Following my brief but enjoyable visit with Paul and Marion in Johannesburg, I met up with the rest of the Mozambique group at Park Station to board our Greyhound Bus that would be taking us to Maputo. Everyone looked slightly more groggy than myself but I guess while I was enjoying a leisurely family dinner the night before, they were all doing what young people do on a friday night in a foreign country. I had never been on a long distance bus trip before but my initial opinions of our road carriage were better than I imagined: fully air conditioned, functional bathroom, a mini fridge, TV's and onboard movies, and fairly comfortable chairs that reclined more so than airplane seats. The next eight hours were going to go by in no time, right?
After a few hours I realized that my prediction was about half right, half extremely wrong. Eight hours of anything is generally pretty boring and sitting on a Greyhound was no exception. The scenery was beautiful but for some reason the bus windows soon became heavily enveloped in a thick sea of condensation, severely impairing our vision of the passing landscape. I then took to reading my book but I couldn't even do that once our the in-road entertainment began. Movies on buses are different than planes where you have the option of listening on headphone because the sound is distributed throughout the cabin whether you want to listen to or not. I had never considered how much of a luxury this was until Dr. Dolittle 3: Tail to the Chief fired up and I had to sit through one of the more painfully bad scripted/acted movies of the last decade. Thankfully it was followed by a Disney movie about a dog from outer space which was then followed by the the original 1960's Love Bug movie. Greyhound was really firing on all cylinders, pulling out all the stops to keep their passengers entertained. When Hancock came on as the fourth movie I was slightly relieved to be watching a movie that didn't make me debate whether or not I'd rather be plucking back hairs from obese hospice patient that smelled like moldy mayonnaise, but by that time I had made some ear plugs from balled up bathroom tissue and could finally read. Soon enough our eight hours were coming to an end and we were passing through the outskirts of Maputo.
Entering Maputo was an extremely eerie experience. I had very little knowledge of the city, only getting a mini history lesson from Paul the day before and a small puff piece about the current situation in the SA Airway magazine, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. Knowing that Maputo is the country's capitol, I guess I had some expectations for what a capitol city should look like, but I was shocked to see one of the poorest, run down cities I had ever seen. There were skyscraper and buildings everywhere, what I would expect from a major city, but every infrastructure looked as if it had not been tended to or cared for for twenty plus years. A large number of buildings were only halfway completed and I am sure never would be finished any time soon. The poverty level seemed even higher I was able to walk around the part of the city where our back packers lodge resided. The streets were in shambles, the side walks looked as if an earthquake had followed month of heavy duty blanket bombing, and trash was literally everywhere. And this doesn't even comment on the people, most of whom looked as if they had been wearing the same set of clothes week in and week out since the Portuguese left in the 1970's (I am promising myself to read up on the history of Moz, it sounds fascinating). There were very few indicators of wealth I came across during my stay in Maputo and even they were surrounded by such high levels of poverty that it was hard to differentiate between the two.
For the next two nights we would be staying at Fatima's Place, a large back pakcer lodge that could accommodate around fifty people. Fatima's also provided a small but painfully slow restaurant service as well as a bar that ran out of beer within the second hour of our groups arrival but our group couldn't care less, all of us just being glad to no longer be on a bus. No one even seemed to mind the warmer beers they ended up serving us later but we all seemed to groan a little when our all-inclusive meal wasn't served until 9 but thankfully the menu of chicken, curry and matapa (a local cream of spinach like dish) were delicious. That night most of us headed out to a club in Maputo called Coconuts, a very upscale, expensive club that did not fit in at all with the rest of the city. I couldn't stop wondering how a place like this existed around the city's poor conditions or how any of the natives could afford to party there when everyone in our group said it was more expensive than any place they had been to in Cape Town. Don't get me wrong, we all had a great time enjoying the five or six bars situated throughout the club, an always packed dance floor with a fog machine that was used more often than all of the Senor Frogs in Mexico during Spring Break, and a large pool that some of us may or may not have used later in the evening, but being surrounded by such wealth in a city so poor was unsettling. The most telling moment of the rich/poor discrepancy was leaving the club and the taxi scene that awaited us. The throng of taxis waiting to take patrons home were all old, beat up cars none of which had batteries. In order to leave, everyone had to push the car until the driver could start the engine and then wait for everyone to jump in.
On Sunday, Fatima's had organized a guided tour of Maputo. After a brief run with a few mates to sweat off the libations of the previous night, our group embarked on the city tour around 10 AM. I am usually a sucker for touristy activities like this and I can even get through a shitty tour guide by focusing on the sites and sounds of the tour. Unfortunately, our tour guide stayed out way later than we all did at Coconuts and woke up to a morning breakfast granola of Valium and Codeine because he lacked any sort of pulse. Compounding the low energy level was a total un-interest in his job and a complete lack of knowledge of the city of Maputo. The only saving grace of the tour was that it was so so so bad, we all could laugh our way through the five hour excursion and be grateful to have experienced such a train wreck. There were some good parts, including a walk through a fishing village on the outskirts of the city and stopping at some of the blown out buildings used during the filming of Blood Diamond, but overall the experience was pretty abysmal. Here are two pictures from the fishing village.
Thankfully the day did not end with tour (which was delayed at the end because one of the drivers smoked weed before leaving our last stop and was too high to drive faster than 20 km/h, no joke) and our Sunday in Maputo was saved by dinner at the fish market. Located in a series of small restaurants, vendor stalls and an open courtyard full of picnic tables, the fish market is one of the more popular attractions of Maputo. How it works, customers walk throughout vendors selling various seafood caught fresh from the Indian ocean that day. You then pick what you want and a 'runner' from a restaurant will come and take your catch of the day to cook on the spot at his place. Our entire group came out for dinner and we all had a blast waiting the two plus hours for our seafood feast to arrive (I am slowly getting used to Africa time but I don't think it will ever be second nature for me). I can't tell if the food tasted good because we were all so hungry but I am convinced it was some of the best sea food I had ever tasted. I guess the constant presence of beer including the giant pitcher a restaurant agreed to fill for $10 might have effected my palate as well but who's counting? We returned to Fatima's after the feast, most of us staying up late trying to sap the bar of its limited beer supply, but we had an early and long bus ride to catch to Tofo in the morning which I'll get to in my next post. Below are two pictures from the fish market. I had to get a picture of the kid in the Spider-Man shirt and the size of the picture had to be documented (check out the painting behind me of the guy doing the same thing, complete coincidence I swear).
Well put, mister Ben. It's nice to hear a different perspective. I honestly had no clue about the drug use by our tour guides.
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