Manica's is the only market I've ever come across which has an entire building dedicated to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Several bread sellers sell small loaves for 5Mt. Then you proceed to another vendor with piles of peanut butter, jelly, and butter jars that will smear on any of these for 5Mt each. Some customers find a meter-long baguette elsewhere and bring it here to be covered; presumably there is greater value when buying a larger quantity of spreads. Nearby, a dozen tea sellers dole out steaming cups of hot tea with creamer and sugar for 5Mt. Many patrons first pick up their PB&Js, then proceeded to this second section to enjoy their sandwich while sipping a tea. The vendor will give you an extra cup upon request so you can slosh your tea between the two and thus air-cool it.
From the market area, several unpaved roads wind up into the mountains, passing myriad villages full of thatch-roof huts clinging to the steep hillsides. Since the area is so densely populated, I was hesitant to seek out the trails that access the surrounding peaks and spectacular ridgelines, but it was an experience to walk among the students, shoppers and gold prospectors as they went about their morning routine.
Around 3, we finally made our way out of town and managed to get 50km down the road to the larger farming town of Chimoio. Here we found a crowd of motorbike repairmen fixing bikes on a curb and we decided to try our luck getting my bike back in saleable condition. I pointed out the problems, explaining that the speedometer and tachometer cables would need to be repaired in addition to the obviously broken headlight bulb and the gauge and light casings, and the head guy promised to fix everything for 1500Mt parts and labor. He would later claim that he didn't understand English and had just been automatically responding in the affirmative to everything I said.
I had to pay in advance and the guy ran down the street to pick up the necessary parts at the spares shop. Nothing exactly matched my bike, so they were forced to strip a lot of wires, reuse a bunch of parts and jury-rig pretty much everything. He wanted 150Mt more to replace the speedometer cable; I protested that this should have been covered by the original amount and requested that he obtain a receipt for the parts he had bought thus far; he left and returned in twenty minutes with a receipt that stated that each of the two assemblies he had procured cost 750Mt. He never got the gauges working, but this didn't stop him from demanding an additional 200Mt more for labor. We debated this point for a while with the man and his cadre, but eventually gave in to avoid a potentially messy altercation, where the two of us would be badly outnumbered and have many less heavy metal tools. As the sun set, we got many sets of directions to bring us to Pink Papaya Backpackers, where we got dorm beds for 350Mt each and prepared a pretty standard meal of spaghetti and curry.
Up before dawn, I walked in what I thought was the direction to the famed Old Man Rock. I passed through a long series of villages and markets, picking up a string of fresh breakfast foods along the way. Five bananas from a little old lady with a blanket of fruits next to her kitchen were 2Mt, an avocado from a 6-year-old girl on the edge of a schoolyard was 2Mt, and an orange was 1. As I approached the frontier of the existing villages and stared out over the plains searching for the rock, a group of men, who were digging clay to make bricks, stared at me quizzically and asked where I was going; when I announced my intended destination they informed me that it was actually several miles on the other side of town. I thanked them and made the hour-long trek back to the hostel, picking up en route something I imagined to be a papaya for 5Mt; this turned out to be a giant orange cucumber.
Upon glancing through the bus station market at six in the morning in search of food, I found little in the way of meals but I did spot about ten different liquor stands. Each sold fifths of locally produced whiskey, gin, and rum for 20Mt each. Given that so many of the buses leaving from this point were setting out on cramped 14-hour journeys, I imagined the demand for such products to be high.
The next thousand kilometers or so had little to interest the average tourist. Every few kilometers we ran across another set of children selling cashews and pineapples for rock-bottom prices, but they had apparently sprung forth from the dense jungle, as there seemed to be little in the way of civilization. In Muxuebe, I stopped at a small restaurant that reputedly had good, cheap meals, but the prices seemed a bit high and, since it was already after 3, I reasoned that the food might have been sitting in the pots for quite a while. Given that this latter reasoning passed through my mind, it's difficult to divine why I subsequently walked over to some children selling a pile of assorted chicken parts they had cooked on a makeshift grill, and purchased a drumstick. They were sitting on the shoulder of a dusty highway where there was little traffic and virtually no pedestrians; their flow of customers couldn't have been all that great. My chicken had likely been sitting there, collecting dust and debris from each passing truck, for the past several hours. But this only popped into my mind some minutes after finishing the piece; my stomach was faster on the uptake.
