I’m glad I was able to get some rest, getting up a little before 5am. Because I was going to need it.

The goal for the day was Kruger National Park, over 7500 square miles of wildlife that is mostly in South Africa but also spills some into Mozambique to the east and Zimbabwe to the north. It was where Ash did his first Safari in 2015 and he was looking forward to me being able to see some of it. Note: when he did it, he was already in South Africa.

We knew it was at least a 2 hour drive, although our guide from yesterday, Flavio, assured us it was an easy drive under 2 hours.

He never once said anything about the border.

We got an early start by getting to the steam room right after 6am when it opened. The hotel gym is a nice one and is open for membership for locals, which is why the locker room is so big.

Men and women have their own spa areas. This included showers, jacuzzi, sauna, and steam room.

We had breakfast and were on the road by 7:20am. We figured we would get to the park by 10:30, although Google was saying 9:30 but we didn’t believe that for one second. 

You might as well grab something to drink and settle in for a story. 

Now would be a good time to talk about the general uneasy feeling I’ve had driving around in this city. Thankfully, Ash isn’t bothered by it At All; he’s driven in much more chaos than this. And is doing an amazing job driving a stick with a right side steering wheel on the left side of the road.

All of that adds to my anxiety about the whole thing. He loves it. Usually I’m the calm one so it’s a nice reversal of roles.

The traffic itself is fairly organized as far as lights and signs go. Here’s what complicates it:

• People just crossing the road every which way, often right in front of you
• People trying to get you to buy something or sometimes just outright ask for money, which they have time to do because traffic is slow
• And it’s slow because of the people, walking in the middle of the street trying to wash your windshield for money, crossing carrying baskets of things on their heads, etc.
• Or cars just stopped blocking traffic because there is so little parking

And that’s in town. All of that increased 10x at the border.

Remember the last border crossing? A stop in both countries for passport and vehicle registration checks? This was that x100.

It was roughly the same process. But So Many People – in the lines to get across, trying to sell you stuff, now including currency exchanges and SIM cards.

We had probably been at a crawl for 20-30 minutes in this chaos by the time we approached the gate around the Mozambique immigration buildings. Liking to document things for the blog, I snapped a photo before we passed through the gate.

That was the wrong thing to do.

A guard noticed, approached me and asked for my phone. “Why are you taking a picture of me?” He found the photo and sure enough he was in it. I said “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in it, we are just travelers documenting our trip. I will delete it.” He stood there and watched me do it, making sure I went into Deleted to remove it from there. Then waved us on.

You may recall the other day I mentioned my irrational fear of border crossings. I say irrational because in over 30 of them nothing has ever happened. So far so good.

But my adrenaline shot through the roof.

We were supposed to park and go inside. The parking lot was chaos and the line to get into the building was way out the door. A random guy waves us over to park in this random space and says he will get us in and out quickly for 300 rand, South African currency. We didn’t have any of that so agreed on 500 MT, the Mozambique currency. He takes us into the building around the back and through the exit then asks for the money. We’d used our smaller bills on the roughly 300 MT we paid in tolls to get this far. The smallest thing we had was 1000 which he took, saying he would need extra to pay the bribes. Ash watched him pay the woman at the counter to stamp our passports showing an exit of the country. And also watched him pay the guard when he stopped us on our way out. We got in our vehicle and continued the trek.

We were on our way. But it took another 20-30 minutes to go maybe only 300 feet to reach the South African side of this process. We found a place to park pretty quickly, but once we got behind the fence, we saw that the lines to get into the building were even more ridiculous than the Mozambique side. Again, a local person identifies us as Americans, asks for $5 to take us to the head of the line. We agree since it worked the last time. He asks for another $5 for the bribes. That all made sense to us. By the way, Ash had just told me that this is how he has gotten through other tricky borders in way worse areas than this so none of this seems unusual to him. What do I know? This is all new to me.

Dude literally takes us to the front of the line and has us crawl through the barrier and says to go to counter three. It is so obvious that we are cutting people start complaining. And understandably so because again, the lines were stupid long. Short version: the guy at the counter was not going for it, asked us to identify the guy that we gave money to, and of course he was gone. So he sent us back to the end of the line. Not before I had visions of us in handcuffs. For the 2nd time that hour.

