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| The "before" picture. (We forgot to take the "after" picture). |
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| Zimbabwe from the bus window. |
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| Mozambique Malawi border. |
We rush out of the house at 7:15 a.m. Tuesday morning for a Johannesburg Park Station, The Ingwe Bus ticket says it leaves at 9:30 a.m., but the gate agent told us to be there at 7. When we arrive, the LED sign reads, “Blantyre 10:00.” We play a few hands of gin rummy and walk a bit while we can.
The bus finally pulls off half full at 11 a.m., only to be stopped by the gate agent running after it. “There is another passenger who just arrived,” he says panting. “We have already made people wait for four hours. This is unprofessional. The people wait for the bus. The bus doesn't wait for the people. We are not waiting,” the older driver shouts back. And the bus pulls into the streets of Johannesburg. We would quickly learn that the Ingwe staff on our bus are excellent advocates for their passengers.
We find the seats surprisingly comfortable. A pretty conductor (stewardess) in jeans, sandals and a checkered shirt accompanies us. She speaks through a mic with too much reverb. She welcomes us with an echo, explaining the on-board bathroom is only for urinating. (She would later come back and tell Annette not to put toilet tissue in the toilet either). She has blond braided extensions and pink toenails. She distributes an unseeded kaiser roll to each of us, followed by a packet of ketchup and one of peri peri sauce. Then, on her second pass, a box from Nando's with soggy South African fries and a delicious quarter roasted chicken. We are thankful of this surprise, as we never made it Nando's – South Africa's largest competitor with KFC – but heard, rightly, the food was good. This is followed by handful of toilet paper to be used as a napkin. Then a styrofoam cup. On the next pass, a choice of Coke, Fanta or Sprite. We choose Sprite and fill the tiny styrofoam cup twice before she sits down.
After some back and forth with the two drivers about how to work the stereo, the conductor plays some mellow Malawian reggae music. A beeping periodically and persistently interjects. It is an automatic and annoying alarm that goes off anytime the speed of the bus breaks 90 km per hour. It can't be shut off. So, we work on welcoming it as a sign we are getting to our destination quickly. Annette and I doze. We wake to the sound of Christian American rap, “gangsta gospel,” as Annette calls it.
We drive past countless signs for game reserves, conference centers and retreats as we work our way north across savannah and through Limpopo. For a moment, we enter a verdant forest, the first I have seen in South Africa. Rocky crags poke out from the top. The road becomes windy and steep. Soon it descends and we start to see the baobab trees. They look like gray sprouting sweet potatoes with their pock-marked bark and wide trunks. They grow larger as we drive north. The conductor puts on Stallone vs. Schwarzenegger DVD and tunes it to Collateral Damage. I remember this movie was about terrorism. It's release was delayed by September 11th. As the sun sets and Arnold leaves Colombia triumphantly, we stop for fuel in Musina. Annette and I each get a delicious Hazelnut Magnum ice cream, a reward for completing one fifth of our bus ride. It is a sort of parting gift to ourselves as we leave the comforts of South Africa.
Twenty minutes later, we reach the Zimbabwe border. We wait in a long, quick, stinky and pushy line for a South African exit stamp on our passport. The stamp comes easily. As we return to the bus, we walk past a dozen pickup trucks, beds piled high with goods and people. One passenger who is late to return to the bus calls the older driver stupid. The driver barks back, grabs his cooler and blanket and leaves the bus blocking the only lane crossing the border. Half the passengers follow, among termite swarms, to coax him back on. Everybody agrees the young man was out of line. “The driver is old enough to be his father. We are taught to respect our elders,” they tell me with a mix of amusement and embarrassment.
The bus driver reboards the bus to sit in traffic for another thirty minutes while we cross a narrow bridge over a river among huge tractor trailers. We wait on the bus for another hour or so as the termites swarm through the open bus door. Finally, the conductor returns and calls us to follow her “fast, fast.” We quickly find ourselves in a line outside the entrance to Zimbabwean immigration. We are hurried into a dusty building with peeling paint while hundreds who were there before us wait in the heat and termites outside. When Annette and I reach window #2, a uniformed gentleman writes “$30 fee” and a bunch of letters on our immigration form. He sends us to pay at window #1. There we wait behind a Korean couple and their son, in his early twenties. And two young white women from the Peace Corps in South Africa. They are headed to Victoria Falls for their holiday. The one from California leans on two crutches as she recovers from a sprained ankle from an ultimate frisbee accident last week. The other is from New Jersey and has braided extensions in her hair.