With our daylight waning, we stopped at a picturesque village to ask for lodging and thus finally obtain the authentic cultural experience we had been craving all these weeks, and in large part justify having our own vehicles rather than just taking public transport everywhere. The first guy we talked to was very open to the idea of us camping alongside the huts and said that we needed only to talk to the chief and something could be arranged. The second man who appeared, who may or may not have been the chief, recommended that we instead go down the road a bit further to a place that was ideal for our needs. A kilometer down the road, we found the Goat and Whistle, which appeared to be a sort of defunct truck stop with a very quiet bar and restaurant, and also a large container labeled "Explosives". We were directed to set up our tent next to the latter. Remnants of huts lay to one side of the bar, but there was little evidence of current habitation, and those who milled around the area seemed to be on their way to somewhere else. There was little activity or sounds to be heard, aside from the melancholy verses of Portuguese honky tonk that lazily wafted from three radios scattered across the camp.
We drove a few hundred kilometers further, with nothing much of interest to break up the trip. Children along the way would hold up live chickens they hoped we would buy and strap to our bikes; the mere sight of these birds turned my stomach a little. We might have been able to put our bikes on a sailing dhow and sail into Inhambane for a handful of meticals, but we didn't know about this option at the time, so we took a sand road into town instead. At three points along this final stretch, my bike did something that made a terrible sound and portended an imminent breakdown. About half a kilometer from our target hostel, the chain jumped off and stayed off, rendering my bike completely immobile. It so happened that I had stopped only a few hundred feet from a repair shop, but since it was Sunday, the shop was closed; Matt grabbed a socket wrench from the hostel and we made the repairs ourselves.
We got beds in a dorm and explored the quiet streets. The power was out across town and most of the stores were sealed up, and thus a meal was hard to come by. We found some overpriced salads at a pizza joint. I got a cup of ice cream but it was mostly melted. The seawall in front of our hostel was a local hangout and kids blasted tunes from their car stereo systems. We might have joined were we not still very much in the habit of passing out at 9 o'clock.
Stopping by the market, I got some fish minestrone soup and bread for breakfast for 25Mt. We found the bike repair kid and he tightened and lubed my chain for 100Mt. Matt's gas tank had broken away from the chassis, and the kid repaired this with a shoestring for 50Mt. While we were there, we decided to go ahead and throw a new tube on Matt's bike. We thought we had agreed for the kid to do this while we waited, and that he had sent his friend to find a new tube, but after waiting for two hours, we began to suspect that this might not be the case.
We rode to Tofo on a beautiful winding road through the dunes that ran alongside picturesque waterside huts and lines of souvenir dhows. In the tiny beach town of Tofo, we found a hostel with camping for 180Mt, and by staying there we would be entitled to a 10% discount at a nearby diving operation. The first dive shop we stopped at was doing two deep dives the next morning and would require that we paid extra for a deep diving certification. The second shop required this as well as a refresher course, since it had been several months since either of us last dived. It was a similar story at the other shops and all had apparently agreed to follow an identical pricing structure. The guy at Tofo Divers claimed that there was one shop in town known to unscrupulously cut their prices to draw business, then proceeded to chop 20% off the standard price. Given our current comfort level, we eventually decided it would probably be wise to wait and do an easier shallow dive in the afternoon, then do deeper dives the following day. For dinner we went to a funky bar where everything on the menu had been randomly assigned a rock band name; unlike the other establishments in town, this one was completely empty; there was still a citronella candle burning under every table, and a thick lemony haze filled the room. I ordered "The Who Hot Malay Curry" which amounted to nothing more than chicken with a generous coating of curry powder.
