Perspectives from the Top of Mozambique

After trudging through the discarded Mozambican landscape that separates Mangunde from our destination of Dombe, we were ready for a rest.  This was July, 2012, and five PCV friends, my trusty Mozambican counterpart and I had just walked 100 kilometers in two days from the comforts of our home in Mangunde to Dombe, a distant secondary school and home to two other PCVs.  On our journey we came across a degree of isolation that made our remote mission school seem like a nucleus of development—people who are forced to travel four hours on bicycle for the simple necessity of water.  We were also humbled by the generosity of Mozambicans who had few material possessions.  The sister of my counterpart, a poor farmer, opened her house to six white giants on just a few hours’ notice and offered us food and a place to spend the night. 

Three days later I decided that the blisters on my feet weren’t big enough so I took a four day hike up the tallest mountain in Mozambique.  If you look at a topographical map you’ll see that isn’t quite as impressive as it seems.  Nonetheless, this would be my first tallest-mountain-in-a-country and I felt like I was obligated to try it. 

I set off with another PCV, David, and we really had no idea what we were doing.  We had been told that to find Mt. Binga you have to take a chapa from Chimoio to Sussendenga, get off, and get on another chapa from Sussendenga to Rotanda, a border town with Zimbabwe.  Don’t go all the way to Rotanda though, we were warned, you must get off at the entrance to Chimanimani National Park, which is on the road to Rotanda, then walk 22 kilometers into the park and find Robat (or Robert, depending on how you pronounce it), there we would receive our next clue (I’ve been watching too much of the “Amazing Race” over here).

  We had packed our bags smartly with the only real packable food that you can buy here in Mozambique, cans of “Bom Amigo” tuna, bread that we squashed into our packs and some apples, which interestingly are exotic and expensive fruits here in Mozambique.  No matter how they’re dressed, two large white guys wandering around the busy chapa stop of Chimoio are going to turn some heads, but on this day it was ridiculous.  David and I had our backpacks and hiking gear on, and were stopping at the roadside stands buying large amounts of food.  I probably got asked for apples 10 times between the fruit stand and the chapa. Then a reasonably dressed man on the bus next to me who clearly had enough money to buy food and ride on buses leaned over and said, “I’m asking for your jacket.” And it’s like, “What?  No!  Go buy your own jacket you lazy piece of shit.”  “I’m asking for a tangerine.”  “I’m asking for 10 meticals.”  Sometimes I think people in Mozambique just beg out of pure boredom. 

Anyway, just getting to the chapa through the sea of solicitors was difficult enough. We made the first leg of our trip no problem.  Then we got to Sussendenga where we were supposed to catch a ride to this border town called Rotanda, a town which neither of us had ever heard of.  I bought some road peanuts (in my opinion the best on-the-go snack in Mozambique—moms roast, salt and pack the peanuts into little take-away plastic bags and their kids wander around the markets and the streets selling them for 1, 2, and 5 meticals per pouch) then we began looking for the elusive chapa to Rotanda.  Strangely, we asked a man at the bus-stop there and he replied, “You want to go to Rotanda?  Let’s go!”  He hopped in his pick-up truck, invited us to sit in the cab with him and before we knew it 15 passengers had materialized out of nowhere to fill the back of the truck as if they had been waiting for us to arrive all this time.

The road to Rotanda was dirt and after an hour or so we easily found the entrance to Chimanimani National Park on the side of the road.  We got out of the truck, thanked our driver and began walking into the park.  Now our challenge was to find the park gate four kilometers in from the road and then continue on to find Robat’s house 18 kilometers further down.  This was a strange experience.  Given the poor financial standing of the Mozambican government and its ostensible neglect of all public services like schools, roads, and hospitals, my expectations for a remote mountain post in a relatively unknown national park like this were very low.  I was expecting an unattended gate dangling half open with some broken chains hanging off of it and a faded sign marking the entrance to the park.  When we got to the park entrance, however, it was a hub of development.  A construction crew was fording a river to build a bridge and another crew was stacking cement blocks while building what appeared to be a welcome center.  At the same time park rangers in full uniform walked or drove their Land Rovers from one station to another within the entrance area.  We were baffled and, after spending almost two years in a broken and under-financed education system couldn’t help but think where all of this money is coming from and why it’s being spent on an isolated mountain post instead of the schools or roads that are in desperate need of funds. 

When we got to the check-in tent the ranger was delighted to see us.  He fastidiously arranged his papers and pulled out a sign-in book from inside the tent.  As he eagerly explained to me how to enter my name, nationality, and passport info in the book I couldn’t help but notice that last visitors to the park had come almost a month before.  Now I knew why he had been so excited to see us walking in.  Curiously, I asked him if it’s been a down year for some reason and he replied, “Oh no, sir, it’s been quite busy this year.”  I had to suppress a laugh at this.  And this is why Mozambique is so poor.  Here we are at a remote mountain post that you have to walk four kilometers just to get to which receives one visitor a month and there are more construction workers and rangers than I’ve ever seen in one place in Mozambique.  The ranger also knew about where we were headed and said jovially “Just continue on 18 kilometers and ask for Robat; he’ll take you up the mountain tomorrow.”

So we walked…and walked…and walked…

As the afternoon wore on the oppressive heat subsided and the afternoon sun faded into dusk.  After not too long, however, we pulled up to a small clearing of huts on our left and figured, based on our instructions, that this must be the house of our supposed guide, Robat.  Sure enough we turned into the clearing and a tall lanky man with a baseball cap and a goofy smile approached and greeted us on his bicycle.  We told him that we wanted to hike up Mt. Binga and that we had been told that he was the man to find.  Robat had guessed as much, as there’s not much else two wandering white guys would be doing in his village, so he showed us around his home. 

