Maputo, Mozambique

Strangely, it was more convenient to fly north to go to Africa. We were lucky with weather and timing, we enjoyed evening views of Stockholm (and Lidingö!),

and were in Addis Abeba in the morning. A bustling, not too well organized airport (On our way back, the lights in the airport went out, flickered and went out again and again. The waiting passangers just laughed.)

Lake Malawi

Kilimanjaro and Mt Arusha

Flying south the views were mostly unimpeded by clouds, and we had a good look at Mt Arusha and Kilimanjaro, Lake Malawi – as huge as the sea, the uninhabited spaces and the prominent greens of irrigated fields in parched red and yellow landscape.

The outline of Maputo from the air was right out of a glossy broschure.

Maputo

Matola

Maputo is a strange mix. One part well kept old Portuguese buildings - the railway station, designed by Gustave Eiffel is considered one of the 9 most beautiful railway stations in the world -  some of the hotels, some former private houses and mansions now serving state institutions or the new elite, one part "socialist" apartment blocks in various degrees of disrepair, one part gleaming new department stores and bank buildings  - and an enormous number of informal housing, huts with corrugated iron roofs, stretching as far as you can see in all directions. The house walls facing the major roads are neatest - painted with ads for the dominant phone company. And everyone carries a phone, you can see a woman carrying a huge can of wallpaint on her head talking on the phone as she walks

One of the most prominent features of the city center is the disastrous state of the sidewalks - you can literally not walk ten meters along the city´s central avenues without encountering a deep hole or a few square meters of pavement missing. Walking is made even more difficult by the parked cars which in daytime block the sidewalks. The cars are many, often large and surprisingly modern (we are told most are second hand imports from Japan), and the morning and evening traffic slows to a crawl for several hours.

The huge amount of garbage all over the city - on the pavements, in the streets, on every green spot and contruction sites - is another striking feature, the most amazing thing being that these makeshift garbage dumps are seen even just outside the city´s better hotels. 

All the streets in the city are named for the African

heroes of the liberation wars, Of course you find The Eduardo Mondlane avenue and the Samora Machel Avenue but also Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Kennet Kaunda, Patrice Lumumba, etc, etc have their avenues.Except for such prominent communist leaders as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and Friedrich Engels the only non-Africans to have an avenue named for them (as far as Annika could see) are Salvador Allende, Olof Palme and – Kim il Sung..

According to our guide book Maputo should be a city ideal to explore by foot but it seemed that the author had not taken into account the poor state of the pavements and the traffic (no driver payed attention to traffic lights, let alone to pedestrians). The prudent way to cross a street was to hang on to a mother with small children, hoping she knew what she was doing. During daytime, all streets are crowded, but except for the traffic Annika felt safe exploring the city by foot and truly enjoyed her 4 hour-long walk.until she happened to go an avenue too far and ended up on Avenida de Guerra Popular where a huge street market was going on and the people were practically packed solid. That led to the sudden disappearance of her iPhone from her backpack, which could have happened in any crowd and she just blames herself for being careless. But one does not expect to be robbed, almost all shops have guards, many wielding submachine guns, and as there are ministries and presidential compounds in the neighbourhood, military is much in evidence.

Maputo does not boast many traditional sights apart from the old Portuguese fort and City Hall, but the city as such is a great experience. Quite striking is a statue of Samora Machel, a gift from North Korea, that stands in Praca Independencia and the railway station really deserves its reputation.

The main roads leading out from the city are, apart from garbage, lined by stalls selling everything imaginable, fruits, fast food, grilled fish, drapes, dresses, car exhausts, furniture, doors, concrete blocks...

 A huge amount of building is going on everywhere. Roads are being built with foreign capital and whole new districts of family housing by private owners, at far edges of Maputo and in its satelite city of Matola. All land is state owned in name, and can not be bought or sold, but "traditional owners" exist, and house builders must compensate them either directly or via the municipality, and are considered to obtain some type of permanent land usage right.

We had the opportunity to see the houses being built by two of my students(middle age university teachers with professional wives),  in Maputo and Matola. The striking feature was the large size of the lots and the houses (one with a pool and an outer kitchen and staff quarters in an outhouse), and the high building and equipment standard. However there is no mortgage financing, and the families bury most of  their spare cash in the house projects which may take ten years or more. Home owner associations with compulsory membership finance all water, electricity, roads etc which are nominally the responsibility of the city, but would never materialize. They even built the police station and supply food to the policemen. It is a strange sight to see rows of beautiful houses along a dirt street which may become unpassable in heavy rain.

Domestic staff is not covered by minimum wage rules, thus all my students had at least one full time help to do the chores and the cooking - we were told that there are cases of people who would even work for just food and lodging.

An interesting experience was a retail/wholesale fruit and vegetable market at the edge of the city. Apart from those selling oranges from lorries, practically all the sellers were women who apparently trade on their own account. All trade is by volume, we saw no scales at all. Some of the prices were ludicruously low - you could get a perhaps 20 kg box of local tomatoes for 5 meticales, about 0.20USD.

The middle class eateries in central Maputo are surprisingly expensive, on par with capitals of western Europe, and even the very basic university cafeteria was definitly not cheap - particularly when seen in relation wage levels (a trained nurse salary 200USD/mo, medical doctor´s starting salary 600USD/mo), let alone to to the country's GDP - 1200USD per capita at PPP, almost 50 times lower than Sweden.

Fish, peixe vermelho and garoupa, and prawns are the flagship dishes, very good taste (excellent in Annika´s opinion), but no real surprise. Petr tasted for the first time bacalhao, and the taste was very similar to "lutfisk". He enjoyed the more surprising part of the cuisine, sauces that go with fish or chicken, based on pumpkin or cassava leaves, with groundnuts, coconut milk and prawns. A common fast food were puff pastry pies, Petrs favourite was spicy beef and cheese filling. To his delight, European style cakes were common.

Our hotel, Monte Carlo, billed itself as 5-star at 3-star prices, we would say the other way round, but hotel prices are outrageous in Maputo. Service standards are good compared to Sweden, but "service with a smile" seems to be a slogan no one has ever heard, although people were not unfriendly, ”simply doing their job” as a guidebook put it. Trying as heard as we could to be friendly, we elicited some response at best in one of ten cases.

Petr`s students took us a bit around by car, one of the interesting experiences was the life along Avenida da Marginal, a main road leading out of the city center along the edge of the ocean. All the coastline was at ebb a wide sand beach. We could see people digging for mussels by the bucket (we did pick up a few shells as memories and Annika  was presented a beautiful shell by a schoolboy), large groups of people being baptized, some, very few, boys play in water - its early spring, after all.  Near the city there is a promenade walkway along the  waterfront, beloved by guidebooks. Annika decided to walk back to the city along it, but apparently the guidebook authors did not see the walkway in real life, just copied from a description from times long past. Not surprising, after all Mozambique is one of Africa´s poorest countries and the walk way as such, lined with palms and with a view on the Indian Ocean was beautiful.

At the airport on our way home, we were surprised to see a stewardess carrying a huge round cake past the security. Eventually, we learned that 11th Sept is Ethiopean New Year, and aboard Ethiopean Air, everyone was treated to a piece of cake, a perfect end to a great trip!