I went out at 5am to try finding a spot on a fisherman's boat, but none of the vessels going out were really big enough for three people, and the prices offered for squeezing me in seemed to assume that my presence would preclude the possibility of actually catching any fish that day. I went to the market for breakfast and waited two hours for some women to finish the fish dish they were preparing. It seems that in Africa, everything takes a ridiculously long time to cook, even though it's all extremely simple and the vendors have many burners and pots at their disposal. I eventually gave up and got tea and a hashbrown sandwich instead. The vendors inevitably increase their prices by a factor of two to ten for anyone with a complexion like mine, and so I gave up the usual practice of inquiring what the price was and simply told the sellers what I intended to pay for their products.
The dive was postponed until 2:30 to await the return of the morning dive; at that time we joined a troupe of 18 Japanese divers for a trip to Marble Arch. We put on our wetsuits and went to the beach to push a large zodiac into the water. The chop was quite high by this time and it was a very fast, rough ride out to the site; the trip leader would hoot and holler with each bounce in a bid to keep morale up. Each time we were thrust into the air, I wondered whether the next crash would be the one that snapped my spine; the constant compressions of my abs led me to question whether my morning constitutional had been sufficient to stave off a bout of diarrhea for the necessary two hours, and the ride wasn't doing wonders for my nausea either. As we readied our equipment while the boat buoyed up and down on the massive swells, seasickness hit me full force, and it showed no signs of stopping as we dropped overboard and sunk beneath the waves. The rock arch was quite impressive and was home to tons of giant, colorful fish, but given that I spent the whole of the 45-minute dive puking into my regulator, my appreciation of the sights was overshadowed by an overwhelming desire to be back on dry land. The only (very great) consolation was that my periodic expulsions were limited to the one end and I had no need to explain a soiled wetsuit.
Since we had little interest in riding the last thousand boring kilometers into Johannesburg, and even less desire to spend a week in one of Africa's most sprawling, dangerous cities trying to sell off the bikes, we decided to look into the possibility of unloading them in Mozambique. We had long been under the impression that if we were to return to the South African border without the bikes, horrible consequences would ensue, but our bikes seemed to be in high demand in this country and we decided it could very well be worth looking into. That morning, a bread-selling boy had offered Matt 50Mt and all of his bread to ride his bike for five minutes. Matt said he didn't want to risk it but suggested that the boy should find a buyer that might allow him to ride it after delivering the payment to Matt. Two buyers came to look at our bikes and claimed they were ready to buy and had cash; we stalled so that we could determine whether we could actually leave the country without them.
That night, we scoured the town for any credible white person that might know a thing or two about selling vehicles across borders; as it turns out, this is a subject that virtually every South African expat knows quite a bit about. We found that the owner of the classic rock themed bar used to be a lawyer, and he was quite confident that nothing would come of us dumping our bikes there. An employee at the scuba shop, who really had no credentials or experience to legitimize him, was equally confident. At the restaurant Tofo Tofo, a regular patron, Shaun, had moved several vehicles across the border and was sure of our ability to do the same.
Shaun had apparently been looking for me all day for a fishing trip which was leaving at 4am the following morning. A 2000Mt buy-in would get me a quarter-share in the profits we would make from selling all the fish we would catch. He spoke of this 'commercial' venture and the windfall which would surely be ours with such enthusiasm that I gullibly bought into the whole thing. What he failed to mention was that it had been over a week since he last landed a fish.
We got prawns and rice at a market restaurant for 100Mt and then I asked around to find a purveyor of Dramamine. One soda vendor recommended that we speak with someone at a fancy lodge down the beach and so we headed that way. I have never before had occasion to transact with a drug dealer, but this guy almost certainly was one. His surfer bum demeanor coupled with a vicious business streak admitted no room for ambiguity. He set me up with two pills for 100Mt.
