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Published: April 15th 2010
The Road Paved with Good Intentions
This was taken during a brief break in the downpour and makes the road look pretty good!Disclaimer: I take full responsibility for this rather long and rambling account of our latest adventure. I hold free of liability and responsibility, the US Peace Corps, the American Government and any of its affiliates, clandestine and public with liberty and justice for all. Read on at your own risk.
Ahhh, vacations! I once reveled in dreams of exotic beaches, sun, books, and deep relaxation, but this vacation, this was not to be just a vacation, but a vacation to the beaches of Mozambique, even the name sounds romantic and relaxing. Mozambique, it just rolls so smoothly from the lips. I used to relax just hearing the name, but no more. This is one of those vacation stories that I will find amusing to tell about in maybe a decade, should I live so long after all the added stress to my poor heart.
Let’s start with planning the vacation. It would seem like a reasonably simple process to rent a car for the trip. I’ve rented cars before. I have good credit, a valid credit card and we have indulged in purchasing Internet at home while here in Botswana. It should be simple. In my fifty-seven years of
Dawn of a new Day
Still pretty, even with all the whining. living, one would assume I’d finally know better than to make assumptions. That’s right; I foolishly assumed it would be simple. First, some of the rental websites here will provide quotes on line, but will not respond to any specific questions or let you actually finalize the rental. Other than the high cost of making calls from a prepaid cell phone, it shouldn’t be too difficult just to call a few places. Wrong. Phone books here are as scarce as hen’s teeth, but not hens. Hens and roosters are all too common here. If they were phone directories I could just strangle one of them after digging up my newly sprouted flowerbed for the third time, carry it into the house, and place it on the book shelf. Or, I could simply drag it to the center of the yard, open its pages and set it on fire for repeatedly waking me at three in the morning. No, phone directories here are not common, but they can be readily disposed of without starting a war with the neighbors. Are you concerned about my state of mind yet?
In the course of my search for a phone directory and a
Really Nice Folks
This is Mmatsholo and Rratsholo enjoying beach combing. rental car, I decided it might also be a good idea to find a travel agent who could maybe help us with both transportation and lodging on the beaches of Tofo, a place recommended by another Peace Corps volunteer, who at the time had not yet been there. What in the # )(*&$%^& was I thinking?????????? I found a travel agent who was recommended by another volunteer who had used her services. She was unable to help us with car rental, but did search for a beach cottage for us. She sent us photos of a place big enough to give Steve and I and our Batswana traveling companions each a private bedroom. Secluded and quaint, the advertising read. The photos made it look okay, not fancy, but nice enough and affordable. We said we’d take it, but did not get the required voucher in time to print it out before we left, but hey, just one small task while en route.
At nearly the same time, through a stroke of good fortune, we were given a new phone directory by a kind woman in Gaborone and guarded it as closely as our wallets on the bus ride home.
Me in Mozabique
One of very few of the typical tourist on the beach pictures that we got. Speaking of wallets, that is another story, but I’ll come back to it soon. Cranes, crèches, councils, car rentals, all were there where my fingers were walking. Oops! I just tripped over the Jolly Bushman canvas manufacturer on my way to the car rentals listings. If I had known then what I know now, I’d have choked the happy little fellow just to ease my own frustration. Anyway, after many phone calls, often without any answer though the call was made during business hours, I still had not secured a car. I will qualify the comment about business hours. I forget that although the normal start of the business day is 7:30, that morning tea is taken sometime between 9:45 and 11. I’m never sure exactly when and forget that tea break is considered sacred by some folks here. Lunch hour can begin as early as 12:30 and run until as late as two, so which hour is lunch hour is often hard to decipher. It seems that whenever I call, that is the break time for that particular business. Afternoon tea is usually shorter and doesn’t begin before two, so it’s a bit easier to avoid. Closing hours are
Steve on Beach
Not bad for being taken with the old camera. normally a t 4:30 p.m. sharp. I admit it; I’m a hyperactive American who expects things to be readily available and convenient. So, I’m sure that you’ve already figured out that my attempts at phone calls were unsuccessful.
A friend finally took pity on us and found someone to drive us around Gabs to check rental agencies in person. I should have gotten a clue of things to come when we were only able to find one rental agency in all of Gabs that would allow us to take one of their cars into Mozambique, and we’d only be liable for up to 13,000 pula if the car was damaged or stolen. However, being the mulish old gal that I am, I continued my search until at last I stumbled upon a South African rental agency while looking up what turned out to be very misleading driving distances on the Internet. With this SA company our liability maxed out at just over 500 USD, a risk we were willing to take along with a border crossing fee and unlimited mileage. We decided we could afford it.
