Arrival in Maputo was an experience that we hadn't been through in a while – it had been weeks since we'd arrived in a new big city, and Maputo was in a new country. We had no idea where we were, we didn't speak any of the local languages (as, after months in English-speaking countries, we were suddenly plunged into Portuguese-speaking Mozambique) and, having played the parts of head clowns in the visa circus of that afternoon, we arrived in Maputo quite a while after dark. Fortunately, the minibus driver was a Swazi who had taken pity on us being put through the visa treadmill and gave us a lift to Base Backpackers, the crashpad we had lined up. As we offered him a small tip for his troubles, he almost fell over himself in gratitude (a nice surprise as I was worried that he wouldn't consider it enough – although we were almost cleaned out of cash by that point) and we disappeared into our room. A nice Indian dinner over the road eventually followed (after a painstakingly long decision-making process finally solved when I just walked in) and we crashed for the night.
Our first full day in Maputo was just spent wandering around. I wouldn't exactly say that it's a beautiful city but it's certainly charming and I liked it pretty quickly – it's full of life (at least during the day) and has a strange mixture of architectures too – narrow Portuguese-colonial streets and main roads of large concrete buildings which looked like they took their inspiration more from the earlier independence days when Mozambique liked to think of itself as Marxist. With Soviet economic and military assistance probably came Soviet architects and the results are plain for all to see. There's something about the mixture of these large concrete buildings and the African adaptation of them – similar buildings we saw in Russia were still grey and looked miserable but in Maputo they were colourful – clothes and textiles flapping from the balconies to dry, colourful shops and cafes on the bottom floors and of course the noise and activity that you'd find in a city the size of Maputo. And, just as the city still has its buildings from those days, it has also kept the street names – our wanderings took us down streets and avenues named Vladimir Lenine, Ho Chi Min, Patrice Lumumba, Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Robert Mugabe, Ahmed Sekou Toure and so on. Great African or world visionaries who didn't cozy up to communism and its ideals were strangely absent...
The "Marginal"
Old meets new - Maputo fort which stands in the middle of a 70s apartment-block jungle
The day (if not much energy) was spent wandering lazily, dropping into cafes for a bite here and a Coke there, sitting on the wall along the seafront and eventually finding a small bar for a 2M, Mozambique's best (in our opinion) beer, and a chat with the owner, a Portuguese guy who came here a few decades ago, never left, and is now the proud owner of a Maputo bar and a Mozambican passport.
Our second day came with a mission thanks to Jay, a guy who'd lived in Mozambique for a while who we'd met in Johannesburg. He'd told us about a fish market where you could buy a fish or 2 and take it to a restaurant out the back where it would be cooked and served up for you any way you wanted. We hopped merrily into a minibus heading north along the coast (or rather crawled into it – we're back in Africa now where the concept of a vehicle being « full » is rather a hazy one) and, with bodies twisted into shapes they had probably never been twisted into, rattled our way up to the district known as Costa do Sol, where M assured us that we had to change minibuses and go further. Would Lonely Planet be reliable this time? Would M's faith in it ever be shaken? When the minibus emptied out enough for us to breathe (and we even got a seat eventually) I asked the guy for the Mercado do Peixe. He smiled uneasily and pointed back to where we'd come. Ah well. We walked down the beach for a few kilometres, stopped for refreshments under the trees, and carried on our way. A woman passing by obviously saw the looks of slight confusion and asked us where we were going and told us that it was quite far back into town. An African perception of « quite far » is difficult to judge. Sometimes it means exactly that, and sometimes it means that it's about 300 metres. Whether this is a reflection of the speaker's reluctance to walk or the speaker's assumption that whites are lazy and use their cars to go everywhere (which, having seen how the majority of whites in Africa are, is quite understandable) is not obvious to me. When we asked for precisions, though, she told us that it was about 4 or 5 kilometres and so she ushered us into another minibus, telling us where to get off.
Some of the fish, which began a long trip from the ocean, via the Mercado do Peixe...
The lucky ones ended up in our plate.
Here, we satisfied one of Inna's wishes for the trip by buying a coconut and a straw for 10 meticais, and walked off towards the famous fish market, easily identified by the overpowering smell of fish and large amounts of people selling fish. We settled of 3 kilos of red snapper and kingfish, which was expertly fried up and served with rice, salad and coconut. Not bad. As we left, we spied the « Restaurante Caipirinha » where we savoured one of the bar's eponymous drinks, and the heavens opened in quite a spectacular way. This meant that we ran to the neighbouring pizza restaurant for more sitting around.
We got dropped off in town a reasonable walk from where we were staying and wandered through the darkness back there, stopping at a small shop for a bottle of water where we were served by an old Portuguese guy. « How are you? » he asked. « Fine, fine, just enjoying a night time walk... » Inna replied. We were then treated to a small warning of how it was dangerous to walk around in Maputo at night, as I tried to think how many times we'd been given this warning about various towns. Maybe we just look tough or maybe we've just been extremely lucky (or maybe these warnings are overly precautious) but we've walked at night in many larger towns and never felt a threatening situation or come across any sort of trouble. On this evening, we were just asked for money by a guy who claimed that he'd just come out of jail and needed bus money to get up to his home in Xai-xai, but when we told him that we had nothing, he just disappeared off into the night. We did the same, facing an early morning in the Junta bus station.
Maputo, 4.30am. We're back in Africa, and that means painful wake-up times