Shaun had said he would pick me up at 3:45AM and I had awoken some, but after sitting out at the curb for an hour, I gave up and went back to bed. He finally rolled up at 5 and came to my tent to find me. We picked up his girlfriend, who looked to be a much younger European tourist, as well as two guys from Australia, and headed to a luxury resort in Barra where Shaun's boat was parked at the end of a mile-long dock, which wound through the mangroves and out to a series of thatch-roof huts on stilts. The boat trip was something akin to going fishing with your stoner uncle. He was incredibly excited at the beginning and rapidly caught a few bait fish, but his excitement waned over the course of the day as we chased about many great schools of fish with seven rods at the ready, but never managed to hook a single one. At one point, he thought he had seen a whale shark breaching the surface, but as we approached, it quickly became evident that it was in fact a log. We did see hundreds of dolphins and swam with one pod. We helped a dhow pull in its nets and Shaun bought a kilo of squid off of the infinitely more successful fishermen. We returned around noon; Shaun and the others went to get a meal at Tofu Tofu, but with little money remaining after this failed venture, I went to the market for a 50Mt plate of fish and rice.
Matt eventually returned from his dives, reporting that he had gotten Nitrox-certified in the course of the day's dives for the bargain price of $270. We called the guys who had promised to buy our bikes and they said they would come with the money in half an hour. After sitting and reading in the shade for two hours, I called them back and they claimed to have gotten tied up with something else but were coming just then. Two hours later, the background sounds on his side of the call hadn't changed; he admitted that he didn't have the money to make the purchase.
I got up early in the morning and went to make some porridge in the kitchen; I started talking to a girl who was also making breakfast while waiting on a bus to Maputo. I noticed some oats on the community shelf - enough was left in the box for a single serving; these would be far superior to my nutritionless porridge, and so I pulled them down and put them in a pot to cook. The girl asked me 'Are you going to eat those oats?' I thought this an odd question - the only possible explanation was that I had just stolen her oats, which she had set on that shelf to get them out of the way for a few minutes. In an extremely English way, she very apologetically attempted to justify to me why she would like to respectfully request that I allow her to eat her oats. She gestured to a bag of muesli that was also on the community shelf and suggested that I might eat this instead; I suppose there was a good chance that this was also hers and she had only sacrificed it so that she may feel less terrible about taking her oats back (muesli, like oats, is an unusual community shelf contribution), but I decided to eat it anyway.
Matt and I had resolved to head back to Inhambane and try our luck at selling the bikes there. I finished packing earlier than he and biked down to the market to get some tea. While I sat there, a kid came up and inquired about the bike; a few moments later, a second came up, then a third. I explained to them that I was selling the bike for cheap; they went off, and then returned with a dozen of their friends. One boy, a Vodacom airtime seller, showed up with 4000 rand and handed it over to me, then another kid took the keys from me, started the bike and zipped off down the road. A young dive leader asked if my friend were also selling his bike; I replied that he was and the man went off to find Matt. A random older guy showed up and insisted that we go to the police station and prepare an official statement so that I couldn't later report the bike stolen.
At the station, the cop gave me a sheet of paper and a pen and told me to write the appropriate statement. Having no idea how to go about this, I wrote that I was transferring ownership of the bike to the buyer. The cop crumpled up the paper and specified a number of facts I needed to provide, including the name of my mother and father. He used a ruler to make sure the text had precisely the right margins. After I had screwed up about six more statements, the cops ran out of paper and instead used white-out to repair the latest iteration. He then translated the whole thing into Portuguese. We each paid the cop 100Mt for his services, then we got on a bus to get the paper notarized in Inhambane.
At the notary office, we were told we had to visit another office across town. At that office, we were informed that we had to first visit another office somewhere else. We shortly learned that this third office didn't exist and returned to the second office, which subsequently sent us back to the notary office empty-handed. The notary made us write something that was solely in Portuguese; Carlos, the buyer, wrote this, doing a rather poor job of copying the original statement; he spelled my full name "Jepree". The notary promptly threw this away and had us sit for twenty minutes while someone prepared an official document, then charged us 750Mt.