After a seemingly endless twenty minutes in which all of our fellow passengers disappear with stamped passports, the woman behind the glass takes our passports and three crisp twenty dollar bills. She handwrites a receipt on carbon paper, stamps it firmly six times, and walks our passports to window #3. There we wait behind our Peace Corps friends again while a woman in a beautiful dress with a nametag over the Zimbabwean flag on her chest handwrites our visa stickers. She presses them firmly on our passports, stamps firmly and initials in the stamps. Then she sends us back to our bus and into Zimbabwe.
It is close to 10 p.m. when Annette and I celebrate a successful border crossing with a smoked chicken sandwich and a duty-free 20-rand nip of Glenfiddich. As we pull off, the conductor makes an echoey announcement to applause in a language I don't understand. Then in English, she says the driver has forgiven the passenger. She asks us to thank the driver for this display of character. We clap. She then says a prayer for safe travels in the language I don't understand. The lights of the bus go off and we fight the termites for a while before dozing off to sleep. We wake periodically in the darkness to the speeding beep muffled by the sounds of rain. It seems like it rains all night and well into the morning. The bus stops periodically for police road blocks. I dream of a flat tire being fixed, but it was just a dream.
The bus wakes up around us to a gray rainy dawn. By 8 a.m., the rain clears to reveal a landscape of granite domes damp with rain. They look mystical in the clearing mist. Looks like good climbing. I flip through the Malawi guidebook to sort our our itinerary for the coming weeks. Blantyre, Zomba, hiking, maybe a canoe ride safari among crocs and hippos, beach relaxation in Cape Maclear, maybe Christmas in the mountains in Livingstonia, then a long bus ride to Dar Es Salaam. Lots of good outdoors. Hopefully not too much rain.
The Mozambique border is far smaller and quieter than the entrance to Zimbabwe. Our passports are stamped on the Zimbabwe side in a matter of minutes. When we were boarding the bus back in Johannesburg, there was some discussion among the Ingwe staff about whether we would have difficulties at Mozambican immigration. We are the only passengers who aren't from South Africa or Malawi. We are happy to find the small house that is the immigration office, empty. We fill out our immigration form and report to the desk only to be sent back to complete a visa application. We do so quickly, fumbling our way through the Portuguese form with some assistance. We don't want the bus to leave us or hold all of the passengers up more than necessary. We report back to the desk with $60, two complete forms, two passports. “Wait one hour,” we are told, gruffly. The agent is uninterested in the fact that we have a bus waiting for us.
I find a seat on the step outside where I can keep an eye on the agent. I am happy to see he goes right to work at the one old computer behind the desk, our passports and visa applications in hand, presumably processing our visa applications. Within 45 minutes, we have a stamped visa. We head to the bus, now parked just across the border gate. A young man in military dress thumbs the pages of our passport, tracing our travels with his fingers. He takes enough time to make the conductor appear in her checkered shirt. At her approach, he hands us our passports an sends us through the border gate to our bus.
It is 10 a.m. We are 130 km from Tete, another 540 to Blantyre. One more border to go. And Malawi doesn't require a visa. So this should be the home stretch. Hopefully we will be in Blantyre before dusk.
We are welcomed to Tete a few minutes before noon by an official with a gun. The conductor quickly shepherds him off the bus and into a guard house with a folder of documents. Five blocks later, a female official with a gun stops the bus and jumps on board to check passports. Our crew argues with her that they just checked the passports. First, it is our conductor. Then the driver who isn't driving. Finally, the older driver walks to the back of the bus to confront her. He is close to six and a half feet tall, probably 280 pounds. Shortly, the female official points her slightly rusty gun toward the floor so as not to clip any passengers with body parts protruding into the aisle, and exits.
Outside the window, children bathe in a small fountain. We cross the Zambezi River as children jump in from a brick wall town meters above the far shore. The baobab trees grow bigger and more frequent. Coast and a hard hat hang on one in the middle of lunch break at a construction site. Further up river, a boy washes clothes in muddy water. Termite mounds sprout leaves, camouflaging themselves as baobab Two rows of raised wooden houses, a dozen each, rest roofless. No workers or tools are in sight. Only a few personal clothing items in two.
