At 5:30AM on Saturday, July 6, my alarm awoke me from my five-hour sleep in my sleeping bag in Nelspruit. I wiped my groggy eyes, recovering and sore from a sudden bacterial infection that sprang up during debrief (I blame the kids at Phumlani who frequently used my sunglasses like a pacifier), showered, spent some time with God, journaled and read for moment, and headed out to procure $4,500 USD to pay for our visas at the border later that day. Three different banking locations, a taxi-driver-turned-chauffeur and two hours later, it was looking to be another normal day of travel – all we had to do was get 52 people to a bus station, into a bus, past the Mozambican border and into Maputo. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, nothing. Not with the first bus. We successfully got from South Africa to Mozambique with only a slight speed bump of a five-hour wait at the border. In World Race time, that's not that long. We camped out on the curb outside the border control office and eventually got all of our passports with all the right documentation. By 7:30PM, we had made it to Maputo. The only thing that lay before us was to get five teams to the north part of Mozambique by the next day.
The only slight problem was that the "bus station" in Maputo where we'd hoped to buy more bus tickets when we arrived was more like a giant parking space, it was already dark, we had no bus tickets, we'd never been there before, we didn't speak the language and we were all sitting in a corner with all of our belongings in the middle of a concrete space that could've been the backdrop for a gangster movie.
My friend Nick and I wandered up the street to a bus company's office around the corner where we met our new friend Mostafa (who looks exactly like you'd imagine a man named Mostafa to look – think Islamic John Goodman) who negotiated arrangements for a private bus to take us to Maputo Beira the next morning. By 9:30PM we'd agreed to the private rental, paid, and thanked God for providing a way to get where we needed to go. Now all we needed was a place for 34 people to stay for five and a half hours until our bus left at 4AM.
women's group at our church this month – sorry I have no pictures from travel days
While a few team leaders went on a walk looking for a hostel nearby, Joey, my team leader, worked it out where Greyhound would let us sleep on the same bus we arrived in at the "station" until our next one left, so we locked the gate behind us and set up camp inside and outside the bus. It was comical, everyone sleeping on the concrete outside or watching movies sprawled out horizontally across the bus-seats-turned-twin-beds. Mostafa had communicated how important it was that the bus leave on time due to Mozambican checkpoints that close from 9PM to 5AM, and if we left late we might get stuck at one and not make it to Maputo Beira until the next day (Monday), so we set our alarms for 2:30AM to be up the street at Mostafa's bus by 3:00 to load our packs and be sure to leave by 4:00.
(elapsed travel time: 12 hours)
We made it onto our bus no problem – though there were strange men in tangerine-colored Islamic tunics made for sanitation engineers taking pictures of our packs on their camera phones – and began our trek northward. It had been a hectic few hours, and I was excited to shut my eyes and enjoy the long ride ahead, just me and sleep and prayer and thinking time.
I awoke the next morning to a stationary bus. Julie told me we'd been stopped for three hours, and we learned that there'd been a wreck ahead of us and stalled traffic to a stand still. The driver was pretty certain we could make the checkpoint in time, though, and at 7AM we were back on the move.
(elapsed travel time: 18 hours)
You can see where this is going, I'm sure. After an eventful day including complimentary, unexpected meals of soggy cheese, white bread and grape soda; an unforgettable episode where we learned the importance of the request not to go #2 in the bus bathroom; and paying for four gigantic bottles of water at a stop just to buy a cup of coffee with a debit card, we made it to the checkpoint at 7:07PM. My team started to gather our things because we were certain we'd made it to our stop in Dondo when the driver told Nick and me the news.
The checkpoint was already closed.
And it wasn't opening until the next morning, maybe at 5:00, maybe at 9:00. He wasn't sure.
(elapsed travel time: 30 hours)
We all kind of desperately laughed at the hilarity of the situation as we looked out the windows of the bus. A dusty, dirt road full of other buses and trucks stopped for the night, an abandoned restaurant to our right and a billiards house/makeshift bar that would make any of our mothers shiver to our left. All of us were tired from being in a bus for an entire day and unable to use the bathroom in a satisfactory way while also nearing the end of our allotted food and water supplies, so we ventured off in a very large group to explore the bathroom situation at the bar.
I used a squatty potty at a Ukrainian campground that not even rats would find suitable for use and that I thought would certainly take the cake for my year's bathroom experiences, but this one ran a close second. The smell that came out of those two rooms was enough to wilt a flower. We all did what we could with what we had and settled in to spend our second night on a stationary bus. It was the first time all year I've been truly thankful for a change of clothes in my day pack.
Anyway, I woke up the next morning at 5:00 and nothing was happening, so I slept until 6:30 (so did our driver… guess he wasn't in a hurry) and got up to get ready to leave. By that I mean I woke up, stood up, looked around, and sat back down. A few people were awake, so we ventured back to the bathrooms together.
This time, the smell was equally bad and there was a homeless man there charging money to use the bathrooms. And he only spoke Portuguese.
With the most successful round of charades ever played and Nick's English-to-Portuguese skills (phrases like "es pee-o free-o?" work better than you'd think), we negotiated with him that we could use the restrooms to "pee pee" for free, but anything else was an extra charge. One by one we used the restroom until Nick and Katrina and I sprinted away from him when he tried to get me to stay and be his wife (or something).
(elapsed travel time: 42 hours)
I was restless and bored, so I got my guitar out, and Daniel and a few others sang with me sitting outside in front of the bus. We sang worship songs and secular songs, and eventually a crowd gathered and somehow there were 20-ish World Racers leading 50-ish Mozambicans in Justin Bieber and Katy Perry songs intermingled with "Days of Elijah" at a weigh station in the middle of nowhere, Africa. Maybe that's why I love music so much – it's so much greater than language, it bridges gaps and breaks barriers that words alone could never touch.
FINALLY, our driver motioned to us to get on the bus – it was time to go. We were pumped. We climbed back on the bus and pulled away, cheering as we crossed the bridge to the other side. The bus steward kept reminding us that we'd lost our bathroom privileges the day before, so even though we did not stop even once on our way, we made it to Maputo Beira successfully and without any more major incidents. The four bottles of water I'd bought to get coffee ended up being a total gift from God since we were nearly out of food and water otherwise.
(elapsed travel time: 54 hours)
After we arrived, the bus driver and steward practically threw us to the curb and turned right around to head back. My team had another hour drive to our ministry site, but the car our contact brought was too small, so I sat on the gas station curb with my new teammates Joey and Lauren while we waited for them to come back and get us. In the meantime, we made friends with a couple of mute boys who lived on the street who let me give them cookies and pray for them, which was cool. Unshowered, hungry and pretty gross, we finally arrived at our ministry site a couple hours later where we pitched our tents on the dirt in our concrete house and took bucket showers with water heated over a fire.
Our friendly ministry contact's family had made us dinner to take to our house, and when I reached down to carry the food sandwiched between two plates, I came face to face with a full fish head, complete with eyes and teeth, sticking out from between the two plates begging to be eaten, mocking me in my hunger.
As I gazed into the fish's eyes, my first hot meal in three days, I tried my best to keep from bursting into one of those laughs where tears stream down your face and you're not sure if you're really laughing or crying, but the food ended up being delicious (I ate the fish) and I was thankful to have arrived safely and have each of my needs met and exceeded, even if it wasn't what I was used to.
And after the buses, that night was the most comfortable my sleeping pad has ever felt.
(elapsed travel time: 57 hours)
Just a normal day on the World Race in Africa.
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