FOLLOW THE POWER LINES

IN REHANA'S WORDS

Friday, May 10 2013

Desperate as I was to depart, leaving Ponta was hard. How difficult can it be to put up a sign pointing the way to Maputo? Our Garmin had nothing to offer except “unidentified sand track”.

Everyone we asked told us to follow the power lines. Some said turn left at the big yellow house. We never found the house and the sand track we chose soon veered away from the power lines. After an hour I was convinced we were driving in a circle.

Eventually we found a wide sand and gravel road and headed north, our Garmin giving us a bearing. Passed a Hindu temple and two mosques.  The Universal Kingdom of God was the biggest church in kaTembe, where we were taking the ferry to Maputo.
Through a break in the bushes outside kaTembe I caught a glimpse of blue. I reversed and there was the sea – with Maputo across the bay, its skyscrapers a gleaming invitation to a woman who had camped for fourteen days.

Maputo's afternoon wink

Metres away from the ferry terminal we were pulled over for the first time by a Mozambican traffic cop. According to legend, the cops are as parasitic as the country’s mosquitos. He asked for my drivers’ license, checked the car’s registration disc and ambled back to my window.

“So where you going?” he asked.

“Egypt,” I replied.

This hit his funny bone hard. He waved us on our way after he recovered. I’m going to try that line on every cop we meet.

Jules managed to squeeze in one game of pool while we waited for the ferry.

She lost minutes before we had to board the ferry

After I adeptly reversed into the narrow spot allocated to me on the deck I leaned back in satisfaction and caught a whiff of foul. Just my luck; I was trapped next to a lorryful of pigs. I was parked between two trucks and both were too close for my car doors to open. The ride was short and the swine incense mercifully muted by plastic bags tied to their arses.

We were met on the other side of the bay by Lourdes, a friend of Carol’s sister. Our convoy of three Landcruisers headed to our B&B, just off Avenide Vladimir Lenin. It was an apt address for me, brought out the comrade embedded in my bone marrow.

I was thrilled by the first cluster of policemen we saw, bearing AKs with their fingers on the trigger. Jules got very cross because the gun is nothing more than a instrument of violence, but all I saw was that the people with AKs had claimed the streets after a hard struggle. Jules was charmed by the naïve mural around the corner from our B&B, on Lenin Avenue – an ode to cooperatives.

Samora Machel’s statue in the centre of town, donated to the people of Mozambique by the not-starving revolutionary people of North Korea, was a scream. His right finger is raised in a PWesque admonition to the street ahead.
We estimate that if his arm is lowered, his finger will drill deep into the plinth – it is completely out of proportion to the rest of his body.

They’re building in Maputo, tearing down buildings that give the city a charm similar to Havana’s to make space for more shopping malls.
Car dealerships must be low on stock, there’s a constant traffic jam. There's a bank branch on practically every corner and cellphone shops. There's billboards everywhere.
The Chinese, of course, are widening the streets.

This is a garage!

Lourdes took us out for supper on our first night, to an Italian restaurant where the waves lapped right up to us. I had my first prawn in Maputo. Just one, decorating the dish closest to what I wanted – shrimp linguine.

Mercedes Sayagues, who has lived in Maputo for yonks, took us for supper the next night, to a Thai restaurant. I’ve been in Mozambique for more than two weeks and I haven’t yet had one peri-peri prawn. No one can feel more sorry for me than I do.

We spent our first day in Maputo with Lourdes’s nephew Tevala, admiring a spectrum of art. We went to galleries, a woodsculpting workshop and a fabric and craft market. Saw AKs and landmines transformed into art.
I’m so glad I can’t buy anything (we haven’t got place for another pin in the car) because it would have been very hard to choose.

On our second night in Maputo we visited with our hosts at Mandala B&B, Vera and Miguel. Within minutes I knew I’d like to sit at their kitchen table most Friday nights.
Vera is a healer who describes herself as a witch. Miguel is a left-wing poet trapped in an advertising agency with the sexiest voice and eyebrows.

I’m slowly realising that we’ll be constantly meeting amazing people on this journey and quickly saying goodbye to them. Makes the conversations a little more intense. A teeny bit of oversharing creeps in.

We’ve been in Mozambique for almost two weeks and we’ve barely covered 2 000km. We’re being held up by a car part Mike needs, which Toyota in Durban took forever to source and DHL is sending on the back of a snail – one with a slow puncture, Julia says.

Jules taking instruction on our second ferry ride at Marracuene

We’re now at a campsite at Marracuene just an hour out of Maputo, which allows Mike to get back quickly when his part arrives. It also gives us a break from a very expensive city that can charge the earth because the whole world wants to be there.

“I hate camping!” I screamed as the table leg’s hinge snapped shut on my knuckles, minutes after I walked barefoot onto a third acacia thorn hidden in the soft sand of our campsite. At the time I meant it. Jules was a hero; she cleared two weeks of sand from our rooftop tent before we went to bed with a new batch.

We’re at Jay’s Beach Lodge. There isn’t much here besides a sea with crashing waves. Julia, Mike, Carol and I went for an epic walk yesterday. We’re living outside of time, none of us wear watches, but I estimate we took four hours to walk down the beach and back. We stopped often to watch the fishing folk.

It’s raining now, after two overcast days and threatening thunder. Jules and I are comfortably tucked under the overhang of our rooftop tent, with about four campsite dogs trying to squeeze in. We hadn’t factored in campsite dogs at all, there’s been loads almost everywhere we’ve gone. Very useful for keeping the monkeys away, but the rest of the time they’re a nuisance.

Camp dog's always underfoot

Tomorrow we head north, to as close to Vilankulos as possible. We've got a lot of distance to cover and little time to get there before our visas expire. We've decided to scratch Tofo - which I've been desperate to return to, I had the best beach horse ride ever there - in the interests of hauling as much distance north as possible. When we looked at the map this morning Jules realised that we can’t be more than few hundred kilometres north of Joburg.

Winter is on our backs. The nights are getting cold. We’re going to be spending a lot of time on the beach. We need sun.