At that point our estimate was it would be another two hours at least before we got to that window again. By this time it was after 10:30. And we’re probably another hour to the park assuming we made it across the border. We asked if there was a way to just turn around and the guards were actually quite helpful on that subject.

The number of cars going the wrong way made it tricky but we finally got to the Mozambique entrance counter where there were very few people. We explained that we never actually crossed into South Africa, we gave up and we’re just going back to our hotel. They shrugged and stamped everything they needed to stamp and we were on our way again. At this point, it’s about 11 AM. Over 3 1/2 hours on the road and nothing to show for it except we spent some money for nothing. What can I say? We are always happy to contribute to the local economy when we travel.

For the most part, the trip back to the hotel was uneventful except for a good couple of miles on and off of the same kind of chaos with people as described above. This was when the window washers really came out. We noticed that we hadn’t seen any yesterday, and we realized it was because they were boys out of school for Saturday. And they were out en masse.

When we got to the hotel, the parking lot was chaos again. Lots of people out, dressed in traditional Eswatini garments. Ash asked one of them if they were performing, because they reminded him of the dancers we saw when we were there. But I had a feeling this is just how they were dressed and it was for some an event.

Remembering our encounter with the Prince, who said he would be in Maputo for his sister’s wedding, we asked if they were here for a wedding and they said yes. Still more on that story later.

We waded through lots of very rich people in the lobby, dressed in both the Eswatini garb as well as very dressy western clothes. We dropped off our passports and Mozambique visas and made our way out again. We were in search of lunch and pedicures.

We had said at dinner last night that we would return to that place and so we did. The same guy that helped us last night was there again for lunch today. He was just as kind and helpful as he was the night before.

We asked him his name: Vasco. Well, of course it is. He spoke the most beautiful English I’ve ever heard.

We made it to the nail place a little before 3 PM. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood right in the entrance of a gorgeous park. It was very crowded, but we were happy to see there were other men there waiting. I had wondered out loud if it was culturally weird for men to get pedicures here, but that made me feel better about it. So many African countries are so very anti gay that I just wonder about these things. We made an appointment for 5 PM.

The pedicures were a huge success. We typically get them once a quarter or so. Ash had gotten one in Lisbon about 6 weeks ago but I was long overdue. As the lady who got to work on me shared with her co-workers in Portuguese!

Like our haircuts, we had been saying for weeks I would just get one here so I had looked for something near the hotel before we even left home. It looked nice in the photos with good reviews and fairly close to where we were staying.

It turned out to be a very high end place about a mile directly south of our hotel. They sat us next to each other. And so much for my worries about them thinking it was strange for a guy to be there: there were 5 of us out of 10 chairs!

This nice Portuguese guy was across from us with his wife and teenage son in the 2 chairs to the left. He spoke perfect English and offered to translate for us if needed. Their 6 year old (or so) joined them later, he had been playing in the park you saw earlier.

The best part? We each got a mani-pedi for a total of $50 including a very generous tip for these parts. Wild.

One final comment about the people. Despite all the chaos, I definitely get a sense that these are just some very poor people trying to eke out a living the best way they can. The average daily wage for Maputo citizens according to some sources is about $33 a day. We tipped the girls at the salon, all four of them, the equivalent of $3 each. it was pretty clear from the smiles on their faces that they were not used to that. It just reminds us how blessed we are. 

Spicy Thai was on our way back to the hotel. We had passed it earlier and decided then we would have dinner here.

We shared chicken and mushrooms, and cashew chicken. They were both really good.

It was a nice place and we sat by an open window enjoying a nice breeze.

We talked about our day on the way back to the hotel. Ash admitted that the drive this morning was exhausting. The people stuff in the city doesn’t bother him, but he said the border stuff was a bit much even for him. When that guard was pissed about the photo he thought we were going to get arrested. I’m glad it wasn’t just me! Apparently, this is our week to piss off border guards.

We did a nice round in the steam room once we got back hoping to sweat out the adrenaline hangover that at least I still had. We are glad to be back safe and sound. I’m sitting on the balcony, enjoying the breeze and Ash is already in bed. I will get there soon.

Tomorrow the plan is to go to the Maputo game reserve. You’ll have to check back in to see how that goes.