So this is a time out from the count down. Over Easter break 2 friends of mine and I went to Maputo Mozambique. We left Wednesday before Easter. Getting to Maputo consisted of multiple modes of transportation. First we took a combi from UB to the station. From the station we paid 190 Pula to take another combi from the station into Johannesburg. It was a 1/2 hour to the Botswana boarder were we had to get out fill out a form and get our passport stamped. Then we walked to the South Africa boarder and did the same thing over again. Once this was all done we got back in the combi and continued onto Joberg which took 6 hours. Thankfully the ride wasn't too uncomfortable. I was able to read until it got dark and then listened to music. We arrived at Joberg around 10 pm. As one of my friends eloquently said "Joberg is the armpit of Africa". And it's true. The smell of burning rubber saturates the air, and there is trash everywhere you turn. Add in some run down buildings and creepy people and you get one sketch place. Our combi driver took us to our hotel, oddly enough this hotel is the exact same one I stayed in when I was last in Joberg. We spent the night there and the next day we flew out of the OR Tampo Airport into Maputo Mozambique. The flight was fine, an hour long and food can't really go wrong.
We ran into multiple issues once we got there. The first being this: All the websites we looked at said that to pay for the visa you can pay in any currency. We got to the visa spot and found out that was not true. So we had to leave our passports with the visa guy and get escorted to an ATM where we had to take out there currency and then get escorted back to the visa spot where we paid for our visa's. Once this was over we went over to where the hotel was going to pick us up. Only there was no one there. So we found a taxi and showed them where we wanted to go. Our hotel was the Catembe Gallery Hotel. What we didn't realize was that the hotel was on a peninsula and we would have to take a ferry every time we wanted to go to the mainland. So then the taxi took us to the ferry, we took the ferry and finally arrived to the hotel where they claimed I didn't pay for our reservation. This issue wasn't resolved until the day we left where I showed them my bank account and showed that the money was taken out.
The hotel was beautiful in my opinion. Our room had a single two person bed in one area and then a single bed in a different spot. Our room overlooked the pool and the ocean. The room had these really cool lizard lights that I adored. The hotel had this little restaurant area. The pool was the cleanest I've seen here, and had palm trees and chairs around it. Then a walk way would take you to the bar which sat in the ocean where you could get drinks and watch the sunset. Mozambique itself is beautiful. The palm trees and beaches give it a sense of serenity and quiet. The sky is always blue and it's always warm.
We went into the city a lot and just walked around. The city could be as beautiful as the country. There are plenty of old Victorian buildings, and plenty of parks. However the people don't keep it clean. There is trash everywhere, maybe on par with Joberg. At one point my friend asked a local where a trash can was and the lady laughed and told her to just throw it on the ground. I took a bunch of pictures of some of the rundown buildings because I felt as though that they could have been really pretty.
The city in my eyes is made up of two parts. 80% of Mozambique is slums and it shows in the lower part of the city that was closest to the ocean. That is where it was the dirtiest and where we saw roads and decided not to go down them. We also saw a lot of homeless people and people begging for money. Now the other side of Maputo sat high on a hill and had a great view of the ocean. This is where the rich people would live and it showed. It was cleaner, and the buildings were taken care of. This is also where the craft market was.
The craft market was about 3 times longer than the one in Zimbabwe if you stretched the one in Zim out. It was 2 rows of stuff and stretched on for so long. We spent a decent amount of time here buying things, and we only walked the entire distance once, because there was so much stuff. I personally loved it. I got a cool bag and some stuff for my friends and family there.
Once we were done shopping and haggling like a boss we got lunch there and then got ice cream. We took this weird taxi thing back to the ferry. Pretty much its a car that is open on two sides and has one wheel in the front and 2 in the back. The driver uses something similar to a motorcycle handlebars. It was the cheapest transportation and the most fun.
We also went to Inhaca Island. It's a 2 hour ferry ride to the island on a tiny boat that rocked with the waves a lot. Once we got closer to the island we had to get out and walk the rest of the way because the tide was too far out for the boat to go all the way. So everyone had to carry their stuff and walk through the water to get to the island. The water here was blue compared to the brown water at Maputo. The island was beautiful, and reminded me of what I thought paradise would be. Palm trees, and beaches that wrapped around the island, with coral reefs in front of it and blue blue water everywhere. We went snorkeling over the coral reefs and saw a lot of fish. It was really cool seeing the reefs. I had this one stupid small yellow and black fish follow me around for a little bit. it would scare the crap out of me every time I turned and it would be there. I also had grilled calamari for the first time here. It was really good and definitely a new experience.
People in Mozambique speak Portuguese, and a tiny bit of English. So communicating was difficult sometimes. I got to use my "teacher" voice and would explain things very simply and slowly. We would hitchhike from the ferry point to our hotel and one time we got a ride with a woman who couldn't speak English at all. It was quite an experience trying to communicate. I was able to get across that I studied math by saying "one plus one is two". We were able to talk to some people in the little Spanish that we knew, but for the most part we just repeated what we said in English multiple times.
When we first got to Maputo we wanted to exchange our Pula. However no bank would do this. Most people and banks didn't even know what a Pula was. This I found interesting because the Pula is a lot stronger than the Meticai which is what Mozambique uses. The people we talked to had no idea what Botswana was let alone where it was.
We went home on Monday where we flew out of Maputo then to Joberg and then took a combi to Gabs. Overall I really enjoyed this trip. I loved seeing a new country and experiencing a new culture. It was really relaxing to just sit under the sun and do nothing. The heat in Mozambique was welcomed since it is starting to turn into winter here at Gabs.
Here are some more pictures:
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