Julia's Travels: Northern Mozambique and slightly less chaotic border crossings

From Zomba, Chris and I continued our journey South towards Mozambique. The Malawi-Mozambique border crossing was pretty hectic. It wasn’t as bad as the Tanzania-Malawi border, but still a little slice of chaos, as I’ve now come to expect from African land borders.

This time around, we had issues changing money. Technically, you’re not supposed to change money with the black market moneychangers on the street, and my strong preference is not to change money in sketchy situations (like at a border with a random tout), but when we tried to change money at the Bank of Malawi kiosk at the immigration office, we were informed that they were out of dollars (what the heck?!?!?!?!) and that we should just change with the black market guys. On the minibus ride toward the border, Chris and I befriended a Mozambican guy who was also headed to the border. When he saw us struggling with the moneychangers, he offered to help us negotiate with the touts (in hopes that they wouldn’t try to blatantly rip off a local). Adding another person to the fray only caused more chaos, and brought our situation to the attention of a police officer (not optimal since we weren’t supposed to be changing money with the touts). The cop swooped in ushered our Mozambican friend off into some back room. So Chris and I waited, somewhat clueless and helpless, for our Mozambican friend to reappear. When he did resurface (30 minutes later), he’d been hassled by the cop, but that was it. Chris and I decided to abandon our money changing efforts and just focus on getting into Mozambique before we ran out of daylight.

Another immigration office and several hours of hectic minibus/taxi rides later, we arrived safely in Tete, Northeastern Mozambique. When we crossed into Mozambique, we immediately noticed some major differences from Malawi and Zambia. Mozambique felt more developed, and even though it’s still a very poor country, you could see more affluence and economic activity (in a very basic sense, of course). The food in Mozambique was also a welcome change of pace. Since Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony, its food has a strong latin influence. The spicy sauces and presence of real cheese were like manna from heaven after a month of chicken and nsima (bland polenta).

We spent a day in Tete organizing our onward transportation, and then another night in Biera on our way down the cost. We didn’t spend enough time in either city to really get to know the towns, but both places provided us with a good opportunity to see some of the non-touristy parts of Mozambique.

One of the highlights of travel in Northern Mozambique was traveling in the comfort of “luxury” long-distance buses. Chris and I have suffered through a lot of painful chicken bus rides, and I can’t even fully express how thrilled I was when I discovered that Mozambique has multiple classes of bus travel (hallelujah leg room!!!). It took me a while to track down information about the nice buses, but it was worth the extra research. Overland travel from Northern to Southern Mozambique requires two days of travel, and I’m not sure that Chris and I were mentally prepared for 2 days of slow, overcrowded bus rides.

Mozambique was also interesting from a language standpoint. Most people in the big cities speak Portuguese and, if you are lucky, a little English as well. Unlike French, which was impossible for me to understand when we were in Madagascar, Portuguese is a little easier. I speak Spanish and Italian, so between those two languages, I can almost read Portuguese and can sort of get by with a handful of simple phases (the numbers are really similar to Spanish which helps a lot). The accent is totally different for me, but when in doubt I’d just use the Spanish word and ad a “shouwww” to the end. This was surprisingly effective, and while we had our fill of miscommunications and confusing/awkward moments, we were able to get by much easier than in Madagascar.

-Julia