Hello my dear beloveds,
I am back with part 2 of the Malawi – Mozambique road trip. If you missed part 1, here it is Let’s Go To Tete, Mozambique: Part 1 Of 3.
Babedem drove from Blantyre to the border, and I drove from the border to Tete. Call me Madam do the big girl thing. If there’s one thing you can count on in Mozambique is the multiple police roadblocks along the way.
We were stopped twice but passed several police roadblocks.
At Stop 1, they couldn’t find anything wrong with the car nor any documentation, because we made sure we were squeaky clean. Next, they are asking, “who funded the trip?” “what do you do?” “why are we from different nationalities?” “Kenyans require Visa to get into Mozambique.”
Especially on the last one, we were left like Ankolo, we have just crossed the border and immigration didn’t say anything, what are you now telling us? We went back and forth. We spent over an hour before they let us go. They realized we were not going to give anybody money in this economy. One of them literally just came out clearly and said just give us some money and we’ll let you go.
This hour-long conversation was very multilingual; 55% Chichewa, 40% Kiswahili and 5% Portuguese. To some extent I do believe they might have let us go because of the language barrier.
Oh, one more thing, these guys were in a no network area so we couldn’t call anyone for backup either or use google translator for easy communication or show them all articles online that would have proved them wrong.
Now that I think about it, would that have that worked out in our favor? I think not. 3-armed Police officer’s vs 2 foreigners, they had the upper hand.
Police stop 2, They wanted to see if we had a fire extinguisher. He let us go and his mate stopped us, because he wanted money for lunch. To be honest, mandem’s chipped lips were real evidence that he was hungry, but unfortunately, we didn’t have any money to spare.
We didn’t run into more cops and an hour thirty minutes later we arrived at our place of lodging, called Hotel Fatima in Tete. First impression of Tete was Hot and beautiful with clean streets.
Hotel Fatima didn’t disappoint. What we ordered was what we got. Breakfast, the pool. I give it 9 out of 10. Another plus for it is how it is walkable distance to most of Tete’s joints (I will talk more about this in part 3 of 3).
A motivational speaker moment please; When I searched on Facebook, about driving to Mozambique with a foreign # plate, there were more negatives than positives (I don’t think I found any positives). It was very discouraging.
One major thing I have learnt from travel content creators like @popi_sibiya or Pelumi Nubi is that everyone and their mother will try to discourage you from doing some things, choosing some paths, and they might be genuinely concerned, but you won’t really know until you do it hey. Their experience and yours might either be the same or different in the end. What do you have to lose?
This sorta gave me the courage to go on this trip, because weeeeh I had excuses, my Car isn’t big enough. I need a VX for road trip. Meanwhile Pelumi is driving from London to Lagos in a car smaller than mine.
Lemme take y’all back on the car though, I slid into a Malawian Philanthropist Facebook DM’s asking for collaborations. The pitch was – I use her car to get to Mozambique and I will give her free publicity. Hahahahah Jesus, #InMyInfluencerEra, well, she didn’t respond. I don’t blame her, because there are like 100 other people probably asking for help, she might now have seen my message.
Till part 3 of 3, my dear beloved; remember If you don’t ask, you won’t know.
In the meantime, continue to spread, peace, love happiness and blessings in abundance❤️.
JustMissKalea 