At long last, we are back on the road. The woman is still on the bottom bunk (she slept through the reloading), and only three men remain on top (the others were paid and remained in Chimoio). The driver is clearly pleased with himself, and he lights a joint to celebrate. As he lights a match, he gives me a sideways glance and scowls, as if to say: “You’d better not write about this on a blog.” Almost immediately after he finishes the joint, we come to a police checkpoint where the driver is questioned and eventually asked to exit the vehicle and sit in a police booth for questioning. It’s a tense moment for the rest of us in the cab, but he emerges a few minutes later unscathed.
As we crawl towards Tete, the night air blowing through our open windows gets colder and colder. (We have to leave the windows open because the floor of the truck is extremely hot, and if there’s no air coming in, the cab turns into a sauna very quickly, especially for people in the back.) The landscape changes and the hills become steeper. And the fog rolls in. At first, there are just patches here and there. Soon enough, it’s as though we’re driving through a cloud. Eventually, the fog is thicker than I have ever seen in my life. Low beams or high, we cannot see the road ahead of us. I have to look out the side window to see the edge of the road to determine whether we are still on it.
I am terrified. The driver has clearly driven this route many times, and he is driving fairly slowly, but that’s not what worries me. What I’m afraid of is abandoned trucks. It’s the same throughout Africa: When a truck dies, the driver doesn’t bother to pull off the road. He simply leaves the truck where it stopped, blocking an entire lane of traffic. At most, all he does to alert fellow motorists is place a tree branch in the middle of the obstructed lane -- though often the branch is just 50 meters or less before the unlit dead truck . I am petrified that one of these dead trucks will suddenly materialize out of the mist, leaving us no time to avoid it.
After 10 minutes of driving blind, the driver suddenly stops. Ironically, we become my own worst fear. The driver pulls the truck a few feet off the road, but part of it still blocks our lane. Now, I fear, we will be the dead truck lying in wait for an unsuspecting driver behind us. At least we leave our flashing lights on.
As these visions unfold in my head, the three men in the back of the truck push past me and vacate the cab in a hurry. I am still sitting, dazed, stressed, and tired, when I suddenly hear the sound of the driver, now in the back, kissing his mistress. I get the message: It’s time to get out. My tent is all the way in the back, and I can’t get to it without disturbing them, but I'm so intent on slinking out of the cab that I don’t even think of the tent at first. I step into the freezing night in the thick fog, wearing a light jacket. Midnight has long since come and gone.
The three men have a hearty chuckle as I stand angry and shivering by the side of the road, conveying my displeasure that my tent and sleeping bag are still in the truck. Meanwhile, the men prepare for bed. Having wisely brought their bags, they pull out heavy coats and a few blankets, setting up an open-air camp underneath the truck, between sets of wheels. Settling in, one of the men beckons to me, and I need no further invitation. I lie on my back on concrete covered by a thin blanket, with one man to my left and two to my right, directly under the truck.
My head rests against one of the workers’ small suitcase. I pull the thin blanket to cover my face. Soon, the cold air seeps through the blanket, and the concrete is freezing against my back and legs. The night, which seemed so still when I stepped out of the truck, comes alive. A child coughs; a baby cries. I realize that we are sleeping next to a village. Moments later, awful howls come from the bush nearby. Made by some animal, they sound like a man crying out in pain. As I gradually slip into an uneasy sleep, one thought possesses me: What if a passing truck slams into our truck as we sleep here? I calculate that because I am in the middle, the wheels would crush the man to my left but not me. This is no comfort at all. I am startled awake once in the night, crying out into the night as a large truck roars past us in the fog.
All four of us startle at the sound of our truck’s engine starting in the still pitch-black night. Without so much as a shout from the driver, the three men furiously repack their bags. They shove blankets hurriedly into their packs and race back into the truck. Within a minute or two, groggy but happy to be alive, I am back in the front seat, relieved to see that the fog has abated.
As dawn breaks, we traverse a horrific stretch of road. The thin layer of tar that once covered the earth has long since given way to cavernous potholes. In spots, there is more dirt than tar. Even the potholes have potholes. Our truck weaves crazily left and right, dodging some of these craters but slamming into others. We leave the road entirely in either direction when it’s expedient. Each time we hit a pothole, the sound is deafening. Our heads -- our entire bodies -- are thrown this way and that as the truck struggles onward. It is a miracle our tires survived. My neck hurt for days.
The only comfort was the landscape: Mountains in the distance, lush vegetation with barren stretches in between, and magnificent, baobab trees straight out of a Tim Burton film with trunks bigger than some houses.
The sun has long since risen when we arrive, bleary-eyed and sore, in Changara, Mozambique.
(A village near Changara.)Although we left 16 hours ago, we still have not reached Tete, which is less than 600 kilometers from Beira, a fraction of the way to my final destination.
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