sarah mcVey: South Africa and Mozambique (part two)

The bus ride to Mozambique was very relaxed until we had to get off and cross the border. The second we got off the bus we were attacked and surrounded by about twenty different people trying to get us to buy anything, grab our purses, and just touch us. Freaked me out a little but totally made the two girls I was with want to turn around and run right on the spot. Finally with the help of another really nice guy, we got through immigration and back onto the bus safely. We got to Maputo and I have never seen so much poverty in my life, everyone there lives in a shack at best and every single street was lined with trash and mud, there were people urinating on the side of the roads and people sleeping in a line under cardboard on the side of the street. We were expecting to get dropped off at some kind of train station where we would call the phone number to the hotel we knew we could get a room at. Nope. We got dropped off on the side of the road outside a tiny little tourism shop. We went in and asked if we could stay in there until we figured things out, and they promptly said no. What the! Okay, we finally found yet another nice guy that let us use his phone only to find the hotel we had planned was 6 hours away and you could only get there by ferry or plane. WHYYY? Problem was we had absolutely nothing planned from here, we had no cell phones, no place to stay and no internet.

So we sat in a ice cream shop for a good hour trying to figure out what the heck we were supposed to do, one of the girls I was with was ready to get back on a bus to Gaborone right then and there but we decided we would at least see the city for a day, we went back into the tourist shop and hassled the worker until she helped us find a small Backpackers hostel no too far from where we were at. So we went there and dropped our stuff off and asked about getting to Tofo, and something easy! There is a shuttle that come to the hostel every morning and takes you straight to Tofo. Oh good, we are going to be fine. LIES. We spent the afternoon looking around the city being completely intrigued by the sadness of this place. Every single building looks as if someone bombed it or burned it. There was garbage everywhere and kids begging on the side of the road. Finally we were a little overwhelmed and went back to the hotel for the night thinking the next day was going to be a breeze.

At exactly 4:40 am, we climbed onto a “shuttle” (a combi, which is a really old and broken down bus) thinking well this sucks, this is going to be one long ride without a toilet. But that wasn’t it. They took us to a different bus station where we got shoved on a different bus, we paid our fee and sat. and sat, and sat. A good hour and a half later, we had not moved but we had been shoved and prodded to fit as much stuff at our feet as possible, no leg room AND no toilet. Bummer. Then these two guys started talking to us about how the roads were supposedly flooded so it would probably take about 15 hours to get where we were going, and we weren’t going to leave this bus station until every seat and then some were full AND there was also a good possibility of more rain so we would probably get stuck in Tofo. NOT ideal and the two girls I was with started freaking out (totally validated) so we decided that this was just not going to happen and was not a good idea, so we got off the bus and asked the bus driver for our money back, the two guys we were talking to tried to help us get it back and it never happened. That jerk face didn’t give us any of our money back so we went back to our little hotel with WAY less money then we had before.

Again we spent the day wandering the city, we got on a ferry because we had heard of a little beach no far from there and we really wanted to see the beach. Of course, again, it was not what we had planned. We got off the ferry to find worse then we had just left. There was mud and bugs and garbage and people selling fish and moldy fruit and cat-calling at us so we quick ran to the beach which was also covered in garbage and some other stuff that I don’t even want to guess what it was. We found a few pretty seashells and got right back on the ferry where a man came over to me and told me all about how he was suffering and I needed to marry him and take him back to the states with me. Broke my heart. Anyways we wandered to the nicer side of town that day, tried some really strange looking but delicious fruit called leeches and bought some pretty African fabrics. Finally we got our bus tickets back to Jo-burg and from there, Gaborone.

Got on the bus and finally for the first time in two days, felt safe again. Made it back to Johannesburg just to spend another entire day in the bus station but I really didn’t not want to do that so we asked around and finally we found a tourist bus that was promoting a “safe tour of the city of gold” so we hopped on and saw everything from townships, mines, downtown, and Nelson Mandela square. We also took a few hours to stop and go to the Apartheid Museum, which was one of the heaviest places I have ever been. We spent two hours in there and saw less then half of the museum because there was so much to see and read and watch but really that era, just like all others like it just disturbs me. It makes me so sad but I am strangely interested in it. I can’t believe it was still around 20 years ago. There was so much hurt and anger and fear that makes no sense to me. There was a whole exhibit on Nelson Mandela and honestly that man is the reason that the country is moving forward. Pretty amazing. New hero. But after two hours, we had to get back on the bus, finish our tour and get on a bus ride back to Botswana. And that is a not at all condensed version of survival mode for the week.

Theme of the trip: Dear Mom, if I die, you have every right to be mad. Sorry.