To Maputo

We had to get up early to drop off our rental, after which we strolled around Nelspruit to find the departure point for buses to Maputo. We found no less then three offices and we opted for the cheapest ticket.
Waiting for several hours, we learned our bus had broken down and we were bumped onto a more expensive ride. However, that bus was already overcrowded and, for almost the whole ride to Maputo, I had to stand in the doorway of the bus.

The road to Maputo is good. In fact, it’s the only really good road in Mozambique and it’s been build by South Africans for South Africans.

In the evening, we had dinner at restaurant Zambezia, where we ordered all sorts of things from the menu, without knowing what they were. I ended up with butter, a dry pancake and xima, the local sadza. We were lucky, just before ordering, to find out that several of the dishes we first thought of ordering all contained chicken intestines in copious quantities.

Lodgings

We were staying at Fatima’s. It’s rather popular with tourists, but not rightly so. Service is crap and the facilities are mediocre. Staff forget reservations, are unclear about pricing and rip the guests off with exchanging money.
We would leave for Inhambane in a couple of days and had planned to stay at a guest house there, run by the same people. Upon arriving in Inhambane, we changed our minds and forgot about Fatima’s Nest.

Fatima’s might have been a backpacker’s in the past, not much of that remained now. Sure, there were still backpackers staying at the hostel, but so were middle aged Chinese couples, South Africans with huge 4x4s and complete families with noisy kids from all over Europe.

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