We like to spend some time in Mozam-beach

Which way?

Oh yes we love the beach in Mozambique. There is something about a beach.

Its the best place to meet the sea and still have a bit of control over the situation. We are very familiar with the beaches of Cape Town and the Wild Coast of South Africa (which is very beautiful but not that wild). Meeting the beach in Mozambique was wild.

We are talking palm trees and turquoise blue sea and fine white sand. And people. Fishing people, pulling in nets people, walking up the beach people, walking down the beach people, selling fish people. The beach is where it all happens, probably the least popular activity is swimming in the sea. For us it was the best!

Being on the beach is one (beautiful) thing, getting there is entirely another! We set off from Harare with the plan to camp in the gardens of La Rochelle that night. La Rochelle was formerly the residence of a member of the royal family, Sir Stephen Courtauld and his wife Lady Virginia Courtauld. It is now a hotel with some of the attributes of the former royal residence, some of the finer details are perhaps lost. There is a tower a la French castles of a more recent era. In the gardens are roses, a collection of rare orchids, and an old school swimming pool, deep and refreshingly cold. There is even a small lake (pond?) with an island.

We set up our tent at the edge of the gardens, surrounded by huge trees. There was even a stone building with hot showers and toilets. We settled down for a peaceful night, safe in the old-world charm.

The next day we set off for the Mozambique border, which is only 30 kilometres away on the other side of the border town of Mutare. Mutare has seen better days, like most of African countries there tends to be one city that attracts all the money, and every other town is just that. On our way through Mutare we ran into a Zimbabwe Republican Police (ZRP) roadblock. Roadblocks are a common occurrence in Zimbabwe, and in Africa in general. In Zimbabwe they can spring up anywhere and at any time, often where there is a convenient tree that provides some shade. One is never sure what the reception will be at any given roadblock, sometimes you are just waved through and at other times you can get the treatment.

The real reason for roadblocks is money and thus it is the reason for the treatment. As we arrived at this one I got the feeling we were in for the treatment. There were at least eight or nine smartly dressed officers in various versions of the ZRP uniform and they seemed ready for some heckling. I was asked for my license by one of the parties and she set off to check on our trailer, which like the car had a South African number plate. This was probably the reason for what followed, seeing an approaching tourist they had anticipated an opportunity. The officer returned from the rear of the trailer and asked some questions while one of her colleagues joined her at the window and asked where was the cover for my front corner park- light. This woman was going to be the bad cop and was playing to the audience behind her. I said, in a mixture of Shona and English that it had fallen off but the light still worked. She announced aggressively that the light working was not the point, it was still an offence under “ fixtures and fittings “ and there was going to be a fine for it.

Fines come in various sizes usually they start off large but can magically be reduced to a lesser offence and therefore a lesser amount, with the proviso that another payment is made for a coke or lunch. All of this depends on the severity of the offence and in this case, I was informed that fixtures and fittings was a serious breach of the rule book. I begged to disagree and appealed to the one man in the backing group of officers; it was at this stage that I noticed all the rest of the ZRP officers were women. He wasn’t coming to my rescue, so I decided to bring Catherine and the children into the conversation. We had a long journey and money was short and we couldn’t possibly afford a $ 60 fine for a missing park-light cover. Ahh the bad cop said, it was only because of her love for our children that she was going to give us a $ 30 fine instead of $60. The conversation went on along these lines for several minutes before the first officer went over to Catherine’s window and leaned in, saying how much she loved our children and on account of them we could give $10 and be on our way. We, on the other hand, were convinced that fixtures and fittings was a mythical offence and even $10 was too much.

The ball was now in our court and if we didn’t want to spoil things we had to make a face saving counteroffer which we did and the officer at the window palmed the money with the dexterity of a card shark. Now everyone was happiness and goodwill to all. We were ushered on our way with best wishes for the journey ahead.

 As a foot note to this encounter the love for our children expressed by those women of the ZRP is a thread that runs through Africa. Everywhere we go we get extra love for the children with us. If there is a problem, we get more help and more empathy because we have children with us - the heart of Africa goes out to them. Perhaps that is true everywhere?

As we approached Forbes Border Post (still named after a colonial era hunter, or painter, possibly both) we started to count the trucks parked nose to tail along the road leading down to the border. There were over 300 trucks, mostly 30-ton rigs and some petrol tankers. I tried to work out what amount of capital was standing there in the sun, doing nothing, then I abandoned the exercise as futile and certainly not my problem.

The border crossing was our reason for being on this journey in the first place. The car and trailer are still registered in South Africa and so they must leave Zimbabwe every three months. Those are the rules and it was at one time possible to drive to the border leave Zimbabwe cross to Mozambique and then come back again, immediately. Now the Mozambicans have a rule that if you enter you must stay for 24 hours and there is nowhere to stay or camp near the border, so we have an excellent excuse to make this a longer trip down to the coast.

We had heard that the roads were not very good, so we were not sure how much longer the longer trip was going to be. It didn’t take long for us to find out. It started with the speed hump that we hit, at speed, as we were sailing along on the first stretch of very good Mozambican road.

Allow me to digress onto the subject of speed humps. Whilst driving on the motorways and autobahns of Europe and the UK one gets the impression that the roads are designed for speed and every attempt is made to keep the flow of traffic flowing. In the part of Southern Africa where I find myself now there is conflict of intentions. There is only one road so while it can be a motorway when you are out on the open road as soon as the road reaches a town or village, the speed of traffic must be slowed, and this is achieved with speed humps. Merely putting up a maximum speed sign is obviously not going to cut the mustard. Quite simple so far but this is where things can get tricky. There are secret speed humps and severe speed humps. The former is obvious and are only unknown to strangers, while the latter requires more depth of explanation and this is where I become exasperated. After building a perfectly good road the powers that be will ruin it by adding a speed hump that can only be negotiated at 5 km per hour, without jarring everyone and everything including the fillings in your teeth.

