Leaving Ilha
Posted By Sika on May 17, 2010
Part of my reluctance to leave Ilha was the sheer work involved in traveling in Mozambique. It’s really not that bad, as far as traveling in Africa goes, but the distances are long, and I was spoiled by the fact that my two most common trips in Malawi were one and a half(ish) or four(ish) hours. In Mozambique, trips were more likely to be 15 hours. And traveling at night was apparently inadvisable.
Heck, I’d finished my Peace Corps service. Proving my cred and worthiness to don the title was even less important to me than before, and I wanted to travel easy. There is no such thing as traveling easy in Mozambique. My guide book, as it had done on so many things, lied to me and made it look like it would not be difficult to fly from point to point in Moz. It also implied that flying back in to Malawi might be possible. This was true—for about US$700, and included an overnight in Johannesburg. The flying from point to point in Moz, though, that was just ridiculous.
For two and a half days I tried to get onto a flight somewhere further south on standby. It was not happening. And the process of trying to get on standby was confusing, pointless, and arbitrary. While the Nampula Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique (LAM) staff was nice and helpful, they were hampered, just as the telephone staff were, by the odd arrival and disappearance of empty seats on planes. The staff at the airport, though, were just rude, speaking English and then pretending they didn’t, refusing to answer simple questions like how many people were already trying to fly standby on the flight, even doing the thing where they’d say they would be able to sell tickets in two hours and then after two hours getting annoyed at you for asking about the ticket status and telling you it’d be three hours more.
I was trying to rev myself up either to spend time in Nampula (a town I really couldn’t see the point of) until flights were available, or to spend three 12-hour days on minibuses on the way down south, when I ran into John again. John was even more over the hardcore traveling than I was, and he had actually gone to a travel agent to see what the options were.
The options were few. Driving was prohibitively expensive, and would involve many hours of driving on rough roads. Plus all the unexploded landmines by the sides of the roads could potentially cause problems. Charter flights were basically nonexistent, and pricey when they did exist. But there was an option, not in the guidebooks, that ended up being perfect.
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