Mozambique

Celebrated Human Rights Day with a long weekend camping trip in Mozambique.

A full-days drive. Pretoria to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. North up the southeastern coastline to Xai-Xai (shy-shy).

Another country colonized by the Portuguese. Not many Portuguese around anymore but the evidence remains in the architecture and language.

A long hot drive, truck crammed full of people and camping supplies. 80s music roaring (not by choice), windows down, sunglasses on, knee tops and arms burning from the intense sun. The landscape. Fluffy white clouds suspended from perfect blue skies. Run-down and forgotten Portuguese buildings from long ago. Over-grown by bush and vine. Specks of paint still clinging to the cement walls. Pink, green, and turquoise blue. Beside these remnants stretch wide open bushveld. Dirt, sand, aloe, scrub brush, thorn tree, brown, red, green. The occasional African farmstead. Single-room home made of reeds. Skinny dog in a swept dirt yard. Africans, young and old, on the roadside selling roasted cashews, stacked wood, bags of charcoal, reeds, waving fresh caught fish with metallic colored scales shimmering in the sun at each passing car.

Maputo. Buildings splashed in Coca-Cola red and Vodacom blue. Roadside markets for miles in each direction. Vendor stalls made from sticks and bits of cloth. Corrugated tin. Potatoes, ruby red tomatoes, onions, coconuts, cassava melon, white chickens in cages, beautifully carved wooden furniture, piles of shoes, old jeans, unidentifiable liquid in recycled plastic containers. The sun at its hottest. A massive crowd of people and cars. Women wearing brightly patterned wraps. Balancing baskets of bananas and containers of water on their heads. Babies tied to their backs like tortoise shells. School kids in uniforms. Men on bikes. Bandages in place of missing hands, feet, arms, legs. Accidental discovery of hidden land mines from the civil war two decades ago.

Off the main route. A long, dusty, pot-holed road to the ocean. The only car on the road. Informal settlements. No electricity, no cars, no conveniences. A school with a hundred kids playing in the yard. A one-room maternity hospital painted white with a red cross over the front door. Kids waving and smiling as we pass. Teens yelling at us to go away. Voicing their supreme hatred for the Portuguese colonizers. Women balancing logs on their heads. Young girls with babies tied to their backs. Men with machetes swiping at the long grass. Thatched huts. Unpredictable chickens running under and away from the car, goats tied to trees, a lone donkey on the side of the road. Palm and banana trees, corn fields, long green grass.

Camping. No need for shoes. 2-minute walk to the beach. Just us and the Mozambican fishermen. The mosquitoes and flies serve as our welcome committee. They do not for one second let us forget they are there. No diving or snorkeling. Bull sharks. Instead we play Frisbee and float in the shallow warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Saturday. Drinking at the pool. Sunday. A long hike into the sand forest. Walk back along the beach. Two little scared lost lambs try following us for lack of a better thing to do. Monday. Floating in the ocean. Reading and exploring. The sun sets. Drinking boxed red on the beach. Dinner, a campfire and a low-hanging moon.

Mozambique. A feeling of truly being in Africa. Beautiful, exhilarating, humbling.