I believe I left yall at the bus stop. The journey doesn’t end there though. We then had to find our ride, Popo, to the chapas.
This might sound easy, but in a city you don’t really know that has no street signs it is pretty tough. We finally got it worked out and managed to find him. The whole time we were talking on the phone to him everyone was trying to get us to take their taxi. No is not a word they understand very well.
Once we got to the chapa station Popo helped us a ton with getting everything sorted out, which was such a blessing, but then the chapa ride started.
A chapa is a huge van that takes around 15 people from place to place. It is definitely not the most comfortable of rides. The drivers of the chapas refuse to leave until the whole vehicle is full. This makes it hard to hold to a schedule because sometimes it might take hours for the chapa to fill up.
Finally we got everyone in and were on our way to Nelspruit, South Africa, our last stop!
The ride to the border was pretty smooth, but once we got to the border things got interesting.
The border between Mozambique and South Africa is really broken down. It looks kind of like a construction site. The “buildings” are just the trailer house that construction manages normally use; the lines are formed by putting chain link fences on either side of the people, it makes you feel like your walking towards your doom.
Once we got through the border we are driving out and have one last check-in with the guards. This is where things got interesting.
The guards take a look at one of the guy’s passports and ask him to get out of the chapa. After a lot of yelling in Portuguese they escort him off to some building. He is the husband of one of the ladies and they have 3 kids in the chapa with us. The weird thing was that two other passengers with us kept shoving the head of one of the kids down under a tarp. Strange right? Finally we realize that they are trying to smuggle their little girl into South Africa!
The husband finally came back after about 30 minutes. He had to bribe the guard to let them through, that’s how things work in Mozambique.
The story was because Mozambique was so corrupt and the little girl didn’t have a passport it was almost impossible for them to get her one. Their only option was to sneak her across.
It was such a crazy experience. I was apart of smuggling someone into another country! The rest of the drive was relatively smooth besides the 4 other border checkpoints with guards searching that we had to to go through. It got old really quick, but there was nothing to do except wait it out.
At last after 37 hours of traveling, corrupt military officials, smuggling a little gril across the border, and sleeping on asphalt in the middle of nowhere we made it to Nelspruit.
Longest travel day ever!!
