Temporary Luxury
Sunday, December 7th, 2008Day 251
Getting up at 3:30am doesn’t seem right. I could hear people coming back from partying the night before, it shouldn’t be an hour to start your day. Then again the benefits of a 4am bus are plenty. The first few hours will be in darkness so it’ll be cool. We will arrive in Maputo early, wait is that a good thing? OK there are some benefits.
We both had real seats for this trip, no folding seats, although the bus was just as packed. We sat at the back so there was no chance of any children getting sick behind me today. One advantage of an early bus was that time seems to go by quickly. It was 8am when we stopped for a washroom break and half the journey was already completed. It had gone by quickly. Well it did until the heat of the day started to build and with it the scents of the bus were unleashed. Body odour being the most prevalent, closely followed by fish and several unidentified scents. They could use a few of those scented pine trees you hang from the rear view mirror here.
Just after noon we rolled into bustling Maputo. We made our way back to Base Backpackers. This time we decided if they didn’t have a double room then we would go back to the same hotel we were at before. Of course they didn’t have a double room so off we went. Before we got in a taxi I figured we should checkout the Monte Carlo hotel directly diagonal to the hostel. It looked nice but who knew maybe it wasn’t too expensive. It wasn’t cheap at $80 but we decided to splurge out once again for our last night in Mozambique. We justified it with the fact that we could easily walk to our bus in the morning and the room we got was great! We had a sweeping view of the harbour and a room that was easily the same quality of a good hotel back home. Quite a contrast from our sand floor hut the previous two nights. We enjoyed our a/c, movie channels and once again ordered in pizza. I knew that all this luxury was going to be short lived. Once we reach Zambia and on to Malawi etc. Rooms like this will be few and far between even if we could afford them each night. So we appreciated it for the night before we got on a bus back to Johannesburg in the morning.
Michael Coroneos