No Stopping for Lions

by Joanne Glynn

  We are determined to eat at one of the famous old Portuguese restaurants still operating in Beira, and one lunchtime we drive slowly past Pique Nique several times before deciding to risk it. Well actually the security man sees us cruising by and waves us down. Yes come in, the restaurant is open. It just looks as though it’s been closed for years. Inside it’s all browns and oranges and we can’t decide whether we’ve just walked back into the ‘30s or ‘50s. The ‘50s are probably when these waiters were first taken on and ours is a big black gentle hulk of a man whose sleeves on his majordomo jacket stop short of his wrists by many centimetres. We order an aperitif of chilled white port, then fried sardines and grilled tiger prawns to follow, and to Pique Nique’s credit the dishes are prepared as if the chef has just perfected something new and exciting and this is their first day on the menu.

  For the next few days we stay in an apartment in a small complex catering to Zimbabwean holidaymakers, and in the evenings, we eat at Club Nautico on the beach. This really is a club and nonmembers must pay a small entrance fee. Middle-class white Portuguese, Portuguese Mozambicans, blacks, whites, foreigners like us are all welcomed and occupy the plastic tables and chairs of the open dining verandah, fanning ourselves with menus and lifting sweaty T-shirts off our shoulders. Children wander down the steps and half-heartedly kick sand about; young macho men take off their shirts and stretch back in the sun, skin glistening, while waiters bring out plate after plate of fried chicken and chips. A family of golden-brown boys, the youngest no more than four or five, sits up to big bowls of minestrone and they tuck in with the genteel manners of a French count. But the chicken is what draws the crowds and it is moist and tender and tastes like chicken as we know it, not the stringy birds with a gamey flavour that the Ugandans and Tanzanians are fond of. Pili pili (piri piri) sauce is served on the side but only the innocent or the brave dip in a spoon. Neil, who has in the past asked waiters to bring chilli sauce to liven up anything from scrambled eggs to French fries, realised very early on in Mozambique that pili pili here is something else again. It’s sold by the roadside, homemade in second-hand jars and empty Sprite bottles, all lined up in neat rows like scarlet piano keys on a vaudeville stage. The contents are so diabolical that we’ve been warned to never ever accept the offer of a sample tasting should we be so stupid as to stop and browse.

  One night there’s a wedding at Club Nautico. Music, noise and heat. It’s hot in the reception room and guests spill out and onto the beach. Men unbutton shirts, take off their shoes and run their feet through the sand. Bridesmaids in silver dresses and tortured hair wade in the ripples, stilettos dangling from a hand. One of them becomes tired and emotional and is escorted sobbing on the shoulders of a relative to a quieter place. A straight-backed father and his little son shed their formal white shirts and sit bare-chested on the beach, legs out, side by side. There’s a little girl in a pink frilly party dress just a couple of sizes too big, with shoes that flash lights when she walks, and a trio of boys catch handfuls of moths in the sand then throw them into the air, liberated. Later they sit in the dark and carefully pull the moths apart, fascinated by their smell. The dance floor is packed, mostly males, but a tall well-dressed man with one gold earring shuns the crowds and dances on the steps to his own beat. The music is pumping and a mother with her daughter tied on her back can’t walk without strutting to the beat. Down to the beach goes a neglected man who looks like an interloper, tipsy with a plate of food, and he half tumbles as he sits to eat. On the plate is the skeleton of a fish and he holds it up, dusts the sand off and sucks on the bones. Shortly after a member of the wedding party goes down to him and shouts; he gesticulates back to the restaurant and manages to move the diner not out of the building in disgrace but back to join the bride at her table. It’s hot, loud and chaotic, and I’d give my eyeteeth to be a part of it.

  The morning we leave, loaded up with Portuguese tarts and cheese and ham croissants for the trip, we pass a thin boy on hands and knees over the swill of a blocked drain, extracting a rotting banana with a stick then stuffing it into his mouth unpeeled. Then another youth, black rags and open sores, sits in the gutter and uses a piece of broken glass to dig something from the sole of his foot. We can see no hope for these poor young men, trying to exist in the lost and found of a struggling city.

