Lebombo

Until I have a work permit in hand I will be in Mozambique on business visas. Even if these are granted for multiple months, it’s required to leave Mozambique at least every 30 days. As I will be tied up in the field for a few weeks, I had to go across the border into Eswatini for a stamp, or I’d emerge from the bush and have overstayed my period. I don’t fancy an altercation with the sullen characters from migração.

I hired a car and drove to the border at Namaacha (Mozambique side) / Lomahasha (Eswatini side). The landscape in this area of the Lebombo Mountains is beautiful and relatively empty. It’s where I spent time between 2007-08 hosting groups of volunteers for community development projects and expeditions. Rather than raise eyebrows by returning to Mozambique five minutes after I’d left, I drove for thirty minutes to the next town, Simunye, which I know well, to eat a pie and take a trip down memory lane. Simunye has a soulless ‘plaza’, which serves the surrounding sugar estates and personnel, and has been frozen in time since 2008, still containing shops such as Connection Pharmacy and Creative Fashion Boutique. I used to come here on a daily basis when doxycycline pills were making volunteers vomit and we needed to switch prophylaxis, or when vegetarians in the group were desperately searching for alternatives to the reconstituted chicken meat that was our staple for sandwiches. The chicken meat section still occupies the same corner of the supermarket.

One location we camped at was Mbuluzi Game Reserve, a few kilometres away, where we used to do sweeps in the bush for snares and help with an annual giraffe census. As I drove back to the border, I stopped at the entrance gate to enquire about accommodation options currently on offer. The same staff member, Smart, was manning reception, so we had a nice chat. I’d like to return with pals for an overnight stay in the near future.

Although it would be useful when my visa allows it, today has deterred me from wanting my own vehicle in Maputo. I’m disinterested in cars, am 10,000 kilometres from being able to cadge my mum’s Fiat Panda, and drive so infrequently these days that it’s easy to behave like a numpty. The prime example of this was not being able to open the boot at the plentiful border gates and checkpoints. A Swazi soldier eyed me with suspicion and disdain, before tiring of my ineptitude, deciding I was too dumb to be smuggling anything, and ordering me to drive on. Back in Maputo, the challenges of parking presented themselves. The city now, whilst nowhere near a Nairobi or Manila, is a far cry from its recent past, when apparently you could hear a lone vehicle coming up deserted boulevards. Kerbs are high and it seems easy to trash the undersides of cars unless they’re 4x4s. I mounted the Golf onto a kerb but when I returned, someone from the neighbouring building had parked her giant vehicle so close that I had to clamber through the passenger side. Then I couldn’t reverse out without scraping my white paintwork on her bumper. I moped in the evening about how much of the excess I’d have to fork out for tomorrow.