Maputo

On our way back to Maputo we stopped in the province of Inharrime to buy their famed peri-peri sauce from one of the roadside stalls. I always thought Nandos, with its peri-peri chicken was a portugese chain and I was surprised to discover its actually South African. I guess that explains the Nandos restaurants on seemingly every corner in Cape Town.

Maputo was overcast, windy and dusty. It has a vaguely art deco feel to it, but the buildings are dirty and dilapidated. We took a walk to the main market and Independence Square which was a dirty overgrown crumbling version of its former self.

On our way out of town we went to Costa do Sol restaurant on the seafront for an extremely tasty prawn lunch. The spot to be seen in the 30's, the restaurant claims to have invented the 'famous' dish LM Prawns (named after Lourenço Marques, now known as Maputo), but sadly no longer includes it on their menu.

All the books we'd read about driving in Mozambique warned of the many police roadblocks and checks that you had the right paperwork, red hazard triangles and whatnot. We ensured we had the necessary equipment and got certified copies of our passports before we went to Mozambique as it is rumoured the police there will refuse to give back your passports after id-ing you unless you pay them a bribe. We were surprised that although we probably passed nearly a dozen or so of these checkpoints, we were waved through or ignored at all of them.

Apart from the many border 'assistants' crowding around the Landy wanting some us to appoint them to deal with the complications at the border (we ignored them), the crossing back into South Africa was fast, straightforward and uneventful.