  THE DOWNWARD SLOPE

  On the road south of Beira we give a lift to a young Austrian hitchhiker. He’s a music producer/documentary-maker currently living in Mozambique. We talk of many things to pass the time and the craziest thing he tells us about is the giant rats trained to detect landmines. Because the relationship relies on trust from both sides, the rats are treated like pets by their handlers and are fed and housed handsomely. For their part, they sniff out live mines and indicate their position then the handlers go in and detonate them before the rats blow themselves up.

  Five hundred kilometres south of Beira is Vilanculos, a busy port and beachside tourist town. It’s the stepping-off port for divers, anglers and honeymooners wishing to visit the islands of the Bazaruto Archipelago just off the coast, and it is bursting with restaurants, resorts and backpacker hostels. We find Casa Rex, another of those slightly eccentric guesthouses owned by an expat and run by friends or lovers. The room we are given looks out across a vivid blue sea towards the archipelago and below us a broad sweep of beach is patrolled every evening by a resident pack of curl-tailed dogs. The temperature is steamy and for most of the day we are content to sit in the breeze of our terrace or go on short excursions in the air-conditioning of the Troopy. Mornings and evenings we go down to the beach despite the fact that the sand has a suspicious texture and smells as your feet break the surface.

  Soon after we arrive a trio of Italian girls checks in. They all work in Malawi and surprisingly not with an NGO or volunteer group, but on salary in the private sector. They’re young and friendly and we get into the habit of chatting with them over breakfast coffee. At first just small talk, plans for the day, what we’ve seen and where we all are going. Then, as can happen on holidays when talking to complete strangers, more personal questions find their way into the conversation. The girl with the best English asks how long we’ve been married then apologises and says that they’ve been wondering and couldn’t decide whether we were long-time married or newlyweds. ‘You are the partners,’ she says, and it takes a minute for us to understand that she means to each other. So after all those miles we’ve travelled through all those years, this is what Africa has given us in just a few months: the understanding that marriage isn’t a competition but a partnership.

  Two weeks later Vilanculos is flattened by Cyclone Favio and footage on the news shows Casa Rex looking like Pompeii after the eruption.

  Further down the coast is Barra Beach and it would have to be one of the best beaches I’ve ever seen. Palm-tree lined, wide firm sand, no beach boys pestering us to buy crummy jewellery; there’s good surf and clean clear blue water. This shouldn’t warrant special mention but does, because in some of the coastal towns — Vilanculos for one — the plumbing infrastructure hasn’t been replaced after the neglect of civil war and, out of necessity, people use the shoreline as a bathroom.

  Driving out of Barra Beach we pass a middle-aged man standing on the side of the road. Straight-backed and in a shirt buttoned formally to the neck he holds a tin plate in one hand and a small bunch of bananas in the other. On the plate are two avocados, polished until they shine, and he holds his goods out for sale like he’s holding the collection plate in church. His pride is clear and I try to imagine what it would be like to have to stand on the street for hours trying to sell the food off my plate.

  Xai-Xai is another 500 kilometres further on, through dusty towns now looking more European than African, and on a road which improves the closer it gets to the national capital of Maputo. We book into a lodge for a couple of nights at Xai-Xai Beach, and it is here that we come across holidaying South Africans for the first time in a long time. They
don’t seem to venture much further north than the relatively safe countries of Namibia, Botswana and southern Mozambique, and many times when we’ve described our trip to a South African they’ve looked horrified and told us we are foolhardy and asking for trouble. I suggest to Neil that this reaction must be because they live with danger on a day-to-day basis and assume that it’s worse in more ‘uncivilised’ countries, but Neil has a simpler explanation: the general population can afford neither the cost nor the time to travel to Uganda or Kenya. If they are going to fly to a holiday destination they’re likely to choose Europe or Egypt or Madagascar, where they’ll be able to have a new experience and a different culture to explore. This time I’m backing my theory.

