Homeless in Maputo

Posted on 8 September 2009

No matter how well you plan ahead there’s always going to be a hiccup somewhere along the way. This time it happened on night one of a 10-day trip to Mozambique.

It was a stressful start, arriving in Maputo to discover the backpackers we were booked into had given our beds away.

We bumped from guesthouse to hotel over the next couple of hours, but everything (within our budget) was full. It sucks being homeless in a strange city, especially after dark, but we eventually found a ‘luxury’ room for R360.

From the outside our hotel was quite important looking, with bright, international flags and a formal lobby with pink walls. Inside, it was a different story. Not that it was bad, just a little special.

The porter gestured for Warrick and I to follow him, along with four other guests and led us to the lift. We waited for it to grind to ground floor and all seven of us (plus luggage) squashed into its narrow cavity, ignoring the ‘max four’ note sticky taped to the door. There was some nervous gabbing about the structural soundness of the cubicle and one man began extolling the virtues of old-fashioned engineering – just before the lift unexplainably slipped one and a half floors, stopping midway between the doorway and the wall of next level. ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, I hate these lifts’ wailed the man’s wife, to which the puzzled looking porter pressed the lift button and up we whizzed to the top floor. No problem.

Telling the others to wait, he led us to our luxury room, roughly half the size of an enclosed balcony of a small flat. We crammed inside and our porter began pointing out the room’s virtues. There was a bathroom, with toilet and shower, a bed, a cupboard and even a TV. Others were that it was a dirty cream and had fat, clanking drainage pipes tucked into the corner.

Warrick squeezed into the opposite corner and stood on his tippy toes to try and get it all into a picture. I think he managed to capture about half the bed and the pipes. It did have a great view, however, once you stood on the bed to force open the head-level, dirt-encrusted window.

We left early the next morning, none the worse for wear, but this time we took the stairs.






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