Home » Mozambique » South African Adventure 1999, Part 10: Mozambique -- symbolising the best and worst of Africa

After a game drive in the park, we crossed the border to Mozambique and drove to the capital Maputo. The country immediately seemed very different from Swaziland with the climate being much more tropical and the living conditions apparently much worse. This resulted in people being very aggressive in their efforts to sell us things and despite us being very careful, there was an incident where a group of people tried to steal from us. However, Mozambique was also a place where we experienced extreme generosity, and in retrospect I think our short visit was the most interesting experience on the whole trip.

South African Adventure 1999, Part 10: Mozambique -- symbolising the best and worst of Africa

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-08 20:33:32

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another meal now was making her sick.

On the other hand, the hospitality shown towards was just amazing, unlike anything we'd ever seen before. Here was this guy living in the Maputo slum, having no source of income except money generated from selling water from his well. He and his family have prepared this fantastic meal for a bunch of "rich" strangers from Norway who they had never seen before, and was most unlikely ever to see again. But it's all really not necessary since none of us are hungry. Was there not a single sane person living in this country?

Finally, each of us was given soft drinks. Everybody got a bottle of Coke, except May Tina who received a Fanta. This was exactly the same as we had been drinking at Mundo's so the guy must have memorized it for this occasion! This was just too sweet of them, especially considering the prices of soft drinks in this country.

Well, we just had to do our best to pretend we were enjoying the meal. Not eating anything would have been tragic. I'm sure they needed the food more than us. So we all did our best, taking a little bit of each kind of food. It was all very good, and I'm sure we would have enjoyed it a lot if we hadn't eaten a full meal 30 minutes ago.

The guy himself was obviously enjoying the meal. In fact, he seemed to be eating just as much as he did at Mundo's, so I guess he needs a lot of food to keep going. Again, he seemed like a really happy guy, laughing and smiling all the time during the meal.

Despite trying our best, we weren't able to make much of an impact on the amount of food on the table. There was a lot left when we gave up. Borgny explained to him that we had really enjoyed the food, but were just not very hungry right now. He seemed to find this very funny, as he really bursted out laughing when she told him. This was a truly happy man, if we ever saw one!

We thought that at least there ...