Africa 2001: Week 2 - Long cab rides, beautiful beaches, and a dead man

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The next morning in Swaziland, we were all surprised to discover that Mozambique still sounded like a good idea. Bob, our hostel host, explained what we'd need to do to get there, gave us a makeshift map, and took Ellen, Emma, Mark, Josh, Marti, Nicky, Anna, Tim, and I to the fruit market.

His instructions played out as follows: From the fruit market, we took a taxi to Mozambique's embassy in Mbabane, Swaziland's capital. We filled out paperwork for the visa, and got passport pictures from a guy running an instant-photo business in the shade of a tree across the street. We then killed time in a cafe at a mall in the center of town, sitting and watching Africa at work: people shopping, chatting, wandering, loitering, laughing and staring back - amazingly mundane. Back at the embassy 5 hours hours later, we picked up our visas with no headaches, hassles or mistakes. Then it was another taxi to the KFC parking lot in the center of Manzini to get a long-distance taxi. A haggle here, a misunderstanding there, and the nine of us piled into a minivan with a cartoon of fornicating bunnies on the rear windshield. We agreed to pay double to get the ride to ourselves.

Tim and I were on our way to a country we’d never even thought about visiting before with a bunch of people we’d just met in a van driven by a guy who didn't speak English. We cracked into a case of Castle lager, toasts went up, conversation exploded, and we blasted through the sunburnt countryside, past grass huts, rolling hills, and brush fires. By 8pm we were in Maputo, Mozambique and out of beer. The ride cost each of us about four dollars. Our trip had become a journey.

We had to find dinner before town closed. Ellen tried using her Spanish to gather information from Portuguese-speaking locals. It didn’t work very well. Soon we found ourselves in an all but empty restaurant where the waiter spoke no English. After a lot of pointing by us and head shaking by the waiter -- the menu listed far more than the kitchen offered -- we managed to get two appetizers without a clue what we ordered. As I was biting into my second mouthful, Nicky, a vet in training, simply said, “I think that’s cow stomach. The honeycomb bit is the reticulum.” The meal wasn’t good to start with. It didn’t get better with that comment. The other dish turned out to be spicy chicken liver. Foul.

Portuguese. New friends. Dollar an hour cab rides. Cow stomach. We were high on the adventure of it all, but had to get to bed early. I tossed through a sleepless night of others snoring as antimalarial pills messed with my head. We rose at 5 and purged the previous night’s dinner. The toilets were behind saloon-style swinging doors along the main hallway. We all heard, in great detail, Tim's intestinal war (privacy and pride were the first casualties of African travel). After about ten minutes of outrageous gurgling, grunting, and gas, he stepped out and said, "Good morning everyone. Ready?"

We were, and booked it to the bus station for an eight hour ride to a place called Inhambane.

Commotion and exhaustion as con artist baggage handlers fleeced me to get my luggage aboard. People hustled around selling food, cigarettes, and just about anything else you might want on a bus. We happy, confused, tired 9, full of Immodium, knew not to eat until we reached the other end of the ride. And we were off.

A woman sat in the aisle breast-feeding. Mark, Josh, and I shared three seats barely wide enough for two butts. Every time the bus stopped along its lengthy route women and boys swarmed the vehicle to sell soda, roots, fish on sticks, even bows and arrows (an odd choice in a land where the police don’t allow pocket knives). To buy, you leaned out the window, pointed, haggled, took and paid. We stopped for gas and a toilet so filthy it scared your waste right back into your abdomen. The bus hummed along. Tiny towns flit past. Women with infants strapped to their back worked the dirt, as they have for centuries. Children played. Men were rare, perhaps claimed by the long civil war. Nearly everyone was barefoot.

Their rickety homes were made of palms. Water came from small wells. Utility poles had no wires, presumably because it was taken down during the wars or stolen and sold as scrap metal. Land mine clearance crews were visible here and there. As dangerous jobs go, it used to be easier but massive rains in 2000 scattered the mines around and now nobody knows where they are. Staring out the window, I couldn’t help wondering how many tilling women or playing children explode everyday. Mark deadpanned, “When the floods came through here and devastated the entire country, it must have taken them weeks to rebuild.”

