Sitting on the side of the main road somewhere between Pemba on the coast and Nampula further inland to the west, it had already been a long day. We had gotten up at something like 4a.m. that morning on the advice that we’d better be on the beach at sunrise in order to be assured of a spot on the first out-going dhow to get back to the mainland from eerie, lazy, lost, wonderful Ilha do Ibo.
After nearly two years in Uganda neither of us had quite wised up to the fact that no one ever needs to be in a hurry in Africa. This notion is always in the back of our heads of course, and we typically even talk about not wasting our time by showing up ‘on-time’, but American stubbornness and ignorance always prevail and we dutifully show up punctually and find ourselves feeling like suckers waiting (for hours, usually) on everyone else. It certainly didn’t ease our minds that Ibo was literally off the coast of the middle of nowhere and we had a good stretch of land between us and our next destination, Nampula, an otherwise un-noteworthy transportation hub and largest town in northern Mozambique. A few days before, from Pemba, we nearly missed a 4a.m. mini-bus that we had arranged the previous night to swing by our guesthouse because it actually showed up early. It just goes to show that whenever you think you’ve got this placed figured out, something sensible happens.
So, to briefly recap our already-overlong day that eventually found ourselves semi-stranded on the side of the road, our morning consisted of the following:
1. Waking up at 4am on Ilha do Ibo after having spent the previous evening sitting in a turret of a the 18th century Fort of São João Batista sipping on cold Castle Milk Stouts, watching the sunset over the Indian Ocean and Mozambique coastline;
2. Sitting on the beach waiting for 2 hours for our dhow to load up and leave;
3. Riding for an hour and a half on an overcrowded dhow trying to not get smacked in the face by the flying fish hurtling past us and willing our way through the bottom-scraping, low-tide channel between Ibo and mainland Mozambique; and, finally,
4. Loading our bags onto the roof of a chapa (the main means of pubic transportation in Mozambique: basically a converted Ford F350 with a flimsy and dubiously welded metal frame draped over the back with unreasonably cramped and awkward wooden benches lining the sides of its bed); hopping into the back of it with about 30 other people, hundreds of pounds of rice and bananas and untold numbers of farm animals; trying for 5 hours not to rub our rear ends raw on the wooden planks by alternating using my coat as a seat cushion and turning around to dangle my knobby and bafflingly white legs out the side of the truck in order to be reassured of feeling in my toes, while doing my best not to hit any oncoming trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, trees, or bushes. Or monkeys.
Despite embarking on our vacation equipped with two Mozambique travel guides and talking to several friends who had visited before us, we somehow remained woefully unprepared for the transportation situation there. Uganda is a small, densely population country that seems to have transportation options available to nearly every part of the country at nearly every hour of the day. In contrast, Mozambique is a much larger country with a significantly smaller population and a more degraded network of roads (particularly in the north, where we were traveling). As a result, transportation there, in a way, is more systematic but initially it’s a totally bewildering experience—at least it was to us, who were so used to the relative luxury and convenience of travel in Uganda (Convenient? Transport in Uganda? Really? Really.). It turns out that ALL relatively long-distance transport in Mozambique leaves early, early in the morning. Like 3 or 4 a.m. early. And that’s it for the rest of the day. So, if you’re a couple of well-seasoned and ambitious travelers like (ahem) us, you get up at 4 a.m., hop on the bus, arrive at the first stop at 8 or 9, and then get stuck in same no-name transport hub because all the options to points further down the line already departed earlier that morning. Needless to say, this was frustrating for us. We were on a pretty tight itinerary (compulsively prepared on Microsoft Excel by Amy weeks or even months ahead of time, God bless her), trying to cover a handful of sights spread out over a big area in a matter of 10 days or so. It wasn’t until later on in the trip, until those few hours of hopelessly waiting on the side of the road between Pemba and Nampula, patiently allowing our butts to recover from our 5 hour chapa ride from the coast with our limbs intact and no dead or wounded bicyclists or monkeys in our wake, that we belatedly discovered the wonders of hitchhiking. And Portuguese Church Ladies.
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