Driving in Mozambique

(Written on the road in Mozambique, ~Dec. 23, 2009)

Ehem, the aforementioned by-the-sea vacation still hasn't started yet, though I've been in Mozambique for 5 days. For starters, Moz is not a very friendly place if you don't have a vehicle. We arrived Saturday late afternoon and weren't picking up the truck until Tuesday. So, we were stuck footing it around Maputo. Maputo, while it does have some charm, is kind of a wreck of a city. It felt very Havana to me. Second, Moz is completely inundated right now with South Africans and backpackers on Christmas vacation. I mean absolutely crawling with them! Matt and I got scared off of stopping in Tofo as the whale sharks apparently don't hang out there these days (my 1 reason for going), and the campsites are literally full to the brim - tent to 4x4 to tent to 4x4. So we decided to drive straight from Maputo to Vilankulo. But due to a snafu with the truck we got a late start and had to camp for a night in Xai-Xai. Sure enough, the campsite was chock full of white, red-faced, pot-bellied Afrikaaners, complete with their air conditioned trailers. More on these thoughts later.

Today we will make it to Vilankulo, though the roads have only cooperated about 50% of the way so far. The bad stretches are unimaginably bad, with potholes so deep they should be called "canyonoles", plus long bits covered in sand. The last stretch we've been on is nice tar, so I'm actually writing this in the car!

Another little dash of salt that's making things more challenging in Moz is communication. The official language here is Portuguese, and very few people speak or even understand a word of English. Thankfully my limited Spanish is helping some, but we are often finding ourselves mostly in the dark.

I'll be honest, I'm kind of in a bad mood. And one of the reasons just dawned on me. In Namibia, I was a local, sort of. I was living there and working for the good of the community. In Zimbabwe, most of the second time I was there I had a connection to wherever I was at. Even without a connection it was still a little unusual that a white woman was there alone, so people were curious. But here in Moz, with Matt in our rented 4x4 truck with tent on top, I look *exactly* like the thousands of S. Africans that swoop into the beaches of this country for 2 weeks a year. And even at the risk of sounding like one myself, so many of them are asses! They are rude, obnoxious, presumptuous and racist. And Mozambicans look at me and assume I'm one of them and it's driving me nuts.

I kinda wish I had the time to wait somewhere else and come back around January 15. I think this would be a *lovely* country to explore, given the right time.