The train was meant to leave at 5am, and so I had to wake at O’Dark-thirty. I pulled on my traveling clothes (because what’s the point of dirtying new clothes every day when all you’re going to do is sit and sweat and then have dirt and grime stick to the sweat?). My jeans—chosen as part of my traveling attire to lighten the weight of my pack—were thick with dirt and I grimaced a bit to have to pull them onto my (cold) showered skin.
There was little life on the streets with the sun not yet up, but about 7 other people from the pensao were also going to the train, so we walked together. I asked someone where the second class cars* were, and got a vague hand-wave in the general direction of the train. I didn’t see any indication of class on the outside of the cars, and so I climbed up into a car and decided to see what I could see inside.
I had been told and had read that the third class cars were horribly cramped, smelly, and dirty, with livestock everywhere and people’s katundu everywhere the livestock wasn’t. What I saw when I got on the train, in the light shining dimly from cell phone screens or in early dawn light bouncing haphazardly through windows, was something that looked a lot like the Liwonde train. In fact, the cars were made by the same company. But the seats were nicer, looked more comfortable, and, so far at least, were not overcrowded. In my mind, that might be enough to make a car second-class. Even at 4:30, all the window seats and 2-person benches were full, and I kept walking further onto the train, crossing from car to car over links of varying stability (even on the unmoving train) and past doorless toilets already reeking of urine, and sometimes bumping up against some man in the process of using one.
The seats started to get more and more uncomfortable, so I figured I was headed to, if not already in third-class, and found a seat. The idea that I was not getting the train ride I had paid for occurred to me several times, but I couldn’t figure out who actually worked for the train, and the only thing that really concerned me about the car I was in was the toilet. Since I had already planned on starving and dehydrating myself for the 12 hour journey, I wasn’t overly worried about that either.
After about 2 hours, the train started getting crowded and looking less like a buy-your-specific-seat situation and more like a cram-everyone-in-minibus sort of situation. Luckily, just then the ticket-takers started coming around. I handed over my ticket and she looked at me like, “white people are so stupid” and found someone to take me to the second class car. The aisles were full enough of people and katundu that I couldn’t put my pack on, and so I had to try various positions to find one that wouldn’t destabilize me, wouldn’t beat up the crowd, and that I could manage as I walked back through all the cars I had gone through looking for a seat, and then through two more.
The second-class car was so obvious—if I hadn’t gotten on the train after it, I would’ve known where to go. First of all, the toilet had a door, or at least the potential for a door (I didn’t look too closely). And an actual toilet, rather than places for your feet around a hole in the floor. And then there were compartments. Each compartment had four bunks and then two shelves for luggage. The top bunk could be folded down to give room to sit more comfortably, or kept up so everyone could lie down. In some of the compartments, like mine, two extra people were sleeping on the luggage shelf. But still, I had a whole bunk to myself. The bunks are a thin layer of foam over a metal shelf, covered in cracking green vinyl. Some of them have been re-covered in improperly fastened and peeling away blue vinyl. What makes it really worth the fare, though, is the two windows to watch the scenery from. If the bunks aren’t converted, you really can only lie down or stand, but you can easily do both, and standing doesn’t lose you your seat.
I hadn’t missed much, because for the first couple hours the landscape was pretty Malawi-like, and the seats only became uncomfortable and the cars too crowded in that last 15 minutes.
Only two of my cabinmates talk to me—one a Mozambican karate instructor, on his way back to Maputo from Lichinga, where he had been at a conference. The other, once she wakes up, is his wife—a Cameroonian named Gladys who is so happy to have someone to talk English with, she buys me a packet of biscuits. She came to Mozambique speaking no Portuguese and none of the local languages. She now speaks some Makua, but finds Portuguese frustrating—it’s similar enough to French that she feels she should have a handle on it, but too much, including the grammar, is too different. When her husband asks why she is speaking in English instead of Portuguese, she says only, “maybe next year.”
The train pulls into villages with these great shuddering stops that rattle the bones, and the villagers throng around the train, peddling their food, drinks, and any other items they think may be wanted by people on the train. The train windows are high, and the ground often slopes away from the tracks, so buying things often involve the vendors standing on tippy toe, using a stick to transfer the item, or simply finding someone taller to facilitate the transaction.
The train then moves on, starting out jerkily, but gaining smoothness with speed. Sometimes people jump on the train as it is leaving. Once, two older boys jumped on and tried to sneak into second-class, causing an unscheduled stop so they could be ejected.
Despite the karate instructor’s insistence that we would get to Nampula by half-two, we arrived around 4, the sun dipping low in the sky—Mozambique is all in a time zone more appropriate to Malawi, and so out by the coast the sun sets and rises quite early. The train station is filled with people, and I don’t need a book’s warning to check that all the pockets on my bags are secure, that nothing is in my pockets, that my passport is safe and concealed.
As I walk down the street, a young man, thinking I may have put something in the pockets of the sweater tied around my waist, tries to see what he can get. I dodge away slightly, causing his body to curve toward mine as his hand automatically follows my pockets but his feet continue forward. I can’t decide how to feel about this, my first experience in Nampula; my annoyance is tempered by the amusing picture of his body curving like a parenthesis, him having to catch his balance again, almost tripping over his desire to get something for nothing.
*This was my first mistake, assuming there were carS, plural.
