02/01/10

I had assumed that today it would be easy to catch a ride home from one of the many South Africans headed home, but like many things in Mozambique my logic didn’t apply and I was dead wrong. There very little traffic and not even chapas seemed to be running. At one point a semi pulled over with bunch of people in the back headed south for Maputo. The driver told us it would cost 1000 Meticais when at most even a closed chapa should be around 200 Meticais. We kindly told him to go to hell and that we didn’t need his ride (even though we weren’t completely sure that was true). We ended up getting picked up a little while later and actually passed the same semi, so I cheerily smiled and gave him the finger as we passed.
How many adults can you fit in the bed of a pickup truck? I was one of 18 adults and two babies today, so whatever you guessed was probably wrong. But other than the fact that the American conception of personal space never exists here, it was actually quite comfortable. The only downside was that we had to drive the part of the EN1 that is in such bad shape that everyone drives in the sand next to the road, so after the trip we were covered by a layer of orange dust.