Stinkiest... place... ever...

Maputo smells like a textbook 3rd world metropolis. Mozambique’s capital, although sophisticated and a damn fine place to eat, marinates in the humid body odour of its three million people, the aggressive reek of the seafood and livestock that feed them, the fuel and exhaust of ancient automobiles in a land that never knew Aircare, and a generous hint of good old-fashioned sewage.

Yet it’s still a lot of fun, since it offers both the cosmopolitan feel and the snazzy food I’ve been so desperately missing in Gabs. Following our early-evening arrival we began last night with a feast at the classy and delicious Indian joint across the street from the backpackers, gorging ourselves over three delightful hours for about $7 Canadian apiece. After a breather, we followed up with a trip to a late-night pastry shop for Portuguese desserts, principally a curious but effective egg tart called a (I’m guessing at the spelling here) pastis do nata, which has since become the mainstay of my diet.

It’s well that the food is so good here, for our lodgings at The Base are less so. The rooms are clean and safe but hot as kilns and perpetually vulnerable to the din of the screaming fools who wander the halls at hours when anyone without fangs or a prehensile tail should bloody well be asleep. The pope’s death watch is playing endlessly on CNN in the shared room – it’s a bit of a downer. The staff are preternaturally unfriendly and more handicap than help with things like street directions and next week’s bookings. Sigh – you can’t win ‘em all, and this is the first disappointment I’ve had in five months in Africa, so I’m done whining.

Today we went a-wandering, after stocking up on enough delicious pastries to last us until we reached the next bakery. During a long banking odyssey (the details of which bore even me, so I’ll refrain from recounting them) we wandered a decent chunk of downtown Maputo, whose streets are universally named after either famous African leaders or celebrated Marxists, a remnant of the now-discarded founding philosophy of Frelimo, Mozambique’s ruling party. Frelimo’s official logo is a farmer’s scythe and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, set against an outsize industrial sprocket of some variety… it’s a bit unnerving.. I saw up front the contradictions of growth and the chaos of the developing world. Maputo’s port and industries are the engine for Mozambiue’s postwar recovery, so there’s a lot of visible money in the town – luxury cars are fairly numerous and banks are as plentiful as newspaper kiosks. Yet this remains one of the world’s poorest countries, and the symptoms of poverty far outweigh the trappings of wealth.

Every journey out of the walled hostel yard entails running a gauntlet of beggars of maddening persistence and occasionally frightening hostility, a distressing number of whom are struggling youth, their age disguised by malnourishment. Street vendors, hawking everything from beautiful cloth paintings called batiks to bootleg Chinese DVDs, cluster around restaurant windows and patios, and can follow a protesting potential customer for literal blocks. Though their aggressive tactics frustrate, I can’t imagine that I’d do any differently if my survival depended on it as theirs does. Kelly, Andrea and I learned to bracket our token American and consummate shopper, Natalie, as we walked down the avenidas. This tactic evolved of necessity, since many were the times one of us would glance back to find that Nat had seen a curious trinket and made the fatal mistake of displaying interest, soon finding herself immobilized, surrounded by a half-dozen or more jostling peddlers.

Eventually, we escaped the gravity of the main drive and the hawkers, who successfully burdened Natalie with at least a dozen pieces and then skedaddled in search of more fertile ground, leaving us free to explore the outskirts of the city centre. We wandered a few kilometres and marveled at the inconsistency of the architecture. The Portuguese slave traders who annexed Mozambique four centuries ago were brutal rulers even compared to other colonial overlords, but they apparently built to last. The large, terraced homes of white stucco they left behind now elegantly house many embassies and government departments. Interspersed are towering, cruel apartment blocks that illustrate the harshness of even middle-class life here. A cage of burglar bars encases each tiny balcony up to about the tenth floor of each tower. Many of the buildings are arbitrarily missing refrigerator-sized chunks of plaster and concrete from their edges, torn away by neglect or violence.

Other scars of the 17-year civil war, now a decade past, are evident even though Maputo itself escaped much of the carnage. At a gas station outside the city, a middle-aged man, begging wordlessly amid the fruit sellers around our car, brandished the remnants of his right arm, crudely severed at mid-forearm, now without prosthesis or even any evidence of medical treatment.

The most frustrating thing I’ve found about the poverty I’ve seen here and in other countries in the region, is that I haven’t had the time to understand it, let alone do anything about it. I just haven’t had a chance to get my head around anywhere other than Botswana, and even there I only glimpse the barest outline of the situation. Every poor country here has different reasons for its poverty, varying combinations of illiteracy, disease, corruption, war, inadequate status for women, environmental degradation, and a hundred other factors I haven’t yet grasped. I could (and probably will) spend the rest of my life trying to get my head around it.