by James Best
We waited in the tray, exposed to the sun, for about fifteen minutes, watched by a group of men lounging on some stairs.
One of them called out to Juliette, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Juliette.’
‘How old are you?’ another asked.
‘Too young,’ she replied, with a dash of Tabasco.
Finally, a man limped over on deformed legs, leaning on a forearm crutch. ‘You will be waiting here until four p.m.,’ he stated bluntly.
I jumped to my feet. ‘What!’ I yelled.
The man, with some of the others nodding in agreement, said that we had only paid for a group vehicle, which would take six hours to fill up.
‘I paid twelve thousand kwacha! That should be enough!’
The crippled man replied for them. ‘You have paid too much,’ he said, with a sweep of his arm. ‘It will cost fifteen thousand kwacha for a private vehicle if you want to leave straightaway.’
I lost my shit. Standing over them in the tray of the ute, I shouted, ‘You think because I’m white I’m made of money? I paid twelve thousand kwacha to go to the border, and I should be taken to the border—now!’ I pointed at the ground. ‘This is totally fucked!’
Sam was amused. ‘Dad is getting angry at the Africans!’
The crippled man and a friend conversed in Chichewa, and then the man turned to us. ‘Follow me.’
He walked me back through the crowded market, found the minibus driver, and had a long conversation with him. The minibus driver extracted three thousand kwacha from his pocket and handed it to the crippled man. As we walked back, the latter explained. ‘He paid six thousand out of his twelve to us to pay for a group vehicle. A private vehicle costs nine thousand more. He has given another three, so if you pay six thousand more you can go straightaway.’
‘That’s a lot of money,’ I replied, partially mollified.
‘It’s a bad road,’ he shrugged.
‘How far is it?’
‘Four to five kilometres.’
I couldn’t believe it. We could have walked that distance, if not for our heavy packs and the heat. ‘But that shouldn’t take long!’
‘That is the price.’
‘Okay, okay.’
I paid the money. Whatever, let’s just get there, I thought. I soon realised that the men I’d been speaking to were not keeping the money, that the utility in fact belonged to another man. They’d just been trying to help out and I’d shouted and sworn at them. Oops. I thanked them as we pulled away, embarrassed about my rudeness.
The utility headed off. After we had travelled what seemed to be a lot longer than five kilometres, Juliette figured it out. ‘I think he might have said forty-five kilometres, not four to five.’
That explained the high cost. Maybe I hadn’t been ripped off, well at least not by that much. We bounced along the dirt road, way too fast considering we were sitting loose in the tray. I squeezed my eyes shut as the driver dodged goats and children on the road.
Finally, we reached the Mozambique border. Dust whistled around a long concrete building that guarded the boom gate. Children from the nearby ragtag village stared at us, and hoary old men played bao, a game where pebbles are strategically moved around gouged-out positions on a wooden board—a kind of African backgammon—under the shade of the solitary nearby tree. With packs on shoulders, we trooped up the stairs of the building and into the office, where the Malawian border guards informed us, to our dismay, that the Mozambique side of the border would not issue visas at this post. We would need to a head north a hundred kilometres to the next post. Argh!
This meant we had to first backtrack forty-five kilometres to the main road, but by the time we realised this the car that had brought us to the crossing had long since departed.
A cross-eyed man offered to drive us back in the only car in the village. Some motorbikes were available, but I wasn’t keen on the idea of Sam on the back of a motorbike without a helmet for forty-five kilometres. The border guard whispered to us that the cross-eyed man’s car was very dodgy. Our options were narrowing. The guard suggested that we could wait for a car to come through the border and hitch a ride.
I looked despondently at the quiet dusty road disappearing into Moz, while Jules hung the half-dry laundry from her backpack onto the boom gate in the penetrating sun.
Just as I was about to say yes to the cross-eyed man and his dodgy car, an ambulance appeared at a small hospital station within sight of the border post. The guard beckoned the ambulance driver over and spoke to him. ‘He will take you back to the main road,’ he said. What a relief.