After countless emails to the travel and car rental agents, with many questions about what this fee is and what that means, we realized we were operating in a place wholly unlike our little universe in Idaho, but we forged ahead. We were on a saintly mission. We weren’t just taking a vacation; we were giving the couple who so graciously hosted us during our two months of training their first visit to the ocean. Saintly, right! The only definition of saint that I can ever hope to come close to is the one from the Devil’s dictionary, which reads, “Saint, n. - dead sinner, revised and edited.”
After more than two months in the planning and a couple of trips to Gabs to get our Mozambique visas, we were on our way to pick up the rental car when we got a text from the daughter of our host couple. She stated that her father was not coming to the rental agency because of the big rain storm that had just hit their village. It didn’t look like it would let up any too soon and we were scheduled to get the car in about an hour, so we went on without him. The original plan was to have him be a second driver. This seemed sensible since he’d worked as a government driver for years, knew parts of South Africa, and was at home in a right hand drive on the left side of the road. As for me, I still find myself heading for the drivers door thinking I’m getting in on the passenger side! Plan B was activated. Steve and I became the designated drivers. Together we both took the first shot at driving when we left the airport, me behind the wheel and Steve doing a fine job from the backseat. After stopping at an ATM, I told him to take over and criticized his need to direct my every move.
Now I’ll go back and tell you about the wallet. A couple days before we were to leave we had guests come to the house, a couple young volunteers who had just returned from Tofo where they had a great time and earned scuba diving certifications. One of the girls called saying that she’d just gotten off the bus at the Kopong junction. I told her that Steve was on his way to pick up a bottle of wine from the store near the bus stop and would meet her soon. It wasn’t long before the other volunteer arrived. We enjoyed a meal together and they showed photos of the beautiful waters of Tofo. They wanted to show us a video of the horrible road that stretched for miles between the capital city of Maputo and Tofo, but it hadn’t been transferred to the thumb drive. One of them could show us first hand the healing red lines that ran over the top of her foot where a ‘sand worm larva’ had burrowed under skin and grown to a nice sized worm. It was beginning to fade since she’d taken medication. Bad roads! Worms! I scoff at them. I am a Colorado farm girl. Such things don’t faze me.
After dinner, we had just begun a game of cards when the only door to our little home burst open and in staggered a nicely dressed young man holding a large bottle of beer. He was rambling in a mix of Setswana and English, something about a wallet. I will spare any reader the details. The crux of it was that this guy burst into our house to get a look at what else he could take from the lekgoa (whitey, loosely translated). He tried to convince us that he wanted to help us recover Steve’s wallet, which Steve did not know was missing until then. Gullible me, I believed him for a moment. He, and an accomplice, had taken Steve’s wallet from him when he was buying the wine. Now he was trying to extort more money from us for the return of the wallet with Steve’s ID and bank card. A disconcerting experience, to say the least, but after calling Peace Corps security and frightening him into giving up the wallet without the money that we’d planned on for the trip, we let it go because we didn’t want it spoil our vacation.
Finally, we were prepared to leave the house by 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Steve’s birthday. Just two days and we’d be on the sunny beaches of Mozambique. Other than driving through pouring rain for hours and having to stop in Pretoria to get a border crossing permit for Mozambique from the rental agency, a stop we hadn’t planned for, we’d still cruise across South Africa, spend a night near the eastern border, and cross into Mozambique the next day and be on the beach by sunset. After over an hour of trying to find a car agency in Pretoria, we gave up and decided to get the border crossing permit at an agency at the airport in Nelspruit, which should be easy enough to find. Wrong again!
To slow things down even more, I managed to ruin a brand new tire on the 2010 Corolla we’d rented. I can say this. Just give me a minute. No! I can do it, really I can. Steve was, well uh umm, he was ---- Okay, he was right! I was driving too far to the left. I was only going about 5 kph, pulling into a filling station, when WHAM! I hit the curbing around the pump and split the side wall on a brand new tire on a brand new car. So now we had to get the crossing border permit, print a voucher, and find a new tire before we could begin the second day of our journey. This was after we got lost on some nasty back roads near Nelspruit while looking for lodging. What we ended up getting was a different and much cozier car because they had no spare to fit the Toyota. Knees against the back of the driver’s seat, I sat quietly licking my wounds, as we’d taken several hours of driving time dealing with the car, the permit, and changing money. It would be afternoon before we crossed the border, and this was intended to be the short driving day.
