The road between Mabalane and Chokwe is not heavily traveled. In fact, only one reliable chapa leaves
Mabalane every day at approximately 3:00.
During the week, one can expect to get a ride on the mini-buses. The weekend, however, presents no such opportunity,
as often times 30-40 people will be waiting in town to fill the one or two
spaces left on the chapa by the time it arrives. As Charlie and I teach on Friday nights until 21:30, this
would be our only option of leaving on the weekends without the alternative,
hitchhiking.
In Portuguese, the term is boleia and is a relatively common
practice among volunteers in Moz., especially along the main Moz. highway where
civilian traffic is heavy.
Mabalane has significantly less civilian traffic, especially on Friday
evenings when we finish teaching and are trying to leave town. However, carvao (charcoal) trucks
travel at all hours and are relatively reliable, although they usually require twice the time to pass the
rough dirt road with their immense amount of cargo.
On this fateful Friday evening of St. Patrick’s Day weekend,
we managed to leave the school at 21:00 and made our way to the road leaving
Mabalane. Our destination was
Macia, where we would find a ride to Bilene Beach for festivities with other
volunteers. We waited for roughly
a half-hour before the carvao truck rolled up. Two gentlemen were inside, the driver and another passenger. Luckily, they were driving through
Macia. We found space to sit
behind the seats and we were off.
Now that we were on the road, I started to do the math and concluded we
should reach Chokwe by 1:30, Macia by 2:30-3:00, and with a little luck get to
Bilene around 4:00 (it’s not the perfect time to get to the beach, but we were
making due).
Through conversation, we found out our driver was from
Maputo, had been driving this truck for six years in order to eventually buy
his own truck, and was hoping to make it home to his wife and kids around 9:00
after dropping off the carvao. We
reached the halfway tree around 23:30 and everything was going well. Then the situation changed. The driver was not going to make it
home the following morning. We
were not going to make it to Chokwe by 1:30 or to Macia by 2:30 or to Bilene by
4:00. No, instead, the driver was
stricken in the head…by drowsiness.
Had you going didn’t I?
I started to notice the driver had slowed down and wasn’t
missing many of the potholes and asked him if everything was ok. He explained that he was tired but was
going to keep driving. He then
proceeded to do two things I never conceived could be possibly done
simultaneously.
He drove the truck while sleeping.
The technique could only have been accomplished because of
the absence of other vehicles on the road, but was relatively simple. By slowing down to a crawl, he was able
to sleep for a good ten seconds before he needed to correct the steering and
save us from going into the ditch, and then nod back to sleep. Even so, the correction took, at most,
two seconds- much less than the ten seconds of sleep he was getting. All in all, he was getting the sleep he
needed while getting us closer to our destination. Revolutionary.
Meanwhile, in the back seat…
While the driver was risking crashing our vehicle into the
bush in the crusade for a few moments of sleep, Charlie, along with the other
passenger, were also sleeping.
This is a prime example of Charlie’s laid-back personality, which I
admire. I was also in the
backseat, but I was not sleeping.
I was watching this madness unfold with a strange feeling somewhere
between fear, admiration, and utter contempt* towards the driver.
*I say contempt because, while I typically try to have a go
with the flow/it’s about the journey attitude, once I have a plan of how
something should work out, or a general time frame of when things will happen,
I absolutely hate when people mess up that plan, and this man was destroying my
plan. Realistically, waiting and
changing plans is the typical experience of PC volunteers in Moz. and I’ll be
tested many times over in this during my service—but back to the situation at
hand
I know what you’re thinking, “Why didn’t you get out of the
vehicle?” To be honest, this is
what was suggested in our training and the thought crossed my mind for about a
half a second. I need to reiterate
that this road is through 70 km of African bush and that we saw NO other cars
on the road after we left Mabalane.
For me, walking here was not an option. And besides, I had a plan of when things should work out,
and when I can, I stick to the damn plan.
Our drivers system of driving continued for the next three
hours until we reached Chinhakanine (a trip that normally takes 45 minutes to
an hour from the halfway tree). It
was now 2:30. We were 2 hours
behind schedule. I was furious,
but we at least stopped to stretch out our legs. During our stop, the driver broke open a watermelon and we
had a snack. This calmed me down
quite a bit, the driver appeared to be rejuvenated and I started to redo the
math. From Chinhakanine the road
is paved and travel is somewhat less painful and quicker, so it should take us
a half hour to reach Chokwe, 3:15; an hour to reach Macia, 4:15; and an hour
and a half to reach Bilene Beach from there, 5:45. Not so bad, we’ll make breakfast.
About 15 minutes into our drive, I noticed the vehicle
starting to slow down…and then the serpentine pattern started again…the driver
was sleeping again. And I had such
high hopes for us. The creeping
continued for another 20 minutes before the driver stopped and said he was
going to take a nap. I would have
slept too, but I was furious and hated my way through a couple levels of sudoku
on my phone. A while later,
the driver awoke and we drove through Chokwe at 4:00.
We were now through Chokwe, on our way to Macia, and then
the swerving started again…NYYYAAAAHHHHHH!!!
Of course, I didn’t actually scream. Instead, I just thought about the beer
waiting for me in Bilene. After
about an hour more, we pulled over at a gas station. But the gas station was closed, and I was uncertain what we
were doing there. It turned out
that the driver’s brother was also on the road last night and his small truck
(think s-10) was broken down. So
we got out, gave him a push, and got him running again. I switched vehicles to the smaller
truck and was happy for the extra leg space. I was also happy to escape my self-created realm of hatred
in the carvao truck. We we’re
still driving slowly, but I felt a little more comfortable. The sun was rising when we started to
reach the outskirts of Macia. It
was a beautiful morning.
A mist exaggerated each beam of sun shining through the
groves of trees and a strange sensation washed over me. I started to look closer at the grass
and trees near the road and it was almost as if I had traveled back in
time. I could imagine monkeys and
leopards in the trees. I started
to think about what this place could have been like before humans. The absolute serenity of the moment
seemed to clear my mind and remind me how fortunate I am to be living in such a
beautiful world. And then the
truck broke down.
I would guess we were about 5 km’s outside of Macia at this
point, and the morning traffic was passing by fairly steadily. Charlie and I likely could have hopped
on with another vehicle, but I surely wasn’t giving up on our group now. The brothers spent a half-hour
attempting to repair the truck before we hooked on the carvao truck and made
the rest of the journey in-tow. We
arrived in Macia at 7:30. It took
us 10 hours to make a 160 km trip.
A 10 mph average.
Charlie and I watched our fearless
chaperones disappear around the corner heading south and ourselves headed east
out of town after grabbing some bread for breakfast. We caught an awesome boleia to Bilene, and walked to our
hotel to the greetings of our fellow volunteers who were enjoying breakfast. My
St. Paddy’s turned out to be one of the best I’ve had with a crew of incredible
people, but that’s another story.
This story is about the journey.
