In the same way I was positively surprised by the standard of living in Botswana I was also surprised but very negatively by the standard of living in Mozambique...
It is a poor country, and it is as poor as it gets. You can see the devastation of the civil war on the people and the way the live. The Limpopo National Park (The part of the Kruger park that belongs to Mozambique) had no animals whatsoever... not due to the predators as you may think but due to the soldiers and the hungry villagers...
Roads had no asphalt, the "national road" joining Mozambique with South Africa was a dirt track... and there were a couple of places where the "road" disappeared due to some flood in the past so you had to get into the jungle and find the road.
The villages looked like something taken straight from a documentary...
I'm afraid that's not the poor part of the village... that is the village.
But let's back track and start from the beginning before you all get depressed with this story...
The border crossing was a bit more involved than all the others we had done since in this occasion we all had to buy a 50 US dollar visa which is the one you can see on the right hand side
And for that sticker we had to wait for 2 hours and pay 50 US dollars each, not to mention the amount of forms we had to fill in...
When we all got our visas and passports stamped we made our way out of the border and into the "road" which as I said earlier wasn't a road but a dirt track.
Below you can see the "road" and a "road bar" as well.
In a couple of occasions the road just disappeared in front of us and here I have to give credit to the driver, driving a big truck through the jungle it's not an easy feat... The driver just got inside the jungle and found a spot from which we could cross over to the other side of the gap left by the flood that took the "road" with it. Some of the crossings were really tight and narrow but the driver seemed to navigate through them with ease... Not sure what kind of test they have to pass in order to become a truck/bus driver for this kind of adventures but I can assure you not many people would be able to do what he did...
Anyway, for our first night in Mozambique we were to camp nearby a village like the one on the photograph above. The campsite was pretty good, so we put up our tents, made a fire and had dinner...
And at night all the crawlers come out...
Mozambique is an endemic area for malaria carrying mosquitoes and there were plenty of those around but for some reason I never got bitten, although I cannot say the same for some of my companions... This campsite however wasn't too bad with mosquitoes, there were some but not too many since we weren't nearby a river nor any other source of water but in our next destination it was a very different story...
The plan in Mozambique was to spend a couple of nights by the Limpopo river mouth. There was some kind of resort there owned by some South Africans. It was nice but we were the only guests in the place. Which is not surprising considering how inaccessible it was and the state of the road from South Africa... clearly not a place for the mass tourism.
The views were fantastic
And we took the opportunity to go for a walk on the beach, after all those hours in the bus we were all really looking forward to stretch our legs.
And when the night came, we all learnt to play "werewolf", a game that I learnt there and I were to export quite successfully to Australia in a later trip. :-) We all got so involved with the game that even when the generator went off at midnight... we carried on playing using our torches in order to see other people faces.
For the following day, we all wanted to do some exercise, after all the time we spent in the bus for the past few days we couldn't wait to move our legs so we had big plans for the following day...
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