If I wasn’t tied to my family, friends, computer and all of the other material possessions I hold onto in life, Robat’s little compound tucked into a remote valley of the Chimanimani mountains on the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe would be about as perfect an existence as one could ask for.  His compound consisted of a large clearing with five or six stick and mud huts spotted around the outside.  The houses were beautifully painted with colorful African inscriptions and coated in a red terra cotta clay.  As we walked around, people, goats and chickens gamboled through the compound in the setting sun.  Just 50 yards down a wooded path one could find a pristine river flowing from the top of the distant mountain down and out of the valley.  The river water was crystal clear and painfully frigid.  As a backdrop to the calmly flowing ice water Mt. Binga and its neighboring peaks lifted ominously into the air and were glazed by the yellow rays of the setting sun.  After having recently hiked through the flat and desiccated land between Mangunde and Dombe and seeing people walking hours to simply fill up their water jugs, this existence seemed too good to be true.  Robat grew all of his crops there on the banks of the river and never had to worry about carrying water more than a few yards.

That evening we set up our tent and cooked some tuna and pasta that we had brought to feed ourselves for our upcoming journey.  Robat explained to us that the next day we would be hiking about six hours to the last base camp before the summit of Mt. Binga.  There we would spend the night and on the following day we would summit and make our way all the way back to the house.  As the evening wore on and Robat told us more about his life there in the valley the thermometer sank lower and lower towards freezing.  We knew were still in Africa, but that night it felt like the Arctic.  I put on one layer after another and continually found that it was never enough to keep me warm.  By the time I was ready to sleep I was wearing two t-shirts, a long sleeve shirt, my jacket, long underwear, pants, wool socks, hat and gloves and was tucked into my sleeping bag.  I was still cold. 

The next morning we woke up at dawn, downed some granola bars and set out for the base of Mt. Binga.  The hike was difficult but not grueling.  We stopped at a waterfall for lunch and continued steadily up the valley in order to reach the last base camp, our destination for the night.  We arrived just after midday and hunkered down there for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

The next day we again woke up at dawn for our big summit.  We left of things at the base camp and only carried the essentials up to the top.  The ascent was deceptively steep.  We walked along the face of a ridge that went steadily upwards.  Robat was a machine.  The soles of his cheap tennis shoes were tearing off, but his gangly legs never stopped pacing out the giant steps which propelled him forward.  Every once in a while he would look back and flash his goofy smile to see how we were doing. 

The summit of Mt. Binga came up very abruptly.  I was busy watching the soles of Robat’s feet in front of me, and suddenly I looked up to see that there was nothing left to climb.  I asked Robat, “Is this it?”  We had made it from the base camp to the summit in less than two hours and it seemed implausible, but he said, “Yes, this is it!” and we made our way up to the rock cairn that signaled the summit, the tallest point in Mozambique.  From the top we looked out at the panorama of peaks making up the Chimanimani range and Robat pointed out every one that he and his father before him had climbed and guided people up. It was incredible.  We looked out and saw where Mozambique crosses into Zimbabwe, and the little speck of white that was Robat’s clearing, where we would be eating dinner later that evening. 

The trip down the mountain was simple and relaxing.  After a day’s work we were back in Robat’s compound enjoying the sunset view from his picturesque compound and a hot meal.  I looked once more onto their compound, Robat’s wife giving a bath to one of their three kids in the clearing, the other two kids kicking around a ball of tightly bound plastic bags and his adult relatives cooking and sharing stories around the fire and couldn’t help but reflect on how different life can be for different people.  Robat’s wife, delicately washing the soap out of her son’s eyes, has no notion of what life for people like David and I is like.  If there is one thing I can be thankful for in my Peace Corps experience, it is that Peace Corps has given me an opportunity to see how other people live.  It sounds trite, but it is a simple privilege that very people in this world have ever had: to go outside your own culture and understand that there is more than one way to live and find happiness.  What you do with that perspective is up to you, but to be given that gift of perspective and the power to then decide your own path is the greatest gift that the Peace Corps offers.

The next day we said goodbye to Robat and his family and waked the 22km out of the park to the main road.  On our way out we saw the strangest thing.  There was a bus parked in a clearing a just off of the path.  As we walked by we looked over and saw a group of 20 or so white, college-age girls getting off the bus with their backpacks, putting sunscreen on and apparently preparing for a hiking trip.  The context of it all was so strange that we weren’t immediately sure what to do—go over and talk to them, wave from the path or simply forge ahead pretending we don’t see them.  To clarify, other than PCVs I’ve never seen a group of more than about four white people together at one time in Mozambique, and here we are in the middle of nowhere, Mozambique, hiking from a guy named Robat’s house to a road that nobody has ever heard of at a National Park that receives one visitor per month, and we see 20 white college-age girls all together at the same time.  While I was curious, they seemed to be on a mission, and may have been a little afraid of or scruffy appearance, so we decided to go with the distant wave. 

Once we got to the road, we waited to hitchhike back to Sussendenga where we would be able to find a mini-bus headed to Chimoio.  This road wasn’t exactly I-90.  In fact, in the first hour of waiting a grand total of zero cars went by.  We began to wonder if we might get stuck out here all day.  But, sure enough, after not too much longer and dump truck from the construction site came by on its way to Sussendenga and offered us a ride in the back of the truck.  Talk about scary rides.  We couldn’t see over the edges of the truck so all we could do was feel a sharp turn or a steep incline on the windy mountain road.  Every time the driver would accelerate into a sharp incline we felt our stomachs climb up our throats like on an amusement park ride minus the amusement. 

Despite the exciting finish, we arrived back in Chimoio that afternoon and I took a well-earned and much needed shower.  In just a few days I would be heading back down to Mangunde and getting ready to meet my parents in Vilanculos for their visit to Mozambique.