January 2015

The Moz Diary

We are excited as we approach the border into Mozambique.  We have been to the southern part of the country several years ago on holiday, but it is another new country for Cuthbert’s trip and we have not been to this part of Moz before.  The weather is fine, the scenery is lovely, the roads are clear…  all is good in Cuthbert-world 🙂 .

We still hadn’t worked out our exact plan for our time in Moz, but we would head to Tete then decide whether to go up to Cahorra Bassa Dam, or down to Chimoio, or both. None of these are listed amongst Mozambique’s highlight tourist attractions, but we optimistically reassure ourselves that we will find something worth seeing!

Here’s Cuthbert’s diary for the next 24 hrs:

• 10:00 hrs – last fuel station before the border has a power cut and can’t pump fuel. No panic – this only puts us down to our last 1000km of range 😉 , but we have saved plenty of cash to fill Cuthbert before entering Moz, so we now have a surplus of Malawian Kwacha to dispose of .
• 10:10 hrs – there are no banks at the border leaving Malawi and a hideously disadvantageous exchange rate with the money touts. Despite our best haggling, we lose money as we swap our excess Kwacha for Meticals.
• 10:30 hrs – reach Moz entry border. The country isn’t part of the COMESA Agreement, so we need to buy new 3^rd Party Liability Insurance.
• 10:45 hrs – we now have insurance, but Moz doesn’t accept Cuthbert’s Carnet de Passage – which incidentally has been good for every country visited so far! Instead we need to pay for a TIP (Temporary Import Permit) for Cuthbert.
• 11:10 hrs – Immigration accepts our visas and stamps our passports! Hurrah!!!
• 11:15 hrs – we are pulling away to drive into Moz, when a sharp-eyed barrier officer notices that Cuthbert is probably over 3.5 tonnes and stops us: there is a ‘Special’ road tax due for trucks. We argue that we are tourists and not commercial traffic, but there is apparently no exception for private vehicles. “How much?” we ask. It depends on how far we want to drive on Mozambique’s roads. We weren’t sure of our route, but we had two possible exit points in mind. The nearest, Cuchamano would be US$75 and the next closest at Machipanda, would be a whopping US$125!!!!   OK, we pay the $75 for the shorter distance and if we change our minds to the further exit border, we can pay the extra $50 when we get there. We are warned that police blocks will stop us en-route to check that the correct fees have been paid.
• 16:00 hrs – after a quite scenic drive down the 223 to the main ‘103-Tete Corridor’ road, we are parked up at a campsite in a Tete for the night. It is close to the town centre and noisy, but it is the only option for many miles. It is hot, very humid, there are mosquitoes and there is no air movement whatsoever. As we sit and finalise our plans for tomorrow over a glass of Shiraz, we are extremely pleased that we asked Bocklet to install the ‘optional extra’ (life-saving!) roof fan into Cuthbert!
• 19:00 hrs – plan fixed for tomorrow: a leisurely start and a 2–3 hour drive up the road to Cahorra Bassa Dam, to a lakeside camp recommended by the Tete campsite owner. Our guide book rates the drive as one of the most scenic in the country, so we are looking forward to it!
• 09:30 hrs – we get more Meticals from the ATM in Tete (enough for more fuel and to last us for a few days up at the Dam) and we are on our way!
• 09:45 hrs – at the junction where we turn off the main road to head up to the Dam, a police road block stops Cuthbert. He checks our papers… “You go to exit Mozambique at the Cuchamano border, yes?”. “Yes, but first we are visiting Cahorra Bassa Dam on the way to the border”. “Your road tax is not enough to visit the Dam, it is only to go directly to the nearest border”.   Whaaaat???? Cutting a long story short, the only way we can visit the Dam is to pay another $75 to go on the road to get there. And if, after that, we want to go down to Chimoio or make any other detours off the main road, we will have to pay again! OK. Enough already! The cost of driving Cuthbert in Mozambique is getting out of hand. We throw our proverbial toys out of the cot and head straight to the Zimbabwe border!
• 10:45 hrs – at the border leaving Mozambique only 24 hrs after entering!!!   And déjà vu….. the curtailed stay in Moz leaves us with an excess of Meticals, on which we lose more money with a hideously disadvantageous exchange rate from the money touts as we enter Zim! Joy 🙁 !

Reflections on the debacle

Well we can’t credit Cuthbert’s Mozambique story with any label more generous than ‘An (expensive) debacle’!  As we left the country we wondered whether, with a little more diligent planning, it could have been a more successful outing. We pondered a ‘post-mortem examination’ of events ….

First, the route change:   following a tedious day in the Moz High Commission in Dar Es Salaam obtaining an ‘expedited’ visa, we read in the news the next morning that the critical bridges had been washed away and our planned route through northern and central Mozambique would be impassable for several weeks.  Conclusion: we found no earlier, widely circulated media reports of the extreme weather, so it would have been difficult to predict that the rains and flooding would rise to 150% of the ‘seasonal norm’ and force us to drastically change our plans.

Secondly, the road tax charges:  being charged an endless stream of exorbitant road tax fees to take Cuthbert onto any road in Mozambique. Conclusion: none of the travel research that we had previously carried out mentioned these charges. But to be fair, the road tax only applies to vehicles over 3.5 tonnes (there are weigh bridges to check!), so only very few tourists are affected by it; the travel books are not written for heavy-weight overlanders like Cuthbert!  The tax normally only affects commercial freight operators, who of course pass the charge on to their customers.

Putting the two unfortunate circumstances together, and with the advantage of 20:20 hind-sight, we are now thinking that we have been more fortunate than we originally realised.  “How so?” you are surely asking.

Well… our original planned route through northern and central Moz would have been around 1,500 km.  In the end we paid US$75 to drive just 400 km through Tete.  Extrapolating that out, the road tax charges for our intended route would have been over US$280!  And that’s not counting any detours off the main route, which presumably would have been extra!  We have no doubt that the fabled beaches of northern Mozambique are beautiful and we would of course have loved to spend some time there, but forking out so much cash, just for the ‘privilege’ to drive there, has relegated this activity to a much lower position on our list of ‘must do’ activities in Africa.

And finally, putting things into perspective… it’s all part of the ‘Great African Adventure’! No fluffy animals were harmed in the making of this scene 🙂 .  We had a great time seeing the ‘alternative route’ and Cuthbert now moves on to return to Zim to see the bits that we missed on the way north last year.

Here is a quick overview map of our (very short!) route in Mozambique (note: red line = our route on this trip in Cuthbert; blue line = our previous trips in other vehicles).

Tune in to the appropriately named Return to Zimbabwe page for Cuthbert’s continuing story in the Eastern Highlands.