Westbound train

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The trip begins with chaotic shoving, shouting, and jockeying for position at the ticket window. We arrive two hours after the designated time for ticket sales and wait another hour for sales to begin. Sarah is so bad-ass, telling off the pestering policeman (in Portuguese!) and holding her position against some dudes three times her size. She ends-up being handed money to buy tickets for some locals who can’t hold their own.

The train leaves Nampula the next day at 5am sharp, allowing us to gaze into the backyards of thousands of rural Mozambicans as they start their day. Isolated homes and villages are scattered thinly and evenly across the west - stunning thatch roofed clay, wattle, and rock huts - all perfectly proportioned, clean, and solid. In the early morning, fathers are sitting with their sons by the fire as women sweep another layer of dirt from the dirt patch in front of their homes (a daily ritual here). Crazy granite pinnacles and cliffs jut out from an otherwise flat landscape in no discernible pattern.

Life in these parts is oriented around the train. At every stop the train is swarmed by villagers carrying the local products (e.g., bungles of cassava roots, straw mats, live chickens, various veggies). You can imagine that a two minute train stop twice per week in a small village with virtually no road creates some level of desperation in the exchange, and the Mozambican train riders fully exploit this situation to their bargaining advantage. When final deals are struck, money and goods are frantically exchanged as the train picks up speed, with some poor villager sprinting barefoot along the rocky tracks trying to get his payment. Others are try to hop on board, shoving at the pile of bodies that are hanging out of the door in hopes of creating space for a big toe to rest on the last step of the entrance.

We were sad when the 10 hour trip was over. (jjk) More photos from the train

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