A Portuguese Twist

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Day 55 - Maputo (Mozambique) - 22/9/09

Woke up at 0700 because Michelle and French needed to leave by 0830 to get to the Mozambique High Commission to get their passport back with their visas. We jumped into the hire car and we were off, we headed down to Mbabane, I remained inside the car with bags whilst the others went and sorted out returning the hire car. This took a while as the hire company had charged French too much for something, I don’t know exactly what. Whilst they sorted this out I went across the road, I went a brought a Swaziland sticker for my work suitcase, I returned and nothing had been sorted. A few heated words were spoken but the company stood firm. We paid and went up to the bus stop, getting the bus back to Manzini from where we picked up the bus across the border into Mozambique.

We jumped onto the minibus leaving a space against the windows for our bags. There we sat the 3 of us and our bags in the back row until a guy in a old Nissan overall got on, he pointed towards our bags, we looked at each other and eventually gathered he was telling us that was where he wanted to sit. He sat down next to Michelle and the first thing that we noticed was that he smelt; I mean he really smells! Every time he lifted his arm to answer his phone or cough we caught a huge whiff of it. It was lucky we only had to put up with it for 3 hours. The journey wasn’t overly memorable; the highlight of the journey was stopping to cross the border; made our way to an impressive building and got stamped out of Swaziliand, walking though no man lands to the Mozambique border control, there was all kind of pushing and shoving in the queue, I actually got pushed out of it a couple of time, normally by little old women.

Eventually we managed to reach the front of the queue and the lady checking our passport started barking out something to us, we couldn’t understand what see was saying as my portuguese is nonexistent, after a gentleman told us that she was asking for 7 rand as an arrival tax.

After paying the arrival tax, we got back into the minibus and continued to Maputo. After 2 hours we arrived at Maputo, the only way I could describe Maputo is that it is a cross between Cape Town and Arusha in Tanzania, nice colonial building that were in a pretty good state but with the street hawkers and beggars.
We got out of the minibus and tried to get our bags out of the trailers, however by the time we got to the trailer some dude had already got the bags out and was going to put it in his taxi. I snatched the bag of him and said “No thanks,” I walked off leaving him cursing me. We dived into a Vodacom phone shop, hopefully giving us enough time to get our bearings. We found out where we were and where the hostel was and started to make our trek.

We climbed up a huge hill before getting to the hostel, the first thing we did was to dump our bags and order 3 cold beers, pissing off the reception staff in the process, eventually he came over us and told us that we needed to check in now, we all thought that he was quite rude but did it anyways to shut him up then he took us to our rooms.

We returned to the bar and sat drinking beer, talking to this American guy; David, who we had met, he was 76 and had been travelling non-stop for the last 10 years! He has been travelling on and off since he was 17 and had seen 160 countries, quite an achievement when you consider that there are only 195 in total. We went out for a hamburger that was silly cheap followed by more beers, we came back to the hostel and came back to the hostel to play some cards

Day 56 - Maputo - 23/9/09

After being woken by some of our dorm mates waking up at some god awful hour, we believe that there were getting ready to get the shuttle for Tofo, I rolled out of bed at 0800 and headed out for breakfast at 1100; in the same restaurant that we ate in last night. We had toasties, mine I believed contained tuna, I wasn’t 100% sure as all the menu was in Portuguese, people don’t seem to speak very much English out here. After breakfast we had to find an internet cafe as the hostel didn’t have one, luckily for us their happened to be one at the end of the road, we updated ourselves on world affairs, checked email and of course checked our Facebook accounts. Then the fun really started as we set out to discover Maputo.

We started off by randomly wondering down roads and streets, not really seeing or doing very much, some people would say that's the best way to explore a city but personally I disagree. We stopped off for a drink and headed for the Nucelo De Arte, where I had read that they had an exhibition where machine guns, land mines and other instruments of death had been melted down or broken up to make pieces of art. I was slightly disappointed the display itself was pretty cool but it was tiny, I was kind of expecting more pieces. I tried to take a picture of the artwork and of the members of staff came over and told me not to take pictures, Michelle wasn’t with me and decided to take a picture, the staff member said no and Michelle kicked off about why she couldn’t take any pictures.

We all got rather fed up and left in search of the Zimbabwean embassy as he, after travelling around Mozambique would be heading into Zimbabwe. We eventually found it and were told that he could buy his visa on the border. We were starting to get hungry and a couple of girls at the hostel had told us about this market where all the fish is fresh, you pick what you want to eat and they cook it there and then for you, the fish market proved just a little bit on the difficult side to find as we found ourselves wondering around for absolutely ages. In our search for the fish market we walked past a beach and decided to on it, whilst walking along the beach we could see in the distant fishermen bringing in their catches, sorting and selling them on the beach to the locals. Looking out to sea, as far as the eye could see.
After a couple of hours of walking, we eventually found the fish market; it was huge and had, funnily enough a very fishy smell to it. It was truly amazing; great big fish, lots of buckets with tiger prawns, crayfish, lobsters and crabs, all alive and all ready to be selected and eaten.

