The smell of feces and body odor fills my nose. Not permanently, but for a short while my
brain reels from the pungency. The
sidewalk should be enough for 5 people to walk abreast, but I must maneuver
precisely to tread through the carts, stands, merchandise strewn about the
ground, customers, and vending ladies sitting on chairs. The museu district of Maputo hosts the
terminus of several bus routes and is one of the busier sections of town. I look to the wall of the large market on my
left, notice a small alley and duck in to find some lunch.
Concrete walls hardly taller than my head stretch on for
fifty meters, each with a repeating pattern of metal grates: doors and
windows. The shops don’t look the same,
but the purpose is the same. Each is
between 2 and 4 meters long and deep and each has an assortment of pots,
tables, chairs, stoves, water barrels, basins, freezers, TVs, utensils, plates,
and people. Walking down the alley, my
head swivels constantly looking for where I want to sit down to eat. The shops aren’t full, but I don’t want to
sit down at any old shop. I have to find
the right one, but how?
A person doesn’t really use any one of their senses in a
situation like this. You can’t. Trying to discern the quality of any property
of any shop over the others would drive you mad. Instead, I shut off the omnipresent clamoring
of my internal dialogue and try to sense where to eat. You might call it intuition. It’s something you can learn to ignore living
the rigorously structured day-to-day life in America, but intuition is an
exhilarating thing to follow and through my time in Mozambique, I’ve learned to
trust it.
As much as I’m looking at the shops, I’m looking at the
people running the shops; not in judgment, but in a sense of extending myself
to see who will react and how. An
attractive women lying on the ledge in front of the window grate makes eye
contact, but I continue. A shop is
half-full of people with plates of food in front of them, but I continue. About twenty meters into the alley, I see a
shop with three women having a conversation out front. I decide to stop here and order the feijoada.
Feijoada is a traditional Mozambican meal lacking in initial
appeal. After boiling beans for 2 to 3
hours, you add them to a pot of sautéing cabbage, carrots, onions, tomatoes,
garlic, basil leaves, and some random chunks of meat/bones (chicken intestines
are common). After frying the beans for
a while, you add the water from the boiling, let that simmer for a half hour,
and in the end it comes out as a thick brown mixture. I’ve been trying to cook it for over a year
now, but am still a novice. Feijoada has
great flavor, is cheap, and can satisfy your hunger well when served with
rice. The plate is set on the table in
front of me and my mouth begins to water.
Three ham bones stand out amidst the lumpy, brown mix. After a few shots of piri-piri, the dish
comes to life. My mouth burns a bit, but
the pepsi coming out of the chilled glass bottle soothes all.
You’re not going to find this shop in a travel book. You won’t even find this market in a travel
book. You’ll find the five star hotel
around the corner. You’ll find the
restaurant down the street where a beer is three times the price it is here. People won’t eat here because the street
outside and the market itself are unsightly and overflowing with people. Aside from frugalness, that’s exactly why I
came here.
When I turned 24 I wrote a self-motivating paper about what
I wanted to accomplish in that year; the theme was adventure. While writing the paper, images of scaling
mountains, hiking across plains and splashing through rapids flashed through my
mind. This grandeous image of adventure
is common for everyone. Hemingway didn’t
write any books about market beans.
However, I believe this image of adventure is distracting people from
the true spirit of adventure. A person that
gets caught up in the planning of a great journey could potentially eliminate
the adventure completely. Adventure
isn’t taking a taxi to a luxury tent in the Himalayas, it’s hiking into a
village in the Himalayas looking for a spot to eat and hoping to meet someone
who will offer you a place to stay for the night. Adventure is letting your intuition drive you
into situations you can’t plan and, perhaps most importantly, trusting that
things will work out in the end. You’ll
probably hit some bumps in the road, but that’s what makes an adventure.
Looking at three dry hambones on my plate, inside a dark shop, in a side-alley of a busy market in Maputo, I’m now satisfied. I’ve never seen this place before. I’ll likely never see it again. As I drain the last drop of pepsi from the bottle, I think: by taking the road less travelled, following my instinct, and simply not worrying, I enjoyed doing something I would’ve never planned on doing. I guess that’s the spirit of adventure.
