Maputo

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After getting my passport back from the Mozambique Consulate, with the visa inside, I got a minibus from Mbabane to Manzini, where the buses to Maputo leave Swaziland from. Unfortunately, I arrived just as one had filled up and was about to leave. This meant I had to wait for another one to fill up, which took about 2 and half hours.



The one advantage of having to wait this long was that I got the pick of the seats and got a seat up front, a lot more comfortable than being squashed in the back. It was 5 o’clock before we got going and I was sitting beside a guy from Tanzania who lived in Maputo. He warned me as we approached the border that we could be there a while, depending on whether the Swazi women on our bus bringing fruit to sell in Maputo, agreed to bribe the border policeman.



I hadn’t experienced too much corruption in Africa so far. It doesn’t seem to be as prevalent in East or Southern Africa as in West Africa, from the stories I had heard. But Mozambique did have a bad reputation, which I was shielded from being a backpacker travelling on the local transportation. If I was with my own vehicle it would have been a different story.



I was told that if the women didn’t agree to pay the bribe the police would search through everything in the bus and trailer, which could leave us waiting there hours. The women, therefore, were under pressure not just from the police, but the driver and fellow passengers. There was some sort of negotiation going on as we got through in about an hour.



On the way to Maputo there were several more police checkpoints, where the driver’s documents were scanned to see if there was anything the police could pull him up on and illicit a bribe. We eventually got into Maputo at about 9.30 p.m. It’s never the best thing to arrive in a big city at this time, but one of my fellow passengers flagged a taxi down for me.



I got him to take me to Base Backpackers, where I had intended on staying. However, the night guard told me they were full. I found out the next day that this was a lie and he just was too lazy to take me upstairs. He woke up a guy asleep in a car on the street, who took me to Fatima’s Nest Backpackers. I set my tent up here in their new astro turf camping area. I actually had the honour of being the first to camp on it and I must admit it was a pretty good set up for camping. That is where my praise for Fatima’s ends. At 400 Meticas (over €10) the place was a complete rip off, with rude staff and showers that didn’t work properly.



Truth be told, there isn’t a whole lot to see or do in Maputo. It bears the scars of colonisation and the civil war that followed independence. The Portuguese influence is quite strong. Everyone speaks Portuguese and the food is all covered in the spicy peri peri sauce. Some of the architecture is quite interesting, especially the old Portuguese fort and the Praca dos Trabalhadores, which was built by Gustav Eiffel.



The Portuguese aren’t remembered too fondly here though. When independence was declared in 1975, the Portuguese pulled out almost overnight to leave the country to flounder. This wasn’t before they went about sinking ships and pouring cement down wells. The Frelimo regime that took control were very strongly aligned to the USSR in the Cold War era and this Communist influence is still very evident. There is a massive statute of Samora Machel in Maputo, which is reminiscent of the ones you see pictures of from North Korea of Kim Jong Il. Also, there Avenues named after Lenin and Mao Tse Tsung.



Even though it is no longer a communist state, I got the feeling that it was still a ‘police state’. Apart from some of the colonial era attractive architecture and the odd modern building, there is a lot of urban decay. As I walked along Ave Julius Nyerere, I was ushered to the opposite side of the road. Evidently I had strayed too close to one of the government buildings.



I had been reminded by several signs that water was short in Maputo and had to be conserved. I had no problem with this, but twice I saw government workers using hoses to clean, what I assume were ministers cars, and water plants on government grounds.



I bumped into Paul from Dublin, who I had met in Swaziland. He had been in Maputo a month and we went for some food and drinks. Maputo is quite an expensive city by African standards. To get some food and drinks, in places frequented mostly by locals, cost significantly more than the equivalent in South Africa. It did make me wonder how the poorer people in this city got by. I was home early enough for a few hours sleep before my 5.30 a.m. bus to Tofo.



I had only spent one day in Maputo, which is never enough to get a real feel for a place. At the same time, I don’t think there was a whole lot more to see. It definitely seems to more of a character than most of the other African cities, but I think you would have to spend some time living there to discover it rather than pass through and hope to sample it.

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