Malawi

January 9, 2007: Mozambique

On December 22, the day before we left on our holiday road trip to Mozambique, I got my friend Carl on the phone. I have come to understand an important lesson of travelling: Don't do it without the advice of real live people who have done it. Don't think you can read a book and figure it out. And for gossakes, don't just grab a map, jump in the car and head out the door. That's asking for trouble with a capital T.

I was in possession of a Mozambique map -- of decent scale, loaned by another friend -- spread out across my desk. Carl talked me through the route we should take from Malawi to the Indian Ocean. The route he suggested was completely counterintuitive. But he told me why roads that looked like main highways in fact were not, why roads that looked like minor roads on the map were actually perfectly graded, and gave prudent warnings about why a stretch that looked like it should take about 1 hour might take us more than 5.

The next morning at 5am, we headed out. Our car -- just back from the mechanic-- had a rebuilt engine, the result of the Thanksgiving fiasco. We had our bikes in the back, camping gear, a mosquito-fighting arsenal. Four Canadians (three working in Malawi for Engineers Without Borders, one of whom is a colleague of Jimmy's) were piled into a RAV4 and would caravan with us. We were thankful for the safety of having others with us; our luck with vehicles this year has been unpredictable at best. We were all excited for the adventure.

We fueled up and headed across the border into Mozambique. About 50 km into the trip, down dusty, pockmarked dirt roads, our car began to lurch and start. At first we ignored it. We were barely on the way but already in a place where there were few cars and exactly zero mechanics. We were in denial. We turned up the radio.

Then it got bad. Jimmy stopped the car and said a bad word. I put my head in my hands and wept. Jimmy started the car again and began driving. Mercy shone upon us; the lurching stopped.

We held our breaths most of that first day, through tea estates and towns, up and over mountains and through villages. We passed through the heart of northern Mozambique, a place where the country's civil war hit hard and an area of great beauty but sparse development.

As we moved farther east from the border, we could notice differences, small but perceptible, from Malawi. Mozambiquans splash everything with bright colors -- from the doors of their houses to their dress. Music was everywhere, in each town we went through. Electricity was reaching many of the villages we passed through; something that is not the case in Malawi. Dense stands of trees are still intact, and it is easy to see what Malawi looked like before massive deforestation. Because Malawi is so densely populated, it is hard to drive anywhere for more than a few hundred meters for seeing a person. Mozambique is about 20 times the size of Malawi with less than twice its population;

The language changed slowly throughout the day as we penetrated Mozambique -- from Chichewa and English near Malawi to local tribal languages to Portugese as we neared the coast. I suddenly realize that we are in the heart of a country where neither Jimmy and I speak the local language at all. I reach deep into the back of my mind for my Spanish stores and don't come up with much.