We left for Maputo, the capital and major city of Mozambique, early Thursday morning. The chapa ride down was pretty smooth until the very end where a bunch of roads were out and all the traffic was piling into one huge traffic jam. It must have taken about half an hour just to complete the last 2 kilometers of our trip.
So turns out there’s a young woman, Jackie, living in Maputo who went to Uni (my now old high school) and is a cousin of one of my classmates, Tahar. My sister discovered her through a mutual American friend and since then they’ve kept in contact. Jackie was letting us spend the night in her apartment, but she really went above and beyond the normal call of hospitality, picking us up directly from the junta, taking us to back to her place, and providing us with lunch before she had to head back to work. After we ate, we spent the afternoon walking around Maputo, first to the Peace Corps office, then to a crafts market, then to the “Teacher’s Bar” (a hole-in-the-wall PC discovery, named for the enigmatic, desolate building next door supposedly belonging to some international teacher’s organization).
The two major highlights of going to Maputo for Scooter and I are Thai food and ice cream. We were getting the first for dinner but Scooter was worried the ice cream shop would be closed by the time we finished so we went ahead and got ice cream before dinner, just to be safe.
The next morning, we took a series of chapas to Goba where we expected to cross the border into Swaziland. However, despite the border post we were going to being named the “Goba border post”, it was located about 12k outside the city, up in the mountains, and so we found ourselves slightly stranded on the edge of the town, trying to hitch a ride from the sparse selection of cars passing through, all charging increasingly exorbitant prices for the lift. After a few hours, we decided to hike a few kilometers up to the highway and got a ride from there. Maybe it’s partially due to not having to cross it at night, but the Moz-Swazi border was much less intimidating than the one from Moz to SA. Once across we found the driver the Cabrini sisters had sent to fetch us and rode to the mission.
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