A man boards the bus with a big blue plastic bag. Inside it are black bags, double-wrapped. They look to contain loaves of bread. I watch him curiously as he tears through the bags like they are wrapping paper on Christmas morning. The loaves of bread are stacks of 500 Malawi kwacha bills. (About $2 each today, maybe more tomorrow). He starts at the back of the bus, trading kwacha for rand, 28 to 1. I give him my last sixty rand for four wrinkled bills.
I see patches of sunshine ahead. And mountains. That must be Malawi. Villages of mud and thatched roof huts reach to the roadside with neatly stacked bags of charcoal for sale. The bright pink and yellow bags look like the huge dried dog food bags I used to scoop out of to feed the dog as a child. But these are netted at the top, so it looks like a hockey helmet across a black charcoal face. Police roadblocks have yielded to potholes and herds of goat and cattle to slow us down now.
The road east reveals a beautiful sunny day among mountains of green and granite. We stop for another passport stamp at 1:54 p.m. as we exit Mozambique. It comes easily. They demand our yellow card before allowing us across the border. Nobody ever actually opens the card to check we have received the correct shots An official card with our name on it seems to be enough.
Annette picks up two rubber-banded styrofoam containers for each of us. One has chicken and greens. The other, a southern African version of fufu. Its the first time I have had greens since Mississippi. They are some of the best I have ever had.
We are greeted on the Malawi side by a cluster of young men all selling the same phone cards. This has become a familiar sight, although we haven't seen it since West Africa. I find it welcoming. We push through for an easy passport stamp, rinse our fingers and board the bus again. But it's empty. The conductor explains that there is an Intercape bus ahead of us. We will have to wait until after them to go through customs.
So, I start reading Old School by Tobias Wolfe. I found it, spine still crisp, in a used bookstore for $2.50 on Long Street in Cape Town. It is good enough writing to keep me reading. I read for a while. Go to the ATM. Buy a Malawian phone card. Text Elaine, our host in Blantyre, that we will be late. Snap photos of the sky over mountains, half storm, half sun. I watch two goats trot across the border without waiting in line or having passports checked. They munch on the roadside grass. I snap a photo of the mountain, nearby, its granite face squinting warmly at me in the sun. A boy tells me the name of the mountain. I repeat it but it leaves my head even before my lips. Another boy is wearing wool gloves. “Why are you wearing gloves,” I ask. But his only answer is to peel one glove back to show his palm underneath.
By 5:32 p.m., the Intercape bus moves. People's belongings are stacked from the sidewalk outside customs to the trailer. Our bus pulls up. Its flanks open. We unload our belongings into a hall, laving the belly of the bus empty so you can see through to the other side. Customs declarations cards are provided. Then Annette puts her bag on the counter, answers a few questions, and brings it back to the curb. My turn next. The woman's only questions are about my wife and why we don't have the same last name. She explains something about benefits in Malawi. I nod and smile without understanding, and bring my bag to the curb.
At 7:04 p.m., the bus departs again, its contents replaced. The light is fading. I read the final pages of Old School to the light from our cell phone. Soon, the conductor announces something about a police stop with too much reverb for me to understand. We all leave the bus. Its flanks are opened again. One policeman flirts with Annette while another points at various pieces of luggage and asks questions. After the police officer realizes I am her husband, he beams, “I want to marry a white woman some day!” Annette argues he should marry who he loves. I tune out and watch the police officer looking at the bags. He points to an electronics box and asks a question. After he explores the second side of the bus, the conductor says something critical to him about everything having just been checked at the border. They go back and forth. We shut the luggage compartments, and reboard the bus. The whole thing seems ridiculous.
Close to 9 p.m., we pull into the back of a deserted gas station in Blantyre. We reattach the tops of our backpacks to the bottoms and argue a cab driver down to 1000 MK ($4) for a cab ride to Elaine's, next to St. Andrew's International High School. It is probably still too much to pay, but it's been a long day. The passenger seats in the cab are still wet from the early evening rain. We make it to Elaine's shortly after 9 p.m., where cold beer, food and good conversation await us. It has been 38 hours since we left Lee and Tabitha's house back in Johannesburg. Close to ten of those hours were spent at border crossings. The difference, on the bus. We will give ourselves a couple of days to shake the ride off. It only took a few hours to learn the language I didn't know is chichewa and the fufu-like food is made with corn. It is nsima (and delicious)! Our next long ride will be to Dar Es Salaam around Christmas time to meet my sister, Mara.
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