The chef introduced himself to us, explaining how it all worked; we pick the fish we want and paid the fishermen for it, the fish then gets taken away to be killed and cleaned, this costs 40MT and then he cooks it for 115MT, it sounded a bit pricey, he assured us that it would be the best fish we had ever had! Me and French eventually decided on 1kg of tiger prawns and a medium sized Red Snapper. We got taken to a table and we asked to sit down and it wasn’t long before the hawkers surrounding our table, actually it was like Dragon's Den , a TV show in England where inventors pitch for funds for their businesses; well, instead of being investors looking for money, it was like we were deciding if we actually wanted to buy anything. Michelle brought a pair of hollowed out coconuts to use a kind of bag and a bag of nuts whilst I brought a pair of flip flops with the Mozambique flag on, unlike the pair of flip flops I brought in Argentina these were bad Havaianas rip off, actually instead of being call Havaianas they were called Hainavasia but what do you expect for 100MT, about £2.50. Bargain! It actually started off being a bit of fun but ended up just being a pain in the ass and started getting on my nerves. The fish came and OMG! the chef was right, it was awesome, the fish just fell off the bone and was so tasty!

We left as the clouds were gathering and the sun was setting. We walked along the seafront and got lost as French was convinced he was going the right way (but he actually wasn’t!), when we got back on the straight and narrow, it was easy to negotiate our way back to the hostel. That night was spent in the little camping area; looking down on the bar in intermittent darkness in the hammock as the power flickered on and off all night, this didn’t affect us as we sat their drinking and smoking ...

Day 57 - Maputo - 24/9/09

Once again up early, had Toasties again and waited for the others to rise. About 1100 we again went to use the internet; this was turning out to be our morning routine! Once this was done we went to find the ferry over to Catembe, which is a little island close to Maputo. We walked down with a girl that we had met the night before, her name was Kay; a Brazilian girl who spoke Portuguese. Everybody needed to get some money as Catembe has no ATM's, don’t know if it was payday or something but every ATM that we went to use had a massive queue. After we had walked past 5 of these queues, hoping that the next one we stumbled upon would not have one, we decided that we probably should join one. We waited and everybody got money out apart from French, who's card for some reason got rejected. We walked for a bit , taking in the hustle and bustle of Maputo, stopping along the way to see if French's card would work in a different ATM (which it didn’t.)
We walked down to the ferry port and let off a big sigh as the ferry had just pulled off, walking back up I started chatting to the security guard who stood at the top of the jetty, asking when the next ferry was. He pointed to a small boat bobbing up and down in the water. Kay, who was acting as our translator for the day translated and told us that the security guard was telling us that it went in 5 minutes, we looked at each then ran down the jetty to the boat, paying the old man at the bottom and jumping on as it pulled off.

The boat was OK though the ship worthiness of it was somewhat questionable with broken benches, broken beams and big dents in the side. We got off the boat and wondered around the port, Kay asked some of the locals what there was to do here and their reply was this is the centre of the island; a few falling down buildings, a gas station and buses crammed with people like sardines and plenty of bars; TIA. We decided to sit down and have a couple of beers in one of the bars, the bar we sat down at had a BBQ next to it and the chef convinced us to buy a BBQ chicken, a whole BBQ chicken. We found the 230MT (£5) between the 4 of us and the chef started cooking. The chicken took half an hour to cook and whilst Miracle, the chef, was cooking it we drank beer, played cards and took pictures of Miracle. It had been raining the night before and there was a lot of water that was on the canvas roof on the bar, it dripped on Michelle's head for most of the time, we all found this very funny.

Eventually, the chicken came and it was complete with chips and salad. It was sooo tasty! Everybody dived in; using fingers to pull the chicken off the bone. Within seconds the whole chicken has disappeared being replaced by a pile of bones, the net thing we know Miracle is shouting at some of the hawkers who were trying to take the bones that were left on the plate. Actually Miracle was so angry that he chased him and hit him with some of the cooking utensils, he came back explaining to us in broken English and some Portuguese that he buts all the bones into a pot at the end of the day and give it to them, saying that they are just greedy and he didn’t like them disturbing his customers.

After much shaking of hands and saying thank you to Miracle and his wife, we left and made our way down the beach where we walked along and chilled out. After we got bored and started to throw some sand at each other, we decided to head back towards to port and back to Maputo before darkness set. We walked onto the jetty and walked past the bigger queue for the smaller boat and decided to get onto the car ferry, which, actually turned out to be a good decision as everybody pushed onto the smaller boar, men hitting people and women swinging bags, at one point the boat had started to drift away from the jetty with people left one foot on the boat and the other left on the jetty; deciding what to do, unfortunately for the comedy value of it all nobody fell in. The car ferry departed Catembe heading back to Maputo, from there we all made our way back to the hostel laughing and joking.

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Photos

French and Michelle
Chillin in The Hammockj

Miracle
:The Chef