A Mozambique Roadtrip

After the relative orderliness of South Africa, the chaos of the Mozambique border crossing is a plunge into the Africa we had expected to encounter. Long shuffling lines full of anxious local travellers, multiple counters with forms to fill out and officials to send you to yet another line, and touts with official looking vests who offer to ‘speed your way through’ for a fee.
We are lucky that we are travelling with an experienced guide, who can plant us in the appropriate line and manage the officials with firm courtesy.

With visas and forms stamped, and surprisingly, no additional fees to be paid, we head off towards Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city. It first appears on the horizon as a gleaming line of white high-rises, more Miami than tropical outpost. However, as you near, it’s developing world credentials become more apparent.

The main road passes first through shanty towns, alive on a Saturday morning with impromptu roadside markets teaming with colourful life. Then entering the downtown, we’re struck by the broad, European avenues, lined with mature trees and tall apartment and office towers.

It appears very modern and cosmopolitan until you take a closer look. On the multi-story apartment blocks, the concrete is crumbling, the paint has faded, windows are broken and the breeze block grills are shattered or missing. Relatively modern buildings from the 60s or early 70s have seen little care since then.

The reason is that when the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal fell in 1974, the colonial masters simply abandoned Mozambique and fled home. What they didn’t take with them, they sabotaged (concrete in wells and waste treatment system, for example). And they had done no succession planning; no one was in charge. The resulting chaos and civil war, pitting a socialist government against right wing rebels supported by neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia, left the country tattered. Now, with peace barely a decade old, there’s still a lot of rebuilding to do.

The city’s core is still quite lovely- from a rococo Manueline museum, to the Beaux Arts city hall, from the soaring white Catholic cathedral to stunning deco movie theatres and office buildings, there is so much to admire. Throw in a few quirky details, like an amazing domed train station designed by Gustav Eiffel (and his iron State House that, under the tropical sun, has always been too ‘oven-like’ to inhabit), a charming Victorian arched City Market , and a cooling botanical garden and there’s lots for a traveller to admire. But between these barely maintained sights, structures are crumbling. Roofless ruins may have trees growing from their interiors and still viable shops tucked into corners of the ground floors. Like Havana, it is a sadly beautiful city.

Unhindered and hassle free, virtually ignored, we wander streets visit the Nucleo de Arte collective and settle comfortably into a shady sidewalk cafe. The occasional vendor walks by selling towers of electric converters, but for the most part, no one even gives us a second glance. Foreign travellers here are rare enough that they have yet to obtain the bullseye targets they’ve acquired in more touristed spots.

After a lovely dinner of grilled seafood, Vino verdhe and chorizo, and a good night’s sleep (well-guarded by the US ambassador’s security detail with some Marine Corp banquet event in the ballroom), we headed out of town for the long drive north to the Barra Peninsula.

For 7 hours, we drive across the green rolling hills of Southern Mozambique, passing through small plots of Pineapple, Maize, Cassava and plantations of coconut palms and scattered wild cashew trees. The agriculture is more subsistence than enterprise, and the cultivators live in small clusters of huts amongst the fields.

The predominant structure is a round hut with a conical roof, all made of the thick reeds that grow in the river floodplains. Occasionally the huts turn into squares, and even more occasionally the reed walls are replaced with cinder block or large red bricks. The bricks themselves are made in the beehive kilns we see scattered by the riverbanks, constructed of the same materials they are used to fire. North of Xie-Xie, as palm trees become more common, the reeds give way to palm fronds.

It hits me that none of the huts, in fact none of the villages we see in the distance, have roads to them. Their only connections to the outside world are meandering footpaths.

And the coast’s highway we follow, a solid multilane blacktop, is the most important pathway of all. It is Sunday morning, and along the entire route, women in white suits and floppy hats and men in wide ties and ill-fitting shirts, walk along the shoulder or plod single file along footpaths in the ditch on their way to some unseen church perhaps miles away.

In the small towns we pass though, the main streets are lined with picturesque Portuguese colonial structures from the 20s and 30s, with broad porches and fading paint. Women wrapped in colourful sheath skirts balance plastic pails on their heads, little boys run through the dust pushing toy trucks made of bent wire on tin can wheels, affixed to handles that rise to their skinny waists. Small buses, packed with those travelling to neighbouring villages stop to disgorge and pick up passengers while vendors crowd up against the open windows trying to sell everything from fruit and beverages to personal care products.

And there are occasional sights that tug on the heart-string. A young boy, no more than 7, balances a cinderblock on his tiny bald head, trudging along a path behind his older brother. A few miles further on, an even younger girl walks behind her brother, both with large bundle of sticks for firewood balanced on their heads. The schools we see are large, solid fenced structures that seem inaccessible to the children of the hut dwellers.

As we breeze through the vast rolling country side, Johannes Kerkorrel singing his Liberal protest songs in Afrikaans on the tape deck, we never feel completely alone. There are always people by the side of the road, walking at a careful pace, or vendors, reaching out into the road, imploring us to stop at their ‘shops’ – roadside trees decorated like Christmas with white plastic bags of cashew nuts or stands with glass bottles full of yellow liquids (petrol?) or milky white beverages (coconut wine?), and ramshackle stands of the local hot sauce (Piri piri).

We drive straight through, stopping only twice for beverages, and by mid-afternoon, have reached the turn off at Inhambane. From here, the road enters the Barra peninsula – a broad arm of white sand dunes and palm trees that reaches up into the Indian Ocean. The people here by the side of the road, suddenly appear more relaxed. Men in shorts (new to us), occasionally shirtless, work on small construction projects (one pounding metal into something in front of his open shop, another threading palm fronds through wooden up-rights to create a hut). Young boys leap gleefully into the bay from a breakwater, women sit in clusters under trees turning to watch us as we bounce by on the red dirt road.

And just when you think it is all timeless and exotic, we are reminded of the global culture; young men in loose pants and young women in tight jeans, walking along the pathways near town, their heads bowed, and arms raised in that ubiquitous texting gesture.

It is an easy drive, but a long one, so it is a relief to arrive at our destination. Our bags are transferred from Steven’s truck into a Land Rover and are taken to the very tip of the peninsula. Our hotel, the Flamingo Bay Resort, is a fantasy: 20 open cabins on stilts, balanced over the tidal flats a hundred meters out from shore across a rickety wooden walkway. We arrive at high tide, and the turquoise water is 20 feet deep and teeming with fish below our cabin floor boards. From the balcony a wooden staircase leads directly into the water and the first thing I do is don my mask and snorkel and wash off the road dust in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.