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

Displayed times (last time: ) Rating 5/5

Rating: 5.00 out of 5.00. 1 members have rated this article

Day 28 - July 24

I woke up at 0700 after having slept very well. Unfortunately, May Tina had not been equally lucky as she had suffered from diarrhoea the whole night, meaning she constantly had to go to the bathroom and didn't get any sleep at all. On the other hand, it was quite fortunate that this happened here in this luxury accomodation and not while we were living primitively in the Drifters Bushveld Camp or Zululand.

Gunnar had brought along some Imodium pills that were supposed to cure such a problem. May Tina tried them and got gradually better during the day.

There was no animal activity at the waterhole this early in the morning. This was a little bit disappointing, but on the other hand we'd seen plenty of wildlife yesterday. We had breakfast, packed all our stuff and were ready to go on a short gamedrive before heading towards Mozambique. According to the rules, we had to have a ranger with us on the gamedrive and he arrived promptly at 0800.

We were mostly interested in getting a closer look at a lion, since this animal had so far eluded us except for a brief glimpse in the Kruger Park. The lions were kept in a special (but large) enclosure here at Hlane. The ranger showed us where to drive and after ten minutes we arrived at the gate and were let inside. For the next one and a half hour we drove around looking for lions, but unfortunately we didn't see any. In fact, the only animal we saw was an elephant, and apart from that the area appeared to be empty.

In the end we gave up and were let out into another enclosure where they had cheetahs. This time we had more luck as we had only driven for a few minutes when we spotted two cheetahs lying in the middle of the road. The cheetah is the fastest animal in the world, but from watching these two cheetahs one would never have guessed. They looked really lazy and when we approached they only just managed to find the necessary ...