Home sweet home

            Hanging out with another volunteer after a week of loud classrooms full of kids who still copy every single homework assignment from their neighbor (love them, I do, but really?  You want to tell me 10 kids said 50/5 = 22.4 independently?  Don’t think so.)  Eleven out of seventeen Cabo Delgado volunteers were able to make it to the get together and it was amazing!  I love my Cabo family.  We spent two days just hanging out in Eryn and Marin’s beautiful house on top of the mountain, dancing with the neighbor kids, browsing their market, and most importantly, eating really good food (Chili with cornbread and beer-battered fish dinners then waking up to banana pancakes, what? So good.)

             Unfortunately, these get-togethers are sandwiched between at least two days of travel.  Let me tell you, travelling in this country can really really stink.  The length of this blog post generally reflects how much of a pain it can be… Here are your general options for transportation:

1) Chapa – Chapas are 12 person vans (like I haven’t had enough of those) that shuttle people to and from local cities at about 1 metical per km.  Here’s the thing, the vans are designed to hold 12 people, but they actually carry between 16-20 people, not including goats and chickens.  Luckily, I haven’t yet ridden in a chapa with passengers that aren’t human.  If you are lucky enough to be seated in the front passenger seat, you might get a seat belt – this is the best seat in the house.  A close second might be the middle front seat.  While the “worst” seat in the chapa ultimately depends on who your neighbors are, the title usually goes to the first rows of the van,  not just the first row, but the occasional makeshift backwards facing “front” row that has to interlock knees with the actual front row.  So now not only does our two-seater front seat three people, but we have 4 rows in the back of the van where there should only be three.  To top it off, the benches are designed to hold three people comfortably and safely… the chapa is not considered full until each bench holds 4 people…  While they drive too slow, too fast, are too crowded, run unpredictable schedules, and break down frequently, chapas are the primary mode of transportation for PCVs.

There are also open-back chapas.  These are small flat-bed trucks.  If they load 16-20 people in a van with 12 real seats, you can imagine what they do with the back of a truck.  But if it’s a nice day, this might still beat sweating it out in a clown car with people who refuse to open a window.

2) Boleia – This is the method of transportation preferred by PCVs… basically, it’s hitchhiking.  You stand on the side of the road, hold out your hand, and hope that someone willing to take you where you’re going drives by in a car that looks sound enough to get there… those two things don’t always come together, if either come at all.  You could stand on the side of the road for hours without seeing a single car, let alone be lucky enough that the one car will stop to pick you up.  Boleia vehicles include the typical sedans, vans, etc, semi-trucks, and the jackpot, an ex-pat’s super nice imported car with air conditioning. If you’re really lucky, the boleia might even be free.  If you’re not, the driver will probably ask you to pay at least if not more than what a chapa to the same destination would cost.  While a free ride is great, catching boleias is not something I would attempt when travelling alone so this is only an option when travelling with Will or Mireya.

3) Machimbombo – Buses are sometimes available for long trips between the major cities.  These can be hard to catch because usually only one bus runs once a day, that one bus usually leaves the big city very early in the morning, and you should try to buy a ticket (in person at the station, of course) the night before if you want to plant it on a seat and not a water jug in the aisle for your 8 hour trip to wherever.  This means that we have to find a way to the first big city (chapa or boleia) by the afternoon to buy the ticket, find somewhere to stay for the night, and probably pay for a taxi to take you to the bus stop if it’s still dark outside when the bus is scheduled to leave.

            Travel in Mozambique depends on traffic that runs between major towns.  For example, our travel this past weekend relied on traffic going between Montepuez and Pemba, traffic coming north from Nampula, and traffic going north towards Tanzania.

Anyways, here is a map of towns pertinent to this past weekend’s travel:

            Montepuez is a big enough town that we can eliminate a preliminary day of travel.  Rafael and Vikram, however, have to come through Montepuez before they can get transportation anywhere else so they had to start traveling Thursday.  Thursday afternoon, Rafael and Vikram caught a boleia with the Balama/Montepuez ambulance (that’s right, an ambulance!) and spent the night in Montepuez.  Friday morning, we split into two groups to travel to Macomia.  Vikram, Will, and I were to leave Montepuez first followed by Rafael and Mireya followed about an hour later.  We had to split up because travelling in groups larger than 2 or 3 can be extremely difficult.

