June 4, 2011, Maputo, Mozambique
It hit has soon as we crossed the border, after the quick and efficient South African immigration (yes, you may leave, we will make this quite easy) and their bizarro-negatives, the Mozambique National Immigration Department (I made that up but it sounds kinda official). I was fortunate enough to skip the line to get into Moz, as I was one of 10, 328 people there in line who had to pay for his visa, courtesy of coming from that great pariah America which just loves to screw all other countries on visa fees, which, in turn, love to turn around and screw ME, but what a line it was....a true Africa border crossing. Pushing, shoving, armed guards barking, ladies with babies strapped to their backs, the whole nine yards. It felt great to be back in the developing world. South Africa, for all its dirt, was way too clean, neat and orderly for me. I breathed in a deep lungfull of the Mozambique air and smiles over the sea of humanity, as the hapless immigration official tried to figure out how to work his fingerprint machine by asking me over and over to rub my thumbs on my forehead. I was fortunate enough to not have exact change, and be faced with a country demanding exact change in their visa payments; all this at 6:30 in the morning, after a night filled in a cramped bus seat with perhaps 2 hours of sleep. Amazingly I survived, was not abandoned at the border post by the bus with all my things packed away into its storage, and was peering out the windows at the marvelously different scope of humanity that soon greeted.
It feels great to be back in Africa. The roughness. The crudeness. The smiles. The Warmth. The cheap street food. The pulsing sidewalks. The arbitrary police. The amazing central market. TIA. This is Africa. This is everything that I so missed in South Africa, a more “developed” nation, but a place without a tenth of the soul of one city block of Maputo, its crumbling buildings, statues, and communist revolution named streets (how about a Lenin Ave and a Mao Street for you right wingers??? Love it.
The slow, tropical, languid pace, the brilliant colors of the setting sun over the harbor, the Portuguese bakeries and their amazing bread loaves. I've found what I came for. And so happy I finally made it to Mozambique.
