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.