            Anyways, Vikram, Will, and I walked to the edge of town at about 9am and stood at the side of the road for about 45 minutes before flagging down a mini-van going to Pemba.  There are tons of chapas going between Montepuez and Pemba that we could have taken but they would have charged us almost the full price even if we were getting out 50km short of Pemba.  Generally, if the boleia driver asks us to pay, we try to only pay the chapa rate of 1 met/km, but sometimes they want more.  The driver wanted 150 mets from each of us to go to Silva Macua which is only 120km from Montepuez.  Eventually we talked to him down to 130 mets a person plus a soda on the road so we pile into the van.  The driver was a professor at the university in Pemba.  We didn’t get much more than that in way of conversation as shortly after he started blasting the radio.  In just under an hour and a half, we were in Silva Macua. 

            Now, there are chapas that run between Macomia and Pemba that we might have been able to catch as they passed through Silva Macua, but they are few and far between so we tried for a boleia to get us the last 100km to Macomia.  Will, Vikram, and I were lucky enough to flag down a very nice truck owned by a very successful Mozambican business man.  Boleia Jackpot!  Air conditioning and good suspension!  Anyways, he was on his way to a town north of Macomia and was able to give us a free ride.  Along the way, we learned that his parents (Indian and Chinese) had moved to Mozambique before the Portuguese had left.  He grew up and went to school here before going to Senegal to be trained as a teacher.  After the war and after all of the Portuguese had left, trained teachers were extremely scarce.  Being one of the few left in Mozambique, this made our driver qualified to be the director of a school.  Which school?  The school in Mariri where Liz and Jamie now teach!  If he were still their director, their lives might be a little more pleasant…  Anyways, he taught, he directed a school for a while, but then he got into mining and land development.  Turns out he owns three ruby mines outside of Montepuez and several housing/hotel developments all over Mozambique.  Explains the custom imported truck, doesn’t it?  It also turns out he had given Jess, the previous health volunteer in Montepuez, several rides to Macomia and he was already familiar with Peace Corps.  He got us to Macomia in a little over an hour.

            If you’re keeping track, the trip to Macomia was fairly efficient and took about only 5 hours to go the ~220km from Montepuez to Macomia.

            The trip home was not so efficient…

            Eryn and Marin live near the secondary school several km up a mountain from the main part of town but we had arranged the day before for a Pemba/Macomia chapa to pick up the six of us that were leaving that day between 5 and 5:30am and take us to Silva Macua.  So, we all walked to the side of the road at 5am and waited.  6am rolls around and still no chapa so we decide to start walking towards town.  Finally the chapa passes us but one, there is not enough room for all of us and two, the driver decides that he does not want to take so many people only part way to his normal destination.  Derek, who was planning to go to Pemba to pick something up, was the only one able to get on the chapa.  The rest of us kept walking down the mountain.  Lucky for us, a few minutes later a large dump truck comes by and offers to take us the rest of the way into town.  We all cram into the cab and our potentially one hour walk turned into a 10 minute drive.

            Now we have 5 in our group.  The five of us walk up towards the gas station at the edge of town hoping for a good boleia or at least an open back chapa.  At about 7am, we climbed into the back of a very crowded open back chapa.  Normally we wouldn’t have taken one that was already so full but the driver assured us that he would be dropping a lot of the passengers off along the way.  I ended up sitting on a coconut for about a half hour until enough people were dropped off so that I could sit on the bed floor.  It was a great ab work out to try to stay upright partially round object in the back of a vehicle with poor suspension going down a pitted country road at about 40 mph.  We hit our next obstacle at a police check point.  The police really probably only pulled the chapa over to look at our passports but it turns out the chapa driver didn’t have the right kind of license to be carrying people in the back of the truck.  The police, really only wanting to be paid off, made up some cockamamie excuse about foreigners in the back of an ill-licensed chapa to squeeze the driver for 100 mets. 

