Who wants to be a millionaire???

15 passengers, 1 driver and a baby, along with their respective mountains of luggage filled our van and the trailer behind. I leant against a stereo owned by the guy sitting behind me, at my feet was a car battery.

The Mozambique border was disorganized, you could walk around the foyer among the masses of people and out the other door without obtaining any documentation. In fact, one of my fellow passengers did. At the border posts when we were asked to show our passports though the window, he didn't have one. This sparked an enormous amount of discussion, that I couldn't understand. His wife with the baby was yelling and huffing and looking disappointed and then they started taking about 20 Rand. The whole bus was going through there pockets. There was 20 Rand in coins, which apparently wasn't going to work, then a battle to find change for a 50. Finally the driver took a 20 Rand note to the immigration office and we drove through the border. For $5 Australian, it appeared that the officer had let an unidentified person leave the country. If that was a bribe, to me it seemed a little light on...

When we stepped off the bus in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, I felt a lot like a tourist that had just stepped off the bus. I was overly aware that I was going to be ripped off. There was no taxis, just cars, people grabbing me and asking how much I would pay for my fare. I only had Rand, and I hadn't figured out the exchange rate. I just walked around sulking, and telling them to leave me alone. Only problem with that stragety, as Joel pointed out, was that we actually needed a taxi. We found a taxi, and suprisingly it turned out, got a good rate, and got to our hostel early afternoon.

In Jeffery's bay, I had met Jon, an Englishmen who had been in South Africa for about 7 months. He'd done a game rangers course, and was then traveling with a friend who had since left, and there was still a few weeks before his flight home. I had mentioned quickly that I was heading to Mozambique at the end of the month for a few weeks and he was welcome to tag along. I was a little surprised to get an email from him , but with no idea what exactly he was getting into, Jon agreed to met me in Maputo.

I spent the afternoon wandering the streets of the city, through old Portuguese style apartments, trees, piles of trash and food scraps. People spoke to me in Portuguese, and I just strugged and smiled back. I tired to buy bread, bananas and orange juice, each time producing either far too much of the currency of ridiculously little. I was walking blind.

16 000 Mozambiqan Meticash is equivalent to $1 Aussie dollar. Being a little rusty on my 16000 times tables, I made a cheat sheet of the momentary denominations, which was gratefully copied down by the rest of the hostel occupants, who were also struggling with their hundreds of thousands. To make it really easy, the 500 and 5000 coins are the same size, the 20 000 and 200 000 meticash notes are the same colour, and all the money is so wiltered and tattered that it desintergrates in your hands and nobody really wants to accept it anyway. "Have a bit of respect" Joel argued. "That money has been through a civil war". I kept my ATM receipt that said I withdrew $1 000 000. I looked around a bit for an ATM that would give me a balance, but had no luck.

When Jon Finally arrived, also having suffered border delays, we joined Joel and John, another guy staying in our dorm, and headed down to the Maputo fish markets. Dinner there every night is early. The fisherman set out there catch at at 6pm. You wander through the markets, picking out your fish from the huge selection, spread across the tables. Red snapper as long as your arm, prawns the size of lobsters, garbage cans full of clams.

Despite all the people who were trying to grab our arms and had attempted to consult us on the quality of the fish, the accuracy of the scales, the price we should be paying and there personal opinions of the fish wives, when we picked our catch, we put our heads down and took it to the busiest restaurant.

From there the waitress took our fish, bought us some beers, and without consultation produced the most fantastic meal, having cleaned our fish, grilled and seasoned it. The noise from the market and the squeals of the children as they danced to music in the light outside the restaurants, were all in contrast to the silence at our table as we dug in and ate our decadent meal.

John spoke Portuguese, and impressed us by negotiating with a taxi driver to take us to a club for a really tiny price. Later, his Portuguese came in handy to argue bitterly with the driver when he dropped us off and increased the price three fold, but it got us nowhere.

The club we visited normally had live music, but on Saturday night, it was kareoke...... in Portuguese :) Jon and I laughed at the prospect of getting up and trying to pronounce the syllables in English, following along with no idea of the songs, but it was going to take a great number many more beers before that was viable.

I had just been saying to Jon "Yeah, Joel... nice guy.. bit quiet I think" when Joel crawled up on stage and belted out Neil Diamonds "Play it now", when I had to concede that perhaps I didn't know him that well.

Some of the local performances were fairly memorable as well. One of the guys, dressed in leather pants and long hair had come along by himself and wait eagerly at the front of the stage, only to get a little nervous half way through his song, and had to be helped along a bit by the guy running the show. After the kareoke all the locals got up for a bit of a jam session, which was excellent, but we'd all had a long day and had tried plenty of cheap local beer, and we had to head home before it finished. But in a city like Maputo, we could have been waiting till sunrise for that.

In the morning we headed for Catembe, a fishing village across the water from Maputo. Walking through the streets of Maputo in the morning sun was amazing. The buildings and streets still reminiscent of the Portuguese colony had fallen into disrepair. There are huge holes in street, and parts were the whole sidewalk has disintergrated into rubble. The streets are like living ruins, people passing between the apartment block, children looking out of windows, bright red flowers sprinkled everywhere from the trees above adding intense colour to the weather beaten concrete fences and pavements.

As we pulled into Catembe on the ferry you could see the colorful traditional style fishing boats scattered along the beach. It was such a beautiful morning, so we pent a while just relaxing on the sand, admiring Maputo's city scape.

We had been told the night before by some other backpackers that there was a good restaurant about 2kms up the road. The walk was really lovely. The village is only about 1 km away from a city of skyscrapers, yet there are people living in grass huts and working in the fields. It was warm and everywhere was green.

Once we came to the restaurant, I was a little taken aback by how luxurious the place was considering it had been recommended by backpackers, but in the local currency the food was still cheap.

perched above the beach, the restaurant was part of a luxury hotel. We took a seat on the balcony, complete with view of the skyline of Maputo, the beach, and the pool below. I felt almost guilty being there.

"What do you think everyone is up to in Austraila right now Courtney?" asked John as I tucked into a plate of prawns, calamari, and baramundi steak. I sat back, took in all the sunshine and the view.

"Its late on Sunday night, its winter, I suppose most of my friends would be cuddled up in bed ready for work tommorow" I said. The image of my friends suffering a cold winter brought me no delight, but the question made me realise that at that point in time, I wouldn't trade places with anyone in the whole entire world...