The city is devastated. Civil war ended 16 years ago, although it seems not enough time to clean up the debris and garbage. The most representative districts, as for instance the Mao Tse Tung Street with all the foreign embassies and ministry edifices, simply stinks unbearably. A huge pile of awful trash lies at every corner and you walk on rotten rubbish. The sidewalk is a disaster. Watch out you step or you might end up in a 1m deep sewer hole just in the middle of pedestrian zone.
To tell the truth, except for Maputo’s train station (described by ‘Times’ to be one of the 10 most beautiful train stations in the world), there is not much to see in Mozambique’s capital.
With so little to explore, we decided to at least to complete some formalities regarding our future apartment in LA. It took us a looong time to find an internet cafe with a printer (internet here is very, very scarce). However, it was peanuts compared with the quest to find a functioning fax. Definitely it became one of the greatest challenges on this RTW. We ended up in the “business” district, next to the Ministry of Finances, in a once-fancy building of telecommunications. Bingo, the fax service is available! Probably the only one in the entire capital. Faxing 10 pages to USA would cost 50 USD. Wow! Let’s simply scan the docs and send them by email. Scan? Forget it – no scanner in the entire CBD! We end-up in a park, sticking the pages to a monument and photographing them one by one…
That’s it for the capital of Mozambique.
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