Mozambique

Lou and I were really excited; we were headed for Maputo the capital of Mozambique for a night. We have been told that it is a really interesting city with a heavy Portuguese influence and only about 3 hours from White River. So we made reservations at a nice motel and headed out yesterday morning.

After a couple of hours of driving we reached the border. The first thing the border guard asked was for the proper papers that allowed us to drive a rental car across the border. We didn’t realize that we needed some sort of permission. When we called Avis they told us we could not drive the car across the border.

Not to be deterred Lou and I decided to park the car and try to get a taxi to Maputo. The taxi driver wanted $110 to take us into town and back the next day. We felt like we were getting the American rip-off price so Lou suggested we go into the customs office and see if we could bum a ride with someone. Who would have ever thought I could leave Lou in the African bush by herself or that she would come up with the idea of hitchhiking to Maputo?

As we entered the customs office we noticed a couple of older gentlemen and I suggested that Lou use her womanly influence to see if we could get a ride. These two guys were absolutely wonderful, they said they were not originally planning to go all the way into Maputo but they would take us into our hotel. They helped us through the process of getting the proper stamps and visas.

Along the way we learned that they were crocodile farmers. They owned a farm in the Nelsprit area and one outside of Maputo, harvesting almost 20,000 crocs a year. Their skins are exported to Mexico to make handbags, shoes and belts.

We were about to get our visas, the last step of the process, when the border official stepped out and told us we didn’t have enough room in our passports to paste the visas. We pointed out that there was one page and the very back page but he said he needed two blank pages and he could not use the back page or put the visa over another stamp. He handed the visas to the clerk and told her to give us our money back and walked off.

These poor guys had walked us through the whole process, waited almost a half an hour for us and suddenly our trip to Maputo was dead. As Lou and I walked out of the border office back towards the South African border we were totally disappointed. We ended up making a day of the drive back to White River and enjoying the African countryside.