Travelling south

This day my trip south begins. I am not sure where I want to go, maybe Tofo which is far south, but maybe I will go to a national park more north. The past two days didn’t work out the way I planned so I will see what the day will bring. On the 7 hour minibus trip to the first trip my left arm gets completely burned, and the skin will peel off for the coming two weeks. When I arrive the brother of the guy who helped me is picking me up and he will put me on the bus south. Unfortunately nobody can really help us by telling when the bus will leave so I choose to take a chappa. This is a minibus with two people in the front and four rows with benches in the back. Normally they squeeze four persons on one bench (for me it seems as a 3 person bench), but quickly I learn that with a bit a tactics you can even squeeze more people in the bus. This is far from comfortable and with my long legs most of the time my legs and muscles are painful. After a few hours the bus breaks down and even almost gets on fire. We have to walk half an hour before we reach another village. During the walk I get ‘protection’ from one of the guys from the bus. He starts walking next to me and doesn’t speak one word English. This is one of the big differences between Malawi and Mozambique. In Malawi most of the people speak a bit English. Mozambique used to be a Portuguese colony, so the people speak Portuguese but also a bit German (which I find out on the last day of my trip in Mozambique). People live in round huts, made of wood with mud against it. Inside it’s dark, which is no problem because people live inside. Women wear African sarongs around their waists and carry all kind of things on their head; wood, buckets or suitcases. When I walk children run to the road and start laughing at me. Probably it is the first time they see a white person and they must think I look hilarious. Most of the time there is only one television in a village where people gather to watch video clips of popular songs or Mozambique television. We get into a second bus but it starts raining very bad. The road becomes a dirt track so we can’t drive quickly. What is supposed to be a 4 hours drive ends up to be a 10 hour drive. During the trip my suitcase falls off the bus together with a goat which is tied up there. Immediate I see that the corner of my suitcase is completely broken, but there is nothing I can do. Until this point I didn’t feel stressed or frustrated and I took everything the way it was. When we arrived in Inchope and I saw my suitcase again and realized everything inside would be soaking wet I decided to go to Beira at the sea and take a proper hostel to let everything dry. This was 24 hours after departure. Four hours later I arrive at the hotel at the seaside in Beira where I first eat breakfast (my last meal was lunch the previous day) and then I open my suitcase. Everything is wet, including my books.