When I was in Malawi I wrote huge letters back to a girl back home in the UK about absolutely everything - I was experiencing new ways of life and cultures and getting involved in all sorts of mischief all of which made great story telling material - I also found that writing about these times gave me a chance to relive it all and small details were never forgotten as they would be if you just used memory alone.
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One of my most punishing and eventful journeys was the Trip to Mozambique back in 2000 - I was packed off in a giant creaking, rusty haulage truck with a bemused driver called Lewis and sent to the Port of Beira in Moz from my home at the time of Blantyre in Southern Malawi (if you look at a map of Africa, Moz is that big chunk on the bottom right next to Zim - Malawi is that mini one above Moz whose make up is basically half a lake) - initially I thought being a trucker in Mozambique was fantastic, but my initial joyful face of unbridled optimism would soon be replaced by a steely thousand yard stare of grim determination by the journeys end.
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For an immature little English troublemaking monkey it was a good wake up call, opening my eyes to the bigger picture of the world. The trips purpose was allegedly to give me an insight into how our tea got from point A to point B and observe all the relevant malarkey going on in the port and what not – I had been working in the Malawi office handling tracking you see – the process of updating folk on the whereabouts of their tea.
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I was responsible for tracing the position of tea via invoice numbers from whse to shipment and up to this point I had always treated it as fact that if tea had been loaded on a truck outside in my yard it was done with. I assumed that once it has been driven off to either the Moz port of Beira or the dry port of Jo’burg in South Africa, then it was more or less as good as in the port awaiting shipment.
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My trip to Moz taught me there was plenty in-between.
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To give you an idea of the intended time – I was to leave on a Tuesday and travel the 2000km or so there and back to arrive in Blantyre again by Thursday or Friday in time to hook up with friends and spend my last weekend in Malawi at Lake Nyasa.
All sounded perfect. Califragifuckinglistic in fact.
In the end my journey can be summed up as a cooking broth of mayhem and frustration whose ingredients involved bureaucracy, documentation, a brothel of angry noisy hookers, home-brewed alcohol, mosquitoes, breakdowns in the middle of nowhere, politely refusing to sleep with someone’s cousin, no change of clothes, lack of food & water, sleeping two to the cab, money changing street robbers, dodgy wooden bridges across doom inviting ravines, minibuses with no doors or windows, 48 hours without sleep and a wrath of god Cyclone.
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The whole story was documented in letter form that I was writing to my friend at the time – then, once I’d survived the ordeal and returned in one piece I turned it into the report I was supposed to write on the whole “trucking experience” for my bosses in Holland.
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The report was unconventional to say the least and can be found by clicking the following: (The Moz adventure) - but is also directly below this in a better adaptation for the web.
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Later on in life when I got the chance to go to Vietnam and set up the office there, the head of the company told me he'd read it and even though it shows my naivety and immaturity at times, it was still one of the main reasons he thought I could handle the job in Vietnam – as if I could deal with the chaos of Mozambique, I could deal with anything......
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So it kind of is in some way responsible for where I am today and shall forever remain as a printed record of one of the most important weeks of my life – I’ll never forget the details now - I'm very glad I went - if not such a happy experience at the time.
http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/kaneheadskompanion/
