Road Trip to Mozambique Island

[Ultimo aggiornamento: 02/05/2024]

“400km can’t possibly be considered a road trip!”, will think those who have never been in Africa…

I was in the north of Mozambique, visiting my amazing friend A. who was offering a few months of her life to a (private and for free) medical clinic in Pemba. With K, a volunteer nurse working for the same clinic, we decided to explore Ilha de Mozambique, a small UNESCO island in the nord of the country. It had been described to as a corner of paradise. For local tourist standards, at least.

Tourism in Mozambique for dummies: how to reach Ihla de Mozambique, 400km away??

Moving around the country is complicated.

The main roads, as in other African countries, are not well maintained and they often consists in only two lanes. With a faded line in the middle, when lucky.
They run through hundreds of little villages where pedestrians, children and animals might suddenly cross the street without thinking twice.

There are buses, sure enough, we looked into this option. They are cheap but you know when you leave (maybe) but not when you arrive. Furthermore, the one we needed was to leave at 5 am from the “bus station”, meaning we needed a taxi to get there and then another one from where the bus would have dropped us to reach the final destination. It was doable, but honestly fairly risky, from a planning point of view.

The good news is, the two amazing girls I was going to travel with built many good friendships during the time they had been working in the clinic and the owner of a Chinese restaurant offered us her brand-new pick-up. Like that. For free.

And so it happens that on a random Thursday, we leave with our shiny black pick-up for a road-trip in the North of Mozambique, to reach a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

How to ride a pick-up “like a pro”

In Mozambique you don’t ride a pick-up like in the West. The first passengers to board the pickup get the seats, obviously. When the overflowing number of passengers is reached, the back of the pick-up starts getting packed. On those uneven roads, it’s not comfortable to seat on the metal surface. Therefore, the best spots are the standing ones, behind the cockpit, with a secure grip on the metal bar.

I had to try the Mozambican way!

In Mozambique, white skin means welth. And if white people have a fancy pickup like ours, they also have air-co. Mozambicans who saw me enjoying my standing ride could just not understand what was going on. I spotted many laughing at me or gesticulating to invite me, while overtaking us, to sit next to them in their half-broken van.

How to face the African roads

For a road trip, food and water are important, especially in a warm and often wild place like Mozambique. We did some grocery shopping at the street market before leaving and some more in the many villages on the way. What did we buy? Fruits like there is no tomorrow! Bananas, oranges, papayas… oh, papayas…. The Mozambican Papayas have no pairs!

There’s also the possibility to stop on the side of the road and wait for the vendors to surround your car offering roasted corn, sugar cane, suspicious “bread”, badjia (a sort of fried… thing) and nourishing boiled eggs sold together with a little salt paper bag. Brilliant.

On the road, you can see a bit of everything. We encountered some African stereotypes, like people carrying massive amounts of stuff balanced on their heads, women washing and drying clothes at the riverside, a beautiful combo of red ground and wooden huts and curious stares while driving past.
We met workmen on the way, busy patching the asphalt up. From our privileged fresh and comfy car, we wondered how could those men survive the day in the scorching heat and we gave them some oranges. But they probably melted in the heat a couple of hours later anyway…

The roads are full of women walking on the side of the road. They walk kilometres to go to the next village market or to visit family, because most of the time, they can’t afford the local busses. These busses are big uncovered vans that hosts as many people as they can squeeze in, and stop apparently randomly to load and unload more and more travellers. These women walk with their bags balanced on the heads and the children wrapped on their backs in colourful textiles. They are beautiful.

We asked some of these ladies if they wanted a lift in the back of the pick-up. Some were suspicious of these too-kind white girls (people tend to disappear far too easily around here). Others, maybe, didn’t have to go too far. But what a joy to load a bunch of “mama” and look at them laughing happily waving to the other ladies still walking like they would have had to do!

We learnt the signal to ask for a stop (’cause even if they had told us the destination before jumping on, we would obviously have not understood it or would have had no clue where that place was): two or three pats on the outside of the car’s body, end off they went on their ways.

Destination: Ilha de Mozambique (Mozambique Island)

A lifetime later, we arrive at the bridge that connects Ilha de Mozambique with the coast: 3 km of single lane road on low pillars on the sea. To cross the bridge, there’s a small fee to pay. But only on the way out, as if they wanted to keep you there forever. The view before crossing the bridge is bizarre: the island is visible in its entire length and when the tide is low you could walk your way up to its beaches. Otherwise, with high tide, fishermen in sailing or rowing boats fill up completely that stretch of sea.

And here on Ilha de Mozambique our holiday starts. Children constantly follow you around, huts cover up half of the island and the hospital gives you the chills (I’ve read that recently there have been some works going on), but unlike most of Mozambique, on this island, there’s a holiday feeling all year around. Inhabitants know that tourism brings money, even offering little services like renting snorkelling masks. And whoever works in this business can earn enough to live decently. It is certainly not the “real” Mozambique, but it’s a beautiful example of Mozambican hosting and development/investment skills.

On the way back there will be another 400 km of pavement-no-pavement roads, other mama, other markets, other animals and children to avoid. But for now, we enjoy the sea and the well deserved time off.

If you’re thinking of planning a holiday in Mozambique, you could also be interested in: Mozambique Tourism Facebook Page for some extra info and ideas
My specific tips on visiting Mozambique Island.

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