Stepping out and going into the unknown: My Journey to Mozambique

IT was in 2008 when my home country Zimbabwe was going through food shortages and you could not find anything on the store shelf's. We were left with no other choice but to go and buy our groceries from neighboring counties. When my mother suggested this i was excited. I'd had a passport for about 5 years now, but had never once used it , and although the reason for travel was not recreational, i was still excited by the thought of leaving my country and going to a foreign country,a country i had only known by name.

I have always been interested in traveling the world and seeing how different people live and experience new cultures. Though Mozambique is still in Africa it was a good place to start. We took a bus to the Machipanda boarder post. The bus dropped us off at the Zimbabwean immigration office where we got our passports stamped and then we proceeded to walk through the no mans land between the two countries,soon enough we were past the Mozambican immigration and were in the the small boarder town of Machipanda in Mozambique. Already i could feel and see the difference, i was in unknown territory. The people spoke mostly Portuguese ,but because they were in a boarder town they could speak a little of our local language. We were able to be directed to where we boarded a mini Bus to Chimoio a small town 85km from the boarder were we would sleep the night and do our shopping the following day.

In the bus they played music that i later learned was calypso,i had never heard this genre of music but the locals seemed very acquainted to it and were nodding their heads to the beat. I sat there on my window seat and tried to take is as much as i could. At this point i had gathered that Mozambique was not as developed in terms of infrastructure as there were not many modern built buildings or homes. We got to our destination and checked into a B&B that we had been refereed to. The rooms were nice and comfortable and were reasonably priced.

The next morning we got to walk around Chimoio .The town was small and had more of a rural setting. The locals walked around bare foot and most of them would try and sell you something or even water. From what i could gather the town had mostly low income families, it was not what i had expected but it was humbling to see how the locals lived and how life was in rural Mozambique. I had hoped to see more of the country but we were soon done with our core business and headed back home.This was my first time in Mozambique.