The ambulance driver, Prince, was a personable Chelsea fan, with a sturdy build and ready smile. ‘The girl and boy can come in the front with me, but we have to pick up some patients and take them back to Liwonde, so are you okay to be in the back with them?’
‘Sure, I’m a doctor,’ I said.
Prince’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, you are a doctor!’
Prince and a worker from the hospital laid some sheets on the bottom of the ambulance tray and then gently lifted a very unwell and wasted man straight from the doorway of the clinic onto the sheets. He was barely conscious and trembling violently. HIV? Cancer?
Malawian ambulances have a bench in the back down one side and that’s it. There was no equipment whatsoever, not even a bandaid. The man’s head lay on the floor next to my feet. He grabbed my ankle like a security blanket.
Four patients capable of walking climbed in and sat next to me on the bench. Jules and Sam anxiously stared over their shoulders at the collection of humanity surrounding me.
Prince bopped away to some tunes from The Black Missionaries, the hottest act on the Malawi music scene. We chatted about English football, my work and medicine in Australia and Malawi.
‘Do people have to pay for ambulances here every time?’ I enquired.
‘Yes,’ Prince nodded.
‘There is no government assistance if people are in dire need?’
Prince’s smile disappeared for the first time. ‘None. It is appalling.’
Deposited back on the main road, we waited at a bus stop in a town clearly unused to seeing wazungu. Everybody stared at us. Sam, sitting cross-legged on the ground playing his DS, had a crowd of forty surrounding him, just watching. He ignored them all.
A bus soon arrived and we headed to the second Mozambique border crossing, further north at Chiponde. This border crossing was on the main road into northern Mozambique and much busier than the first. On the Malawi side, two problems emerged. First, unbeknownst to me, Sam and I had been issued with only fourteen-day visas for Malawi instead of the standard twenty-eight, so we had been staying in Malawi with expired visas. We were unwitting lawbreakers. Second, we were told that getting a visa on the Mozambique side would still be very problematic. The first problem was fixed with a stern look and a fifty US dollar exit visa. The second was not so easy.
‘Just be flexible. Remember, this is Africa,’ the guard cautioned me, as he handed back my passport.
I took this to mean that we would need to pay much more than the thirty US dollars the visa was officially meant to cost. On the back of motorbike taxis, we zoomed across the sandy road at sunset to the Mozambique immigration office seven kilometres away.
Sure enough, there was trouble, but it was worse than I thought.
It seemed it wasn’t a matter of money. The machine they needed to issue the visas was broken, so they literally couldn’t issue any. They seemed genuinely upset for us, especially once they found out about Sam’s issues. It appeared we’d have to travel all the way back to Lilongwe to get the visas. Our plans for Juliette’s remaining week with us were unravelling, and the overall itinerary for Sam and me was being turned on its head.
After an hour of stuffing around, of phone calls back and forth and intense discussions between the dozen or so staff in the office, they finally told us that if we came back the next morning at eight they could issue the visas then. Let
heaven and angels sing!
We stole away, back on the bikes, across the seven kilometres of no-man’s-land, into Malawi. The motorbike drivers didn’t stop at the Malawi side of the border but instead took us straight into town, passing the closed border post. It occurred to me that we were back in Malawi without visas, but what could we do?
Take us to the nearest nice hotel! We arrived in a town shrouded in darkness—yet another blackout. Our friendly host, however, managed to organise some chicken and chips, soft drinks and bottled water.
We picked at our chicken on the floor of the room in the flickering light of a single candle stuck to the floor tiles with melted wax, and reflected on the day as we waited for the blackout to end. Jules sat cross-legged on the tiles, her elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. ‘At least we don’t have a tapeworm infestation, Uncle James.’
True. I nodded.
‘Also, if Benison and Mum knew we’d been riding on motorbikes without helmets, on a dirt road, in the dark, in Africa, they would completely freak out.’
True! I laughed.
