Life is a Highway

Howdy y’all – did you miss me? Sorry it’s been a while, but I’ve had a very interesting time for about the past month. I’ve been on the road through Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland since mid-December, and I’ve still got to catch a train tomorrow to get myself back to Cuamba.

It all started with a train ride that was supposed to take nine hours and ended up taking 24, so hopefully it won’t be the same going back again… The train itself breaks down all the time, and since it’s the rainy season a heavy storm can (and did) wash away the railroad tracks. It’s an interesting feeling when you’re just chugging along and the train suddenly drops several inches…

I spent Christmas with some team members in Nampula (where I studied language) and we took off early on the 26th to drive to Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a four-day drive, so I was looking forward to the road trip. The roads are sometimes paved, but mostly dirt and full of potholes that could swallow a tank. I didn’t take a lot of photos, but the first here is when we were crossing the Zambezi River. We didn’t have to go across in those canoes; there is a ferry for cars. Which brings me to my next photo… I love this shot because the guard in front of the truck is looking very tough and intimidating, but the goat up on top isn’t concerned with appearances at all and was bleating like nobody’s business. It was cracking me up, but it would have been quite inappropriate to laugh – a lot of things are like that around here... And this was our truck when we reached the southern part of Moz where it became much cleaner driving. Actually we had someone wash the car while we were at the river, or it would have been much worse…

I arrived in Joburg Dec 29th and we had a big retreat for missionaries all around the southern part of the continent. It was a great time to relax in an American-ish environment, and it was wonderful to be able to speak English for a while and to actually feel clean for more than the five minutes after washing. I stayed down there until Jan 3rd and hung out with some other Journeymen – people my age and doing similar work. Here’s a pic from New Years eve with all the others. Yep, I’m the only guy – it’s a hard lot…
So the people I drove down with had to stick around Joburg for a few extra days for medical reasons, and I wasn’t too keen on hanging out in the city the whole time. Joburg is kind of just a big ugly industrial city with a high crime rate and not much going for it. So I mooched a ride off a wonderful family who lives in Swaziland, and then squatted at their house for a few days. They’ve got two young boys who were great to play with, and there was another missionary there my age that was willing to play tour guide for me.

Swaziland is GORGEOUS. It’s mountainous and forested and just great– you can see the green hills behind me in this shot. It looks a lot like Ireland actually. The city this family lives in is surrounded by rocky areas, and on the last day there I talked my tour guide friend into climbing this big granite mountain. This was what it looked like at the beginning, but it quickly turned into a sheer rock face at about a 45 degree angle. We decided to press on despite that it was raining, and we soon found ourselves stranded about 3/4 of the way up without the ability to go any further. Going down was more treacherous, and we both came out with a lot of scrapes and bruises after a few semi-controlled falls… :-)

Later that day I took a taxi-van to meet up with my ride in Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique. Have you ever sat in a position where you couldn’t move anything below your shoulders? At first it’s really uncomfortable, but after a while everything goes numb and then it’s alright… Well it was pouring rain for this leg of the trek, and I was half-hanging out a window because there just wasn’t enough room in the van. The driver didn’t know how to use the break pedal, but I still felt kind of safe because I knew that I was wedged into the back of this van so tightly that it would take the Jaws of Life to get me out anyway. I reached my destination after about five hours, and somehow managed to find the right address in the dark.

It took us five days for the return voyage to northern Moz, but we stopped at beaches, forded flood water, and visited other missionaries along the way. Like I said, I’ll hopefully be on the train leaving tomorrow morning and that will complete one very interesting journey.