  Back at the Xai-Xai Beach Resort our neighbours unload iceboxes from their bakkies (utes) and talk to each other loudly with snapped grainy Afrikaans accents that I find hard to understand. The men are all big and noisy, wear flip-flops and short shorts and have unruly hair and straining beer-bellies. Their women wear tight Capri pants and glitter on their tops and sandals. They busy themselves wrapping potatoes in foil and making big spiralled coils with long links of boerewors, those thick, meaty sausages so loved by South Africans. In no time the group has taken over the pool and braai area and a ghetto-blaster is positioned in a strategic spot. The smell of frying boerewors and the pop of brandy bottles dances our way and the ghetto-blaster starts up. This music is a strange marriage of styles, half German oompah military and half country and western, but it’s good. They are having a marvellous time and invite the rest of us to join them.

  After Xai-Xai we drive straight down to Maputo and look for a hotel. We choose one on the beach, a little distance from the noise and bustle of the city centre but close enough to walk to restaurants and cafés.

  Another deciding factor is the free Internet connection it offers, as it’s time for Neil to start contacting all those to whom we’ve promised first option when it comes to selling the Troopy. Timing is now becoming an important issue. If the Troopy is sold, we’d like to hand it over as close to our departure date as possible. On the other hand if no one wants to buy it, we’ll have to ship it back home, which means finding a sail date that corresponds more or less to our leaving, and then pre-booking container space on the vessel. Negotiations for both eventualities will need to start soon and they’ll have to run in parallel until a cut-off date is reached. Neil sends off emails to five of the most promising interested parties and while we wait for responses to filter back we make forays to different parts of the city. Now that we’re conscious of our days with the Troopy being numbered we become clingy and drive everywhere on these daily excursions, even though most of the places we want to go can be reached on foot.

  The city seems to have been spared some of the destruction wreaked on the rest of the country during the independence battle and civil war. We find some beautiful old Portuguese buildings still standing and in good repair, although there are many that have succumbed to neglect. My favourites are the Natural History Museum, a perfectly proportioned confection of ornate white plaster, and a wonderful private home on a main avenida, its ornate façade heavily decorated and tiled. Neil’s favourite by far is the railway station. It’s still an imposing, well-maintained building, but the tracks terminating inside are rusty, and the numbers have long ago fallen off the arrivals and departures board.

  The goal each day is to find somewhere serving coffee as good as we got in a café in Kampala and a restaurant with food to match Beira’s. This becomes an uncontested challenge in a city now so influenced by South Africa that all we encounter are Wimpy outlets and cappuccinos made with boiling milk and burnt beans. The food in Mozambique generally has been pretty good. Apart from the chicken at Club Nautico and the grilled tiger prawns at Pique Nique, my favourite is sultana jam, which is the best thing to spread on toast and pastries. And at Barra Beach I had matapa for the first time, a southern Mozambique staple of peanuts, coconut and clams cooked up with pumpkin leaves. Sounds a ridiculous combination but the one I had, which substituted prawns for the clams, was out of this world despite looking like vomit.

  By our own measure we’ve zoomed through Mozambique — 2000 kilometres in ten days — but there really hasn’t been anything to tempt us to stay longer. Until the country sorts out its national parks it only offers beaches, islands, diving and fishing for tourists, and for us they aren’t enough to make us stay longer.

  Before we left Beira we thought about heading up the coast to Pemba and the Quirimbas Archipelago in the northernmost province, close to the Tanzanian border. We’d read that Ibo Island in particular would be worth a visit — an atmospheric, crumbling blend of Muslim and European in an unspoilt area of great natural beauty — and the island reef ecosystem in the surrounding Quilálea Marine Sanctuary is said to be the most significant in the Indian Ocean. However, the diversion would have involved a number of days driving through regions not geared to tourists, on bad roads, with few attractions along the way. Worth the effort? The truth is that our heart just wasn’t in it. It felt wrong to turn around and head northward after being in a big clockwise circuit for so long; it would have been going backwards at a time when we were on the homeward run.