I learned a good deal about Carlos that day. He was a really sweet kid but wasn't particularly sharp and likely got taken advantage of by pretty much everyone. In pursuit of the 'American' dream, he worked nights and weekends and abstained from alcohol and other unnecessary expenses. This motorcycle was a milestone; his next step in 'becoming more like me' would be to travel to South Africa and buy a car. He had never driven a bike or a car and had no license as of yet, but that would come soon enough. Matt's buyer, on the other hand, was the epitome of crazed machismo; he had crashed his last car whilst driving drunk. We were pretty sure that our bikes would enable both of them to kill themselves in short order; we wondered how bad we would feel when we heard the news of their premature demise; we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that such news would almost certainly never make it to us.
Carlos had suggested on multiple occasions that I take a shower and change my clothes at the ferry station, but a shower was nowhere to be found, so I just boarded the next ferry to Maxixe and found a seat on the back deck where I couldn't offend too many with my stench. I bought a new belt for 50Mt from a guy on the dock, then walked up to the highway and boarded an old Bluebird schoolbus bound for Maputo (425Mt). This bus had serious engine problems and struggled to get past 25km/h; it is likely that if I had stuck it through to the end, I would still be on that bus today. When we stopped at a police checkpoint, I noticed that there was a luxury express bus stopped behind us and I immediately jumped out and boarded that one. For 500Mt, this one had AC, headrests, and most importantly, a working engine. I noticed the remains of sandwiches and snacks in everyone else's seatback mesh and asked the ticket checker about it; he replied that the food was finished but he was able to procure a few extra sodas for me. I found some cookies in front of my seat that the previous tenant had left behind.
I got off the bus at a dark intersection in the middle of Maputo; I had just woken up and had little desire to carry all my stuff to the hostel, so I overpaid a tuk tuk to take me the 2km. The hostel was essentially full, but I was able to squeeze our tent to half its normal width to get it to fit into the remaining space on the concrete loft that constituted the tenting area. I went to a restaurant down the street that the hostel had recommended and ordered seafood matapa, which turned out to be a few pieces of crab covered in a nasty green goo; I instantly realized my error in ordering seafood at 10 o'clock at night in a country not renowned for its refrigeration, but luckily never suffered any serious repercussions. Matt showed up several hours later, having taken a much slower bus to a more distant bus station.
We both spent the day wandering aimlessly around the city. My first stop was of course the market and surrounding eateries; while not a culinary destination, Maputo does have tons of delicious baked and fried street food for dirt cheap. I ate about 15 different varieties of donut.
Change in Mozambique, and particularly in Maputo, is impossible to obtain. Though there are plenty of things that cost 100 or 200 meticals, no one wants these huge bills and many will simply refuse to take them - even if it means missing out on a valuable sale. I offered to buy 40Mt worth of pastries from one woman on the street; this would have probably constituted over 10% of her sales for the day, but because I only had a 200Mt note, the transaction could not go through.
I consulted several travel agents to see if they have any special insight on cheap flights back to the States; surprisingly, even though they represented the airlines whose tickets I had found earlier, they were unable to find even those that I had already spotted. I finally resolved to just pick up the tickets on the internet, but it took me hours to find one of the city's few remaining internet cafes, and the ticket I had seen earlier, which had a day-long stopover in Istanbul, sold out as I was buying it.
I went to the Natural History Museum, which was chock full of delightfully bad taxidermy arranged in ludicrously gory scenes. An exhibit on elephant fetuses had the remains of baby elephants in several different stages of development. The art gallery across town featured a temporary exhibit on photography in Maputo and I instantly lamented all the awesome things I had failed to take pictures of; one wall of the exhibit was dedicated exclusively to the fetuses.
I hiked to the Greyhound station to await the 8PM departure. Matt called to say he had found a good deal on flights and would go ahead and buy them. As the minutes ticked away, it began to feel increasingly unlikely that Matt would make it there with our bus tickets in time for us to board the bus. But he showed up with ten minutes to spare (though without the plane tickets) and we settled into our extremely tight 5-seat row for the 9-hour ride. We had a few very tense moments as we contemplated the giant car stamp on our passport and what the guards might think when we showed up with a bus group, but both posts just waved us through and we were home free.