After crawling through the outskirts / slums of Maputo, we were back up to highway speed, and the girls had said it was bad road all the way from Maputo. The road was fine. Still, it was obvious that we couldn’t arrive at the beach house before 11 p.m. We were spent. We stopped at a dive of a hotel in Xai Xai because we were just too exhausted to look for a better place. Our host family was not impressed, but politely stayed quiet about it until the next day. Staying the night in that dump of an old rooming house was one of the few good decisions we made about this entire trip. The next day the rain was worse than any we’d encountered driving across South Africa, and so were the roads, by far. Some places the pavement had been torn away completely. Rain water ran in rivulets, washing sand down both sides and often over what could barely be called a road. There were a couple short stretches of new pavement, but much of it was covered in sand. Brush and tree branches dotted both sides of the road bed marking the worst of the potholes and trenches. Tough Colorado farm girl. Right! The bus, combi and truck drivers raced through this obstacle course as if it consisted of empty miles of Wyoming Interstate and we were no more than a jack rabbit. I have to commend Steve on his nerves, even though he couldn’t avoid some neck snapping potholes.
At last 24 hours late and I don’t know how many Rand short, we arrived at Tofo Beach Cottages and ours was the ghetto! Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t good. We gave our guests the room with the double bed. We took the loft that held four twin beds, but only after insisting that the ‘butler’ who wore a dirty yellow T shirt with the word STAFF in black letters stretched over his ample belly, find us an electric fan to use. We were so tired that we didn’t mind sleeping on mattresses that folded around us like taco shells.
It was true that you could see the ocean from the veranda. The view was only slightly obstructed by heavy power lines and brush. If I ran and slid as fast as I could go down the steep embankment, I could reach the rocky beach before the superheated sand seared the calluses from the soles of my feet. Unless of course it poured down rain, which it sometimes did, then I could just barefoot ski to the bottom as long as I avoided roots and shards of glass. Still the ocean was truly beautiful, as were the tired faces of our host couple as they gazed at this amazing expanse of water for the first time. We enjoyed long walks on the beach with Steve taking photos of our guests at every turn until he bent down with the camera case open and the camera plummeted lens first into the hot sand. He tried canned air from the Internet café and a pocket knife blade around the outside of the lens, but only succeeded in damaging the gears that drive the lens. No more photos and a very unhappy husband! Still, the breeze from the ocean made the veranda a pleasant and shaded place to sit, to play guitar, to read and to enjoy fresh seafood. So what! We’d missed one day of our reservation, but still had the funky old camera that sometimes takes good pictures and four nights to enjoy the ocean.
We thought. The evening of our second day there, we received word that there had been a death in our hosts’ family. Her father had passed away. We packed up that night and were on the road before 4:30 a.m. the next day. Driving conditions were better on the way back and we made it back to Nelspruit, SA that evening and stayed in the same pleasant motel where we’d stayed a few days before. We were considering taking a chance and waiting to change what little Mozambique money we had left until we got back to Gabs, just so we’d arrive home before dark. The decision was made for us. We had time to change the money while the tire that went flat overnight was being repaired. We arrived in Kopong shortly before 10 p.m. after depositing our host couple travel worn, but safe in the arms of their children in Molepolole. Sadly, they’d be faced with another journey the next day to help with funeral preparations.
When we were preparing to return the rental car, Steve noticed a deep scratch across the right rear fender. In our rush to change cars neither a thorough cleaning nor inspection had been done on the second car. We were relieved when the agent told us that it was marked on the ‘yellow card’ as previous damage, but then asked if the rock chip in the windshield was new. We told her that was the one thing that the agency driver pointed out to us after he parked it near our first car so we could move our luggage. She called to confirm this and was told that there was no windshield damage and no scratch on the car when we took it. Thankfully, she was persistent and called her supervisor who said that we would not be held liable for either. At my request, she called the SA agency back to ask about charges for the tire and they then changed the story and said that both the scratch and the rock chip were there before we took the car.
Other than waiting to see how much tires cost in South Africa, wondering if our Batswana friends will ever want see us or the ocean again and figuring out where we may get the camera repaired, we are for the most part recovered. I also think that spending long periods of time in a rocking chair on the front porch of a good old Rocky Mountain home seems pretty appealing now.
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Mtae
non-member comment
Amazing Adventure!!
Oh what sheltered lives we lead back here in Idaho. I am so happy you are laughing through all of this. Happy Birthday, Steve! Love, Mtae