           

            About ¾ of the way between Macomia and Silva Macua, the driver pulls over and asks us to pay (a good tactic.  Trap your passengers in the middle of nowhere so they have to pay you.)  He wanted 130 mets a piece for the 100km trip!  We argued with him and he said it was because he had to pay off the police.  We then convinced him that wasn’t our problem and asked why he was really over charging us.  I kid you not; his response (directly translated) was “You are white.  You are rich.”  Our objection could not have been more synchronized if we had been using an atomic clock.  Luckily, as education volunteers, we have a trump card.  Not only are we volunteers, which takes a minute to explain to people that we aren’t paid a salary, but we are teachers.   Teachers are very well respected in Mozambique (take note America, some things are done right in this country) so with that on the table, we finally convinced him not to rip us off and we only paid 100 mets each.

            Remember the boleia to Macomia in a private car that took a little over an hour?  It took over two hours to get back to Silva Macua from Macomia.  So if you’re keeping track, we are at about 4.5 hours of travel and we’ve only made it about 100km…

            Only having to go an additional 10km to Metoro, Eric splits off from the group to travel home solo.  The rest of us were hoping for something going all the way to Montepuez.  Almost as soon as we arrived in Silva Macua, a mostly empty chapa headed from Pemba to Montepuez rolls in.  How lucky is that?  Aren’t short layovers great?  WRONG.  We climbed into the chapa and proceeded to sit there in Silva Macua for over an hour while the driver waited for more passengers to show up.  Fed up, Mireya and I get out of the chapa and look for a way to get to Metoro.  Metoro is where most of the traffic coming north from Nampula passes through so we thought we would have an easier time picking up something to Montepuez from there.  Well, at least that’s what we were hoping for…

            As we got out of the stationary chapa, we saw a big open back chapa getting ready to roll out of town.  It was pretty full but we didn’t care.  We flagged it down while running (much to the amusement of everyone around) and climbed aboard, perching on top of sacks of charcoal (as if I wasn’t dirty enough from travelling).  This open back chapa experience was a little scarier than the first.  I was now sitting right inside the tailgate, almost level with it, with no real place to put my feet and since it was a main road with better paving, the chapa was probably going around or above 50 mph. Good thing Metoro was only 10km down the road.

            By the time we reach Metoro, it is almost 10:30am.  Mireya and I hop off the chapa which was now heading south for Nampula and walk to the edge of town hoping for a boleia.  We were also checking chapas coming through from Pemba but most were already full (which doesn’t mean they still didn’t try to pick us up).  Another open-back chapa rolls through on its way somewhere else and off jumps Rafael.  Apparently Will, Vikram, and Rafael also gave up on the original chapa from Silva Macua and following our lead, even most of the Mozambicans in that chapa also got out.  Rafael decided to follow us while Will and Vikram found another chapa to Montepuez… one that still hadn’t even left Silva Macua by the time that Rafael arrived in Metoro to find us.  So we waited on the side of the road.  And we waited.  And we talked (against our wishes) to a drunk guy who wasn’t wearing any pants.  And we waited some more.  We hadn’t found a single car or chapa to take us to Montepuez. When a chapa with a little space finally rolls through, who do we see but Will and Vikram!  There still wasn’t enough room for all three of us so we walked over to another chapa (almost completely empty) that had just pulled in behind.

            I’ll be damned if it wasn’t that first chapa that we got out of in Silva Macua.  Life sure does have a sense of humor; it’s just hard to laugh at it when you’ve been trying to go 230 km for over 6 hours.  Admitting defeat, Rafael, Mireya, and I climbed in and said hi to the one woman in the back who had stuck with the chapa from Silva Macua.  The driver then spent the next half an hour arguing with a potential passenger about how much to charge for loading several heavy sacks of charcoal onto the roof.  During this time, we see three nice looking private cars drive by.  You can imagine us grumbling as the potential boleias speed past us.  Eventually at about 11:30, the chapa is full and weighed down enough to drive through a tornado.

            It was 1:30pm when we finally pulled into the bus stop in Montepuez.  If you start our trip at 5 am when we first started trying to leave Macomia, then we had been travelling for 8.5 hours.  It took 8.5 hours to go 230km aka less than 150 miles. 

            Mireya has a theory that travelling is really good for raising your moral for two reasons:  One, it’s great to hang out with your volunteer friends and two, traveling is such a pain that you couldn’t be happier to come home to your town, your house, your own bed.