told the cab driver he would need to drive to the hotel, get our passports, and then come back and retrieve us. This plan wasn’t through on many levels, and our Portuguese-speaking colleague wheedled enough and batted her eyelashes enough to get us out of what would have been a royally inconvenient spot.
My summary: I would definitely go back. At the rate Mozambique moves, this is not a place to attempt a drive-by one-week tour.
Mozambique was ravaged by a long and taxing civil war, and the result is a country that is very poor even by African standards. They've been having riots as a result of increasing prices of bread recently.
Maputo (the capital) might be one of the most relaxed places I have ever been. The seaboard was lined with old cars with doors opened, and car radios provided the soundtrack for the night. I split from the group and met up with a Mozambican and a place and then we headed to Mafalala Libre. It’s nothing special at all, but I loved it. In the back a great band was playing some interesting electronic/rock mix music and the crowd was very into it. Out in front the patio was packed and the crowd spilled out onto the street. If I wanted to blend in I should have worn a Che t-shirt over jeans and flip flops, and maybe disguised my short-cut hair under a rasta-type beanie. It was a beautiful evening, a mixed crowd, and everyone was very laid back. Having been warned that a typical Friday night ended at 7am Saturday, I called it a night early because of a tiring week, but reluctantly.
Instant dreads, anyone?
The next day we took the ferry to Inhaca island off the Maputo coast. There is a stretch of beach facing Maputo that has a hotel, a couple of lodges, and a tiny town (50m of dirt road). A cruise ship had disgorged its passengers onto the island, and we arrived just as they left, leaving us alone with as much beach as we wanted. The two restaurants in town have regular menus and “cruise ship menus” with doubled prices. Since the ship was gone we ate on the beach and watched the sunset. The beach goes out so gradually that low tide means almost an extra 0.5 km of beach exposed.
We passed obviously cultivated blocks of land, but it must be difficult to grow anything in the extremely sandy soil. We also passed some locals walking back from church in full suits, some also sporting black baseball caps. I doubt the suit gets drycleaned very often (as in never).
On this drive we encountered the “goat rope.” Our driver didn’t notice until too late that there was a rope across the road; it went up over the hood and clotheslined (goatlined?) a guy in the bed of the pickup pretty badly. One end was tied to a tree, the other to a goat. The poor goat had decided the grass was greener on the other side of the road, and he got a nasty surprise when jerked back by a truck hitting his tether.
The ocean pounds the east side of the island with its full broadside. We shared the beach with a crowd of local women and kids picking mussels from rocks exposed by the low tide. Parts of the beach were craggy rock formations pockmarked by crevices, some deep enough to swallow the kids playing in them. Each was a tiny tropical aquarium featuring the standard kelp and hermit crabs along with whatever tropical fish were unlucky enough to be stranded there until the next high tide.
Back in Maputo we wandered around the city some. Maybe the air itself makes one lazy, but the whole town had that feel. We got a drink at the old train station known for its architecture and ID’d some of the art deco buildings that were once new and now look their age. It’s easy to remember street names here because they are all named for revolutions or Marxist leaders.
We went through a big market that was about half fruit/veggies/fish and half beauty supplies, which primarily means hair extensions. I’d never walked around a lot of stalls selling hair extensions in so many colors or styles. Slightly odd. As we entered the market we were pestered by a guy trying to sell us a D60 (SLR camera). I’d guess that there was another guy somewhere in the city trying to figure out where his camera went.
We got stopped by police that night at a road block. They wanted us to all show our passports, which we didn’t have on us, and they told the cab driver he would need to drive to the hotel, get our passports, and then come back and retrieve us. This plan wasn’t through on many levels, and our Portuguese-speaking colleague wheedled enough and batted her eyelashes enough to get us out of what would have been a royally inconvenient spot.
My summary: I would definitely go back. At the rate Mozambique moves, this is not a place to attempt a drive-by one-week tour.
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