Jo'burg - Maputo

I apologise to those I promised not to take the bus from Jo'burg to Maputo, but at short notice, it seemed like a much, much cheaper alternative to flying. In retrospect, I don't know why I was so worried, maybe the uncertainty of what it would be like. I'm very glad I took the bus, and unless I can find very reasonable flights, I would do it again. This will only confirm Alice's suspicion that I'm a sadist when it comes to long distance travel.

The trip was uneventful; the highlights were seeing a zebra on the edge of Kruger park, eating ostrich biltong and the bus not breaking down. The disparity between South Africa and Mozambique is what fascinated me the most. Everything changed on crossing the border: landscape, people etc. The South African border was air-conditioned, clean and efficient; the Mozambican border was crowded, smelly, disorganised and the staff more friendly.

We waited in the mid afternoon heat while the customs officials went through all our luggage. In the valley below the Mozambican border was a little town called Ressano Garcia. There were lots of mangy dogs, chickens and goats roaming around, and a fellow bus passenger told me that they ate anything and everything: monkeys, lizards, frogs and rats etc.

The remainder of the trip was uneventful. I looked at the arid landscape with little clusters of reed shacks every couple of miles until we arrived in Maputo an hour later.