Sam jumped into the conversation. ‘Mum would completely freak out!’
When the lights came on, we settled in for the night. A new problem was looming, which concerned me even more than our visa problems. Jules had an ache in her wisdom tooth that had worsened over the last couple of days, and now she was having trouble opening her mouth fully. She had struggled to eat her chicken.
She had an enlarged lymph node, but at least her gum line didn’t look swollen. We did not want to try to find an emergency dentist in Mozambique, of all places. Fortunately, I had a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics in my medical kit and started her on them. Hopefully they would do the trick. I told her not to worry, that it would be fine, but secretly I was very concerned.
The next morning, half an hour before dawn, I crawled out from under the mosquito net and quickly dressed. We had to regroup. The plan was to withdraw some kwacha from the bank to change into US dollars, which we would probably need to bribe the Mozambique border guards. To do this I had to leave at six a.m. to get to the nearest ATM at Mangochi, a forty-five-minute drive away, and return in time to try to cross the border again at eight a.m.
The motorcycle rider I had booked didn’t turn up. After three-quarters of an hour of frustrating messing around, I finally managed to organise a cab to Mangochi and back for probably way too much money, but time was of the essence.
We travelled up and over a mountain range in the breaking dawn. White mist in the mountain shadows mixed with blue wood smoke leaching from chimneys. Mangoes, bananas and baobabs. Villagers stirring and streets filling.
I was already nervous that we had stayed overnight in Malawi without a visa, and now I was passing directly through African roadside police checks. The police didn’t usually check wazungu, but I still wondered what a Malawi prison would be like. I had heard stories of human faeces mixed into the nzhima, the cornmeal mash that was a staple of these parts. I practiced some mindfulness exercises.
At the ATM, I nervously entered the card and prayed to hear the whir of notes being dispensed. If this didn’t work, we really were in the poo. I would have to travel on to yet another town, yet another ATM, until I could retrieve cash.
But it worked! Back in the cab, humming The Pretenders song ‘Brass in Pocket’, back to Chiponde, back to the room. Jules’ tooth was already feeling better thanks to the antibiotics. This time the three motorbikes booked to take us across no-man’s-land did turn up. We didn’t stop at the Malawi immigration office. Straight on to the Mozambique border post.
They knew who we were when we arrived, but a burly officer at the army post at the front of the crossing still wanted to search our bags again. He ordered the three of us into his hut with our bags, but Sam just ran off and sat in the shade of the building.
The guard watched Sam run off. ‘He is very rude.’
It was not a sentiment you want to hear an African soldier slinging a machine gun express. ‘He has special needs,’ I explained, nervously.
‘Oh, I see. He is your son, yes?’
I nodded.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said the guard.
‘That’s okay,’ I replied, ‘he’s a good boy.’
The officer eventually let us proceed to the immigration offices, where Jules and Sam sat on the cool tiled floor while I stood waiting at the counter. Nothing was happening in a rush, that was for sure. A junior official took umbrage at us sitting on the floor and ordered us out onto the verandah.
Waiting, waiting. We three waited, sitting on the concrete steps. The motorbike riders waited, lolling near the bikes which again had our packs strapped onto them. The enervated officials waited, sprawled on a circle of chairs at the other end of the verandah. Jules and I smiled as sweetly as possible at everyone. Eventually the chief called me into his office.
After a few concerned looks at some pieces of paper, he raised his head, took his peaked cap off his balding sweaty head and pointed a fat finger towards me. ‘Why did you not get your visa at the embassy?’
I replied politely. ‘I had been told you could get it at the border, and I also read this on the Mozambique government website.’
He glared at me, an eyebrow raised sceptically. ‘Who told you this?’
‘Some friends who had got their visa at the border, and I rang the embassy in Lilongwe the other day and they also said this to me.’ The former was true, the latter was not, but I thought it would improve my chances.
He ran his hand through what remained of his hair, shaking his head. He pointed the fat finger again. ‘This will cost you one hundred dollars, for each person!’