We cruised right through it all. From Inhmabane, we got in the back of a pick up doubling as a taxi and half an hour later the road ended in Tofo, on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Packs on our backs, we took off our shoes and began the 1.5 km walk up the beach to Bamboozi Backpackers. Palm trees whispered with the cool breeze. Fine white sand tickled our feet and skittered past our legs. Up the coast there was nothing but beach. My photos say it was cloudy, but you could feel the sun bouncing on the blue waves. I yelled through giddy laughter, “This is the coolest place I’ve ever been!”

It never got worse.

The night we arrived Des, Bamboozi’s white South African owner, was dangerously drunk. After threatening to kick my ass for reasons nobody understood, he did a conversational u-turn and exhorted me not to “buy into that first world bullshit, man. You got to Realize!” Then he stared across the moonlit ocean, said, “Magic,” and shook my hand.

Six days snuck by as we lounged at the hostel, lounged on the beach, lounged at a restaurant, lounged at the other restaurant and meandered the beaches for miles upon miles. Hours disappeared as we chatted with Hidde, a Dutchman who was out of money two months before his trip was to end; Anthea and SarahJane, who worked the bar for a week in exchange for free lodging; Jarrod, the young Irish tough who was really just the quiet young Irish guy; and too many others to count from countries galore. Friendships came quickly in Paradise. All you had to do was turn, face, and start talking to find a buddy for an hour, a day, or a lifetime. Breakfast was pancakes and fresh fruit. Dinner was seafood caught that afternoon. Managing it all was Des's main employee, a local named Alex who managed the books with stunning incompetence and spoke little English. He had a big heart and an apologetic smile.

Marti, Ellen, and I signed up for SCUBA certification courses at a local dive shop. On my first dive my air went to zero, scaring the instructor so badly her eyes nearly knocked off her mask. I remained calm because I could still breathe and incorrectly assumed the gauge was broken. Gareth, our instructor for all dives but the first, took great joy. He flashed an Eddie Haskell smile when he rocketed over the waves and sent people bouncing around our motorized raft. He admonished me to “Shine up” when I asked him to wait a second so I could go to the bathroom. We followed his blond dreadlocks through the coral as he pointed out angel fish, trumpet fish, rays, lobsters, and even snails having sex (when asked whether they were rare snails, he explained, “It’s rare to see them humping.”).

On the last day, he tried mightily to get us out for our final dive though the waves were ten feet tall. We slammed and jarred along in the raft, clinging for our life. Anna nearly went overboard, somehow holding on even as her head was almost in the water and her feet were almost in Gareth’s ear. After about 15 minutes, some important looking part of the raft broke loose and we turned back. Marti let Gareth know we appreciated his decision with a quick confession: “I was bricking myself just thinking about getting out of this boat.”

That same sea had killed a man just a few days earlier.

In many ways the dead define Africa. The dead of civil wars. The dead of poverty, AIDS, and crime. Dead economies, dead expectations, dead regimes, and dead ends. It was fitting, then, that in the midst of idyllic Tofo, a dead man disrupted our day. He had gone fishing south of town and slipped on the seaweed covered rocks. The ocean grabbed him, beat him against the bottom, placed him on the beach in front of our hostel, and went back about its business.

We were in town – the lone customers in a beachside restaurant called Concha – when Jarrod and a deaf bilingual German guy came running in from Bamboozi to find someone who could help them find someone who could help them do something about the body. A woman at the bar called the authorities. We went back to the hostel for curiosity, safety, and camaraderie.

A policeman, a priest, and a small crowd of locals came to identify him and give last rites. They pulled him out of the surf, told us that people would be by in a day or two to remove it, and left. The 20 of us in the hostel stayed in the bar at the top of the dunes, nervous and respectful.

I spent a lot of time that night wondering what to think. Wrapped in a hammock and palm leaves by some hostel employees, the corpse was bigger and darker than one skinny African man. The waves kept up their rhythm. Clouds drifted past the fluorescent moon. You could almost here nature saying, “Excuse me, you dropped this.” In the hostel, we listened to Santana, took our SCUBA lessons, ate our delicious meals of prawns, chicken, and crab, drank our 2M beers, and chatted quietly about what it would be like to live a life where you can die trying to catch dinner. We were welcome, but we were visitors.

The family came by the next day to sit with the body a while before carrying him off for burial.

It was time to move on. Two weeks down, and enough memories for a lifetime already.

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