You want me to go where?

The joke with most GPS navigation systems, whether it is part of your car or your phone (or you car phone those of you stuck in 1993) is that at some point it is going to tell you to go somewhere that doesn't exist. It will tell you to turn into a building that should be a road, or you won't be paying attention and you will be headed toward an identical address but in another town. At the very least, you can find an alternate rout or type in a new address and it will get you where you want to go.

Or people with smart phones just type in "Starbucks" and you get instant directions to sate your latte habit. Type in "chinese food" and you see reviews for the nearest chinese food restaurants and then get directions to them.

That doesn't work here. Not by a long shot. You can't head down City Boulevard and then take a left on Maple Street. In theory there are street names, but only foreigners know them. These foreigners come from places where every street, no matter how small, has a name and there is a number for every brick and mortar address.

Here, there are maybe about two dozen streets that have names, with only about three of those being major roads that continue in any direction for more than 500 metres. They are mostly all named after persons. And when you've never heard of the people before it doesn't make much difference trying to remember the names because you just can't. I remember being in Hawaii once and we were confused as all get out. How were we going to remember that Kamehameha Boulevard is next to Wiame'a Avenue that crosses Melekelikimaka Street. It was all Greek (or in this case, Hawaiian) to me. We ended up just remembering to turn at the Long John Silvers and our hotel was a block past the McDonalds.

In Maputo, there is considerably more city planning, and more streets and names, although I don't know that means people actually use the street names or not. I do find it funny that emails from the American Embassy remind us that it is located on the corner of Ho Chi Min and Karl Marx.

In Nampula you can get around much easier telling people which bairro to go to just pointing out landmarks along the way. Once you get near where you want to go, you just ask people where it is you're trying to go if it is a place you are unfamiliar with.

However, this is all relatively easy compared to when you are trying to give a ride to somebody and they are the ones telling you where to go. Culturally, and I don't know if it is a universal trait or only limited to the people that I end up taking places, is is almost forbidden to ask where it is I have to take them. There is an absurd amount of errands that have to be done, and most them involve going to a certain store or picking up and dropping of a certain person in a certain neighborhood.

Most of the time there is a flat-out refusal to tell me where it is we need to go, be it from the other staff or the other Mozambican's I ferry around. The staff all know by know to tell me where to go. The others just point and say "Start going that way." Really inspires confidence when the person giving directions at least knows that, of the two ways I could go leaving the orphanage gate, one will go 100 metres and then stop being a road while the other direction goes to absolutely everything.

I have learned that you absolutely need to know where to you are going before you leave because not only are there multiple ways to get there, but the people I'm driving are horrible at giving directions. Their idea of giving directions is wait until the truck is going at 50mph and then point to the intersection as we pass it saying, "You needed to turn there." And this is EVERY SINGLE TIME I DRIVE SOMEBODY. Are you noticing the irritation here?

And then after the second time it happens you tell the person that a car does not stop on a dime like a person walking and you need to to give a lot of warning before we get to where we need to turn. And then he still does it three more times, forgetting to say anything about turning until you are directly even with where you needed to turn. And eventually, at some point he will tell you to turn down a certain path to get to house. At this point I try to remain gracious, but usually end up saying something like, "Do you see the car we are in? It is a 4ton pickup. The path you told me to drive down is so narrow that a bicyclist just dismounted because he can't navigate well enough. What's that? Oh, cars come down here all the time? I guess we can go then."

Granted, this is not to say that directions are perfect from your GPS, or that people in western nations know how to navigate properly. This last year I was in Detroit doing some traveling with my family (this despite the fact that the Detroit Police openly campaign against tourism to Detroit saying that the city is unsafe). We were on the highway in a strange