We reached Park Station at 4am and set up camp along a random wall; despite its daunting reputation, it seemed a fairly pleasant place to be, though a security office did insist that we abandon our wall spot for one of the secure seating areas. Two Peace Corps volunteers from Kansas camped out with us; they were also heading for the airport, in the hopes of securing cheap tickets to Addis Ababa. Since they were of Asian descent, random African men would come up and bow to them and say 'konichiwa', or show off some faux Kung Fu moves; they had apparently been suffering through this the entire trip. Once the trains started running, we went down a level to wait on the next one to Isandro, from which it would be an easy walk to the airport. While we waited, I used the city's 3G network to order two tickets to New York via Abu Dhabi ($662) using my Kindle; since mine was an old-school e-ink Kindle, this was an incredibly frustrating experience, but at this point I had nothing but time.
It took an hour to reach our stop, which left us with a mere twelve hours to hang out in the airport. The two Kansas guys went to shop around the ticket desks while we devised an airport scavenger hunt and trolley racing tournament using the free luggage carts provided. Unlike most other airports in the world, the food here was priced pretty reasonably, and in addition to eating a slew of honey sandwiches in a futile attempt to finish off my jug of honey, I also ate an orange, cornbread muffins, ginger snaps, two bananas, a 24oz peanut butter chocolate banana smoothie, a cheese bagel, a bag of wine gums, 2 cups of coffee, and half a serving of chocolate mousse. After we had gorged ourselves for some hours, one of our friends showed up with hamburgers, fries and sodas for both of us from Wimpy's (we had earlier commented that we had never eaten there); we couldn't very well reject this thoughtful gift, so we shoveled those down as well. A clinic/dentist was advertised, so I went there to seek out some cheap dental work; unfortunately, the dentist facet of it was not currently operational.
The Etihad planes were pretty decent; they presented us with free socks when we boarded the plane (exactly what I needed!) and the movie selection was quite extensive; I watched about 12 new blockbusters over the course of our 27 hours in the air. The Abu Dhabi airport was an hour's drive from the city and, given that we only had a three-hour layover, we were advised not to venture through immigration to officially set foot in the UAE and survey the town next door.
Arriving in New York some hours later, Matt took off with some friends and I took the subway to Chinatown. I booked a seat on the 8PM bus to Jacksonville ($50) and found some nearby pho and boba tea. One thing I found curious about New York is that everyone seems to be lost all the time and a good 30% of all conversation centers around people reorienting themselves; three different people asked me for directions during my brief stay.
Reaching the stop on Camp Blanding Blvd the next morning, I asked the driver if the bus would be getting any closer to Gainesville; he informed me that there was actually another bus that went directly to Gainesville (via Atlanta) and that I really should have mentioned that that was my intended destination the previous night when I was buying my ticket. I began hitchhiking down the highly commercial, six-lane road, knowing full well that my chances of getting picked up given those conditions were slim. Very soon it began pouring down rain and I took cover in an Advanced Auto Parts; there I was informed that the rain would continue for several days, though it was a new development and it had been completely dry for the past several weeks. I called my friend, Bevin, and mentioned that I might need to be bailed out. A few miles down the road, I got my first and only ride from a beautiful country UNF girl in a pick-up truck; she dropped me off a short distance down the road but claimed she would be back through in a little while and, if I were still there at that time, would drive me the rest of the way to Gainesville. Bevin called back, having recently decided she could indeed come get me, and since it was getting late in the day, and I was currently taking cover from a torrential downpour in the alcove of a Winn Dixie, suffering through the sales pitch and uncomfortable lewd comments of a Xanax dealer, I was not in much of a position to decline. I picked up a disposable poncho and continued walking south in the hopes that I could get another ride and shorten her drive, but soon gave up and hunkered down at a Kangaroo station to wait.
