Category Archives: Travel

Last day in Maputo! …until we come back to catch our bus to SA

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We woke up early and walked down to the TCO office to purchase the tickets that Alex had been unable to finalize the day before without my passport. The lady remembered Alex and literally went over her penciled in booking from yesterday with pen to make it official. Once she was finished filling out our tickets we proceeded to pay her more then the total price assuming she would be able to provide us with change since the taxis we took every night did– we were wrong. The TCO lady told us it had to be EXACT change, so Alex and I searched through our coins and bills to find our smallest denominations in order to give her an exact amount. We finally succeeded but providing small exact amounts in meticais is not easy for foreigners who are getting their money from ATMs because the smallest bill ATMs will provide is 200 & the smallest bill in Mtc. is 50 (that we have seen), coins only go up to 10 Mtc. so there is a big gap in the currency, which is inconvenient for providing exact change. Continue reading →

How to Get to Vilankulos and the TCO Bus Office (Day 3 – Maputo)

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Today started out a tad late as these beds at Fatima’s really do little to recharge you at night, they simply allow you to lie back, close your eyes and wake up just as sore and tired when you went to bed.

We set out to get notaries of our passports as Lonely Planet advised due to police checks. The whole process was about 30 Mts for both Alisa and I and was done on Vladimir Lenin just south of Mao Se Tung where Fatima’s is located.

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Day 2 in Maputo

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We woke up this morning with clouds in the sky and a fair amount of wind. Today was the day we had planned to do research on ticket/ bus costs and make the decision on whether to just go north as far as Tofo or go up to Pemba, however we forgot it was Sunday. Everything but the restaurants & Internet cafes were closed. We should have gone to do our research on Saturday but we got a late start & I was focused on visiting the cultural/ historical places listed in Lonely Planet.

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Into Mozambique Day 1

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2105 29 May

We crossed into Mozambique this morning around 4 am on a uneventful bus journey from Joburg. I was surprised at how well the management of the bus went, as they handed us tickets for our bags that went in the bag carriage and did counts of people on the bus at each stop. When we were here before we had only rode Intercape once or twice, but they have upped their performance since.

The border was just as rowdy as many other African borders we have crossed before. However there was much less cohesion as a bus group than er have seen at other borders. Usually we can just follow the crowd and get through but this time i had to enquire and i actually lead the entire group to the out-processing point on the South African side. Afterwards we trekked on foot across the birder but again this wasn’t marked out very well nor was there a steady stream of people doing the same. We were stopped by the military/police as Continue reading →