Day 1 in Maputo: Shielding myself from bat excrement

I put a printout of my online visa in my passport before getting off the plane in Maputo; I had applied for it some two weeks ago and received it within a day. I was not sure then why the process went so smoothly, but I would soon find out why. Spotting my printout, the lady sorting people into queues asked me to stand by the side until she had sorted the rest of the passengers. When that was done, she pointed me to one of the glass cabins; I was not sure where to go, but glancing at my printout, I saw it was not a full visa but some kind of pre-approval receipt, so I went over to the pre-approved counter.

The immigration officer did not speak much English and the best I could give her in response was Spanish with a Portuguese accent. It turned out I was meant to print out my hotel booking and my return ticket. I professed my ignorance and asked where I might do that, and I was pointed to a little room where a thin young man seated behind a desk told me to send him my documents on WhatsApp so he could print them for me. Like most people in Mozambique, he had not the slightest idea of where the Czech Republic was but now believes we all speak German because I confirmed to him – when I said we are close to Germany – that I do indeed happen to speak German. Having printed my documents and brought them back to the desk, I was shocked to be reminded that the visa to Mozambique costs 150 US Dollars. I did not have a fifty-dollar note on me, but the officer asked me to wait a few minutes while she went off to find change.

One of my first impressions of Mozambique was the friendliness of its people. I asked a police officer where I might find the currency exchange, and she walked me to it while asking me, with genuine curiosity, why I had come to Mozambique and what I hoped to do there. I was embarrassed to tell her how little time I was intending to spend in the country – a day and a half in Maputo – so I fudged and said I might go to the National Park, which I already knew was completely farfetched.

Outside the airport, I was surprised that I was not being approached by any of the taxi drivers. There seemed to be an invisible line somewhere between the exit and the parking lot, where the drivers stood chatting in front of a few yellow vaguely taxi-like cars. I walked over to one of them and (after a brief moment of polite haggling) took a ride to Workers’ Square. Workers’ Square, or Praça dos Trabalhadores, is where Maputo’s Beaux-Arts Central Railway Station stands, flanked by vendors and buses in various stages of disrepair, some of them apparently grounded for good. At the centre of the square stands a very angular 1930s monument to the victims of the First World War, a bare-chested woman standing over reliefs of crouching soldiers.

Despite having a heavy backpack and the city becoming warmer by the minute, I decided against going straight to my hotel and walked along the Avenue of the 25^th of September (the beginning of Mozambique’s ten-year-long War of Independence). The avenue is lined by historical buildings from the colonial period like the Central Market and the National Library, and walking towards the sea from the road, one reaches the Fortress of Maputo, which was built by the Portuguese in the location of an earlier Dutch fort, followed by a fort built by the Austrians. Nowadays the fort discreetly houses the equestrian statue of Joaquim Augusto Mouzinho de Albuquerque, the governor-general of Mozambique, as well as the remains of Gungunhana, the last ruler of the Gaza Empire. Gugunhana had rebelled against Albuquerque’s rule and was taken to Lisbon before dying in exile in the Azores.

The Fortress of Maputo is relatively small and so is the museum inside it, but a ticket costs only fifty meticais. Approaching it from the north, I had the distinct displeasure of coming from the less visited and therefore less manicured side, which is covered in trash and reeks of human waste.

From the fortress, I walked up to Tunduru Park, where I at first thought I had crashed a wedding party before realising that there was not just one but several couples getting married. The whole town seemed to have descended on the park singing, dancing, and wearing colourful clothes, the last of which was the reason why they studiously avoided the bat colony on one edge of the park. Lacking this key insight, I was walking under a tree and fortunately, the poo destined for my head was caught by my umbrella. I spent some time walking around the park and watching the wedding parties. At one point, a lady staggered up to me in her high heels and asked me to walk her down some stairs – I did not understand what she meant until she grabbed onto my arm and started leading me down, laughing.

I ate lunch at a Korean restaurant, which was one of the few restaurants I could find near my hotel or, indeed, the city centre. I would later come across European-style restaurants with terraces in the more residential southeast, but I had already decided I would eat my leftover aeroplane meal for dinner. After that, I checked in and left all the superfluous things in my bag at the hotel.

Following lunch, I walked to Independence Square, the symbolic centre of Maputo. On the eastern end of the square stands Maputo Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, a dramatically tall and strikingly white building made of concrete and cement. Completed in 1944, it has a few details reminiscent of Art Deco but the full impression it gives is austere, like a gothic church stripped to its essentials and rendered in low resolution. On the northern end, the square is bordered by the hefty neo-classical City Hall, and the western side is delineated by the administrative tribunal.

At the centre of all this stands the statue of a waving Samora Michel, the leader of Mozambique’s struggle for independence and its first president. Like several other statues I have seen in Southern Africa, this one was built by the North Korean company called Mansudae Overseas Projects. The ties between North Korea and Mozambique date to the 1980s when Pyongyang established a military mission to support FRELIMO – the Mozambique Liberation Front – in the Civil War that followed Mozambique’s independence.

I did not enter the cathedral as a wedding was underway and continued instead to the Casa de Ferro, a prefabricated metal building imported from Belgium in 1892 for Mozambique’s governor-general. Nowadays, the building serves as a small art museum for contemporary Mozambican artists, and the man in charge of collecting entrance fees also runs an art shop on the ground floor.

It was still quite early in the afternoon, so I decided to visit the Museum of Natural History. However, when I made it to the gate, I found that the museum was closed. Having made it this far, I kept walking until I reached the Jardim dos Namorados, a public garden that overlooks the ocean in the east and the glass and steel buildings of modern Maputo in the north. I then followed Nyerere Avenue all the way to the Avenue of Mao Zedong and behind it, the Avenue of Kwame Nkrumah, which is home to the striking Church of Saint Anthony. The modernist structure is shaped like an upside-down origami blossom, letting light seep in through stained glass at the very top and from the sides in between the “petals.” I made it there well before closing time, but it felt deceptively late, so I caught a tuk-tuk back to my hotel from the intersection of Mao Zedong Avenue and Kim Il Sung Avenue.