Tuesday
It is the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18, and I need to get out of Beira, Mozambique soon.
I crossed the border from Mutare, Zimbabwe on Sunday and arrived in Beira (halfway up Mozambique’s long coastline) the next day, committed to finding a boat to Dar Es Salaam. Any boat would be fine, as long as it arrived within a week: I had catch a flight out of Dar on Sunday, August 23.
The boat didn’t pan out, but not for lack of trying. I visited the main port twice, pleaded with immigration officials, and dickered with the logistics managers of all the major shipping companies in town. In the end, I couldn’t go the sea route because no boat would get me there in time.
Anticipating this result, I had asked around to determine the fastest way to Dar overland. The consensus was that it was faster and more reliable to go the long way around -- northwest through Mozambique, then north through all of Malawi, and finally east across all of Tanzania. The roads on the more direct route north along Mozambique’s coast were rumored to be awful, and trucks rarely passed that way.
One of the logistics managers at a shipping company told me he knew of a truck leaving for Malawi on Tuesday afternoon that could take me. I come to the company’s office around 2:00, as requested, and wait inside for over hour in suffocating humidity. As I begin to lose hope, the manager pops out of his office and says, “My dear friend, the truck is ready. Let’s go.” He drives me out of town in his pickup truck, telling me about a trip he once took to Vancouver.
We arrive in a dirt alley on the outskirts of town. A large semi is waiting, the engine already running. The driver is a musclebound, bombastic Portuguese-looking man in his early 30s who speaks little English beyond “Hello, how are you?” He shakes my hand, grabs my tent, and we get in. I sit in front; three Mozambiquan men in their early 20s are already in the back. They will handle the manual labor and help maintain the truck along the way.
The truck is about 10 years old, I deduce from the text “Spirit of Ninety-Nine” along its side. It may have begun its life in Canada, for it bears stickers announcing that it is compliant with Canadian regulations. And perhaps it spent time in the States: Across the back of the cab, in massive letters, is that peculiar American phrase: “Git-Er-Done.”
The inside is the standard layout for a cab of this kind: Two pilot chairs in the front, a large gearshift protruding from the floor, and bunk beds in the back with some shelving space and compartments in between. The radio has been stolen. At some point during the ride, I notice that the truck’s odometer reads over 928,000 miles.
I try to fasten my safety belt, but it’s broken. I greet the men sitting in the back, discover that they speak no English, and we drive off.
But trucks, in my experience, don’t just “drive off,” and this one was no different. We stop by the side of the road to pick up a very young Malawian woman who turns out to be the driver’s mistress. We stop so the driver can pick up some food. We gather a couple of additional young men to help with the truck. The woman gets the bottom bunk to herself, while all the men pile into the top one. Then we pull over by the side of the main road, no more than 15 kilometers outside of town, and wait.
After a while, an empty open-bed semi pulls up and honks. The truck’s driver speaks with our driver, and the empty truck maneuvers directly alongside ours. Everyone hops out, and the five young men in our truck proceed to unload 38 large sacks of fish from our truck and place them on the empty one. I am mystified. Are they really stealing all of this fish? Here's a surreptitious photo I snapped from the passenger seat.
Nearly an hour later, we are finally on the road. We drive toward Chimoio, a city on the way back to Zimbabwe. The vegetation is lush, and people line the roadways in both directions, carrying giant sacks, containers, or logs on their heads, or riding overloaded bicycles that wobble precariously as riders struggle to pedal them.
Our progress is slow. The truck crawls up hills, barely moving at all, and drives no more than 70 kilometers per hour at the fastest. The driver is no expert. His gearshifts are unsteady and his pothole navigation skills are lacking. He constantly checks his cell phone, glancing down for many seconds at a time as the truck swerves across the road. Shouting and waving his hands, he tells stories to the men in the back, who respond at regular intervals with the slightly forced laughter of those who know that being amused by their boss’s stories is part of the job description. The driver honks at nearly every truck that passes on the way to Beira, smiling in a self-satisfied way each time a truck honks back. About half of the time, he initially whiffs when trying to grab the string to honk the horn.
We arrive in Chimoio in total darkness. Chimoio is 164 kilometers from Beira, but with all the delays, it took us more than 5 hours to get there.
We pull into a truck depot and park. I wonder whether we are stopping for the night, but the men in the back communicate to me that we will proceed to Tete, more than 400 kilometers further, before going to sleep. All of a sudden, the flat-bed truck with our 38 sacks of fish pulls into the depot and alongside us once again, and the process recommences, this time in reverse. Because the men have to lift the sacks nearly above their heads to pile them back on our very full truck (shouting and grunting with effort as they do so), it takes much longer. I offer to help, but they say they are fine; the driver adds that the fish smell bad, a point I do not dispute.
With time on my hands, I wander a bit through the depot, which is little more than a large patch of dirt along the side of the road, adjacent to a former petrol station that now serves as a junkyard. I smell the smells (few are pleasant), look at the stars in the night sky, say thanks but no thanks to prostitutes, chat as best as I can with other drivers and their staff, and stop by a local bar to buy some water and take in the music blaring from blown-out speakers. I reflect on the mysterious fish transfer and decide that it must have been to evade weight requirements; we stopped at a weigh station shortly after unloading those 38 very heavy bags.
It's been a slow start, and I have a long way to go.
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