So back to the speed hump I hit, it wasn’t a secret speed hump in the sense that it was actually marked with white paint, in a vague sort of way that was a sign to your average Mozambican motorist. I didn’t get the message and the hump turned out to be severe. The result was a nasty grinding noise that wasn’t coming from my teeth but from the back of the car. On investigation I discovered that the tow bar had been partially ripped off the chasis by the weight of the trailer coming back down after it had ramped off the hump.

It wasn’t as bad has it had sounded, it wasn’t a terminal issue, in the sense that we still had mobility, if we decoupled from the trailer. This we did, leaving it with a group of fruit vendors who had set up shop by the speed hump, for obvious reasons. We set off in search of a welder. This section of the road seemed to be a continuous village. Much like the rivers of previous centuries, roads create their own ecosystems. Within a few kilometres we spotted a welder making window frames and right next door was a car ramp, quite by coincidence. Things were already looking up!

I explained the problem to the welder and suggested I could drive the car onto the next-door ramp that didn’t seem to belong to anyone. He agreed and told me to go across the road and buy fifteen welding rods from a wooden stall that turned out to be the local hardware shop. I had my reservations about arc welding the chasis, 20 cm away from the petrol tank. I had to use non farlo Portuguese and ended with “no boom, no Donald Trump “

That seemed to convey the message, and I was assured there would be no boom. I was still not entirely comfortable but I found some reassurance in the fact that he would be the closest to the boom, if there was one, so by simple logic he must be confident that there wasn’t going to be one. Right?

We moved off a safe distance to where there were some tables and shade. The welding started, there was no immediate boom and it turned out that we were in sitting in an alfresco bar, that opened within a few minutes of our arrival. It was about 10 o clock in the morning, and things were definitely looking up, so we had a beer. After about half an hour I decided to  wonder back to the car as the welder looked about to finish his work. There had been no boom, and I was feeling quite relaxed. As I reached the car some of the assistants to the welder started to have an agitated conversation about something. They were shouting to the welder who was still welding under the car, by now he was on the driver’s side which was the opposite sight to the petrol tank. Finally, one of them summoned some English and said to me “open boot there is fire “. Luckily the boot wasn’t locked, and I yanked it open. To my horror I saw flames licking out of the compartment that held the wheel spanners and other tools for wheel changing. On top of that were suitcases, cooler boxes and clothing. I galvanized into action and sent all these things into the street while shouting “aqua aqua”. Luckily a bucket of aqua was on hand and the flames were extinguished, in seconds.

The polystyrene holder that held the tools in place in their compartment had been set alight by the heat of the welding under the car. If the welder had not had an audience, he would not have known about the fire in the boot. Then by the time my cooler box was on fire I may have noticed and there might have been time to save the car. All was well that ended well and we were soon on our way to retrieve our trailer and continue the journey. I was more watchful for speed humps than before, but what was coming up next was something different – potholes!

The map showed that we were are headed south to a place called Dombe then east from there to the A1 that would take us south again. The A1 is the national road that runs through Mozambique from Maputo in the south right through to the north, past Tete as far as Pemba. North of Pemba is a no go, there are bandits and warlords. The road to Dombe turns out to be quite good and we have a very pleasant drive through hilly country where bananas are being reaped, and trucks piled with green bananas are the only real traffic on the road. From Dombe, which turns out to be a village with not much more than a market, we hit a gravel road cut through the bush taking us east to the A1.

The going is slow and there is no other traffic. In fifty kilometres we see two cars, then we hit the AI. This is the national road the spine of the road system in Mozambique, after 35 years of Independence. We had been warned not to expect too much but we were still disappointed. In places the tarmac just ends, and the road is gravel, with potholes, for long stretches. That is the better option because tarmac with large potholes is far less forgiving than speedhumps.

Of course, along the way there are roadblocks and believe it or not speed cameras! The traffic police in Mozambique leave the ZRP in the dust. They have style and most of them have charm. They cut a finer figure too. We are talking Portuguese versus English fashion sense, and the Mozambican traffic department undoubtedly wins hands down. A crisp white shirt with a collar and lapels, black trousers and shoes. The whole ensemble is topped off with a white naval officer’s cap with impressive golden insignia and a big white smile. The smile is accompanied by a cordial greeting of Bon Dia

Here the plan is to cajoul the motorist out of his cash with charm rather than fear. Minor transgressions can easily be forgotten, if a token gesture of one hundred metacais can change hands (about $3). It is surprisingly easy to speed, 60 km per hour is the speed limit when one comes upon a team of officers and their speed camera. There is no speed limit sign to confirm this, it is just a known fact. We, however, did not have any issues with speeding. We did have some very pleasant chats about the heat, the road and how money was short. By the time we reached the turn off to Inhassoro, the little town on the coast where we planned to camp on the beach, it was 4 o clock in the morning. Our average speed worked out to have been 25 km per hour.

By the time we reached our campsite on the beach it was closer to 5 o clock and the dawn was upon us. There was a breeze coming off the sea that rustled through the palm trees. We pitched the tent and moved the sleeping children into it from the back seat of the car. They woke up and there we were, finally, on the beach!