  So now here we are at the southern tip of Mozambique, poised to enter South Africa again ten months after arriving in Cape Town last year. Then, we thought we were prepared for any outcome and had considered most possibilities on the practical side. And we had, as it turns out. Neil has been thrilled that the Troopy has performed so magnificently, and I’m impressed that we managed to pack the right clothes and the right equipment to meet all eventualities so far. What we couldn’t have anticipated, however, was on a more personal level. The thrill we both continue to get from visiting national parks and seeing their wildlife, enjoying the hospitality and friendship of strangers and, more than anything, the satisfaction of travelling together and sharing experiences, both good and bad. Even though I was confident that our nation of two would be united and strong, I couldn’t have anticipated that it would be this good, and feel this true. When I’ve said from time to time throughout the journey that I’ve never been happier than doing what I was doing at the time, I meant that I’ve never in my life been happier.

  Strangely enough, we weren’t concerned about our personal safety before we arrived, and now that we’re here and the months of travelling have rolled by we’ve become even less so. We’ve never felt wary of anyone, nor have we ever thought that we’ve wandered into a dangerous situation. We’ve taken few risks because few have arisen, and anything different, even confronting, we’ve chosen to see as an adventure.

  But I think that, beyond the animals and adventures, it is the heart of the people of Africa that has affected us the most. Their infectious optimism, their stoicism and grace in the face of hardship, and their understanding and acceptance of life’s calamities. Even though Neil has taught me to look beyond the pathos and to look for the rhyme and reason, I am still, every day, inspired.

  A BiRD SHOW AND A BACKSTREET BRAWL

  The South African border is just a short 100 kilometres from Maputo on a wide, multi-lane, tarred highway. It’s good to be back on this sort of road, and after months of being in the Third World I’m excited when we reach the town of Nelspruit. It’s modern and thriving, and we can stay in a stylish B&B and go shopping for familiar things in a well-stocked supermarket. As we first drive through the streets we can tell that here things are run efficiently, and rules and regulations are adhered to. The houses have been built by people with tastes similar to ours and there’s a comforting amount of rage on the road as people speed around in expensive new cars.

  The Troopy needs a service so we agree that while Neil takes it to Toyota I’ll go window-shopping in the centre of town. I’m very excited and head for the first department store I’ve seen in many months. In Women’s Wear there are new-season clothes and, even better, racks of sale items to browse through, and there’s a Homewares department with intere
sting things like slingshots and big plastic pestles. But something isn’t right and I’m not really enjoying myself. In fact, I’m losing interest fast and getting anxious, wondering if Neil has found the right address and whether he’s taken something to read while he waits. The time drags. We’re both early when we meet up at the appointed café for lunch and chat away as though we’ve not seen each other in months.

  It’s in Nelspruit that it starts to sink in that we really are on the home stretch; that the hardest but more rewarding part of our adventure is coming to an end. The dream run has run its course and we’ll soon be back to a world of responsibilities and obligations. As we’ve driven through country and village, and weeks have turned into months, we’ve begun to think of ourselves as free spirits, detached from everyday life. Now there’s a time frame to consider and business to attend to — the despatch of the Troopy — that involves a certain amount of attention and forward planning.

  Neil has received the first positive response from one of the people he emailed in Maputo. We never really doubted that we’d be able to sell the Troopy here when the time came — the possibility had turned into a given by the time we’d granted first option for the fifth time. We know that it’s the sensible thing to do; we’ll have no use for the Troopy back home and all indications are that we’ll get a better price for it here, plus we won’t have to fork out for the return shipping expenses. But now that the prospect is becoming a reality, not just something on the horizon to be dealt with later, the sense of imminent loss first experienced in Maputo sits permanently behind us on the backseat.