In Which TJ Continues Chasing Wild Geese

Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. Percival and the Holy Grail. Lewis and Clark and the Northwest Passage. The Nazis and any relic that Indiana Jones is currently also seeking. The Cubs and a World Series. You can to the list of mythical and unattainable quests TJ and the Mattresses of Nacala (movie rights currently for sale).

Recap: Donated Mattresses. 3 hour drive to the Port. Wait all day, no mattresses. I’m with Charles, Maurio, the kid, and the fat man. Arrive at hotel for the night. Go to sleep. All is peaceful.

All was peaceful. Around 11pm (which is like 2am in American culture) I was woken to shouting and yelling in the hotel courtyard. At this point, I figure its a drunk neighbor leaving the hotel bar and it’ll end in a minute. Well, one minute turned into TWENTY! Finally, the shouting stopped and peace was restored. Turns out what was going on was that some Pakistanis were staying at the hotel decided to head out in the middle of the night. The night security guard, being polite, asked them what they were doing leaving in the middle of the night. The reason he asked was he was probably concerned for their safety and a little puzzled, because people just generally don’t leave hotels in the middle of the night in this country.

That innocent little question turned into the two Pakistanis taking offense at the guard “intruding into their privacy and implying that we’re criminals”. The way I heard it was the Pakistanis started shouting and woke up the rest of the staff and then woke up us and then you have a full on mini race riot going on as the Pakistanis accuse the hotel staff of being racist and the staff accusing the Pakistanis of being crazy.

And that silence after twenty minutes. It turns out the Pakistanis refused to shout at anybody until the hotel owner showed up to because they wanted to shout at her personally. Then the arguments continued for a good 40 minutes more, depriving any decent, God-fearing soul of any hope of getting sleep. The argument escalated into a he-said, she-said with the Mozambicans claiming the Pakistanis said they were illiterate poor slaves and the Pakistanis claiming the Mozambicans said that the Pakistanis were going to do a massive drug deal. At this point, all the guys with me were also actively participating in this verbal war.

The next morning, short on sleep and sense of humor I asked my guys where they thought the Pakistanis were going in the middle of the night. I got four responses of, “Oh, yah! They were definitely going to make a drug deal. No doubt about it.” At least they were diplomatic about it the night before.

That second day in Nacala, a Wednesday, we arrived nice and early at the port and called the broker to see what time our mattresses would be ready to leave. The broker came to where we were shortly after and picked up Charles and I to go into the Port. Charles and I, giddy as can be, were a little more that disappointed that he picked us up to spend OVER AN HOUR sitting in his running, air conditioned car as he was inside a Mozambican version of Kinkos making copies of his drivers license.

I take that back. We were a LOT more disappointed.

The rest of the day was spent sitting next to the Port entrance on a esterra (pronounced “stair-uh”). If you are not familiar with a esterra, it’s literally a picnic blanket made out of wood. If you’re thinking to yourself, “that doesn’t sound very comfortable”, you’d be right.

That’s where we sat for two whole days, waiting on this broker to call with our mattress. That’s now three days total, sitting without so much as a courtesy call from this jerk. When we did call, each time it would take him about twice as long to respond. While we were there we got to meet plenty of other drivers, most of whom would wait about two or three hours and then go unload their cargo. Their opinion was that this broker had written us off and was looking for other work because he had spent all the money we paid him and had nothing left to pay the port for all the fees.

While everyone in our party would agree that the second and third day in Nacala (not the beach day) was a complete waste of time, there was quite a bit of story telling that went on as we sat around with absolutely nothing to do. After we witnessed a guy robbing an unattended truck (and thwarted it) the guys started telling stories about all the famous thieves of Nampula, including one guy who would call the police before he robbed a place to warn them not to be there. The implication was the police were scared of this guy and would make sure to be on the other side of town that day. There was also the story of another thief who was so strong he could carry as much as three horses. I found this interesting, not because it is entirely unbelievable, but because none of them has ever seen a horse before.

I got my two bits in when they asked about the most famous thieves of America. I responded by telling them about D.B. Cooper, Jesse James, and recounting the plot of “The Usual Suspects”. All of them went to sleep that night deathly afraid of when Keyser Söze comes calling.

Day two ended with another night in the hotel with promises from the broker (who we were convinced was just napping the whole day) that he’d get our cargo out first thing in the morning. Day three almost ended the same way, with a tired butt from sitting on our wooden blanket, a hotel for another night, and more empty promises. It almost ended like that until we decided that we were just going home to Nampula. We’d find some other way to deal with the broker’s lip service. In the meantime we were running on fumes, had been in the same clothes for three days, and were tired of eating the Mozambique version of fast food for half the week.

We also headed home because I was starting to feel sick with a fever. I equated my fever to a combination of sunburn, being a little underhydrated, and my last nerve having been trampled about a day and a half earlier by our do-nothing broker. As I would discover, it was a little more than just a fever…