‘Okay. I have this,’ I said, nodding eagerly.
It was an exorbitant rip-off, but by this stage I was prepared to wear it.
‘I have to check with my boss.’ He shook his head again. ‘This is not easy, you know.’
He made a call on his mobile, speaking in Portuguese. He mentioned the hundred dollars three times, and seemed worried. Eventually he hung up. ‘The machine is broken. It is not possible. You have to go back.’
Bugger. They were not just being mulish. The broken machine, whatever it was, meant the visas really could not be issued. The only person who seemed pleased about this was Sam, who realised there was a country struck off the list, and it started with an M.
Jules and I discussed our options. If we went all the way back to Lilongwe, or south to Blantyre, to get a visa from an embassy, it would basically mean the whole of the next week Jules was with us would be spent on a bus, and it would still be difficult to get to Pemba, the town in northern Mozambique Jules was booked to fly out from, in time anyway. This was not what any of us wanted. The best course of action would be to change Jules’ flight so she left from Lilongwe, abandon Mozambique altogether, and spend another week in Malawi. It was a softer option, but one I immediately felt more comfortable with. I needed to focus more on Sam, and less on travel. At least we had saved three hundred US dollars on visa fees and bribes.
We came back through Malawi customs.
The same officer met me at the window. ‘Where did you spend last night?’
I sheepishly admitted we had stayed in Malawi without a visa. The officer gave me a wry smile and issued Sam and me each with a new one-month visa.
Then followed three long, bumping, bouncing trips back to Lilongwe on the roads of Malawi. The first was in an open truck with thirty people crammed in the back, an elderly woman using Sam’s feet as an impromptu chair. Haggard and brutalised by bitumen, we spilled into Mabuya Camp at eight p.m. We had been travelling for twenty-eight hours of the last forty-eight, by minibus, truck, utility tray, motorbike, taxi and ambulance. Three border-crossing attempts in two days had failed. We were exhausted, hungry, dehydrated and frazzled. We ate pizza then collapsed into bed. It was only then I realised that of the three of us, Sam had handled all the hassle, the delays and the chaos best of all.
CHAPTER 25
In the morning, I read on the front page of The Nation, the Malawian newspaper, that Mozambican refugees were pouring across the border as the rebel group, Renamo, threatened to take over any northern district governments not appointed by the rebels themselves. There were threats of violence breaking out. It was just as well it had proven impossible for us to get there. Maybe that had been the real reason we couldn’t bribe our way through, after all.
Renamo had been a right-wing rebel movement, backed and funded by apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, from 1977, two years after Mozambican independence, until a ceasefire in 1992. Of Mozambique’s mid-1980s population of fourteen million people, one million had died during the years of civil war, and five million were now internally displaced deslocados, typically living in abject poverty on the outskirts of cities and towns. Countless people had also been killed or maimed by over 170,000 landmines during the period.
I asked a co-owner of Mabuya Camp why Renamo were still fighting. ‘Shouldn’t they be defunct?’
‘They’re just a bunch of bandits now. They grew up in the war fighting, and it’s all they know. They have no other skills; nothing else to do. There is no political ideology now, if there ever was. It’s just about getting some money.’ Moz was yet another African country still reeling from the effects of war.
While it was serendipitous that we had avoided a conflict, I was still disappointed we were not going to visit Mozambique Island, or travel on the Nampula railway that I’d been reading about for over a year. However, bearing in mind the trip’s purpose, tossing the whole program up in the air was certainly in keeping with the principles of unpredictability.
So, what to do next? The next day at Mabuya Camp there was another unexpected turn: we ran into Mike and Lenneke, our Dutch friends from Zomba, who nearly fell off their chairs when they saw us walking near the pool.
‘What are you guys doing here?’ Mike said. ‘You should be in Mozambique.’
‘They didn’t let us in,’ Jules replied. ‘We knocked and knocked but nobody opened the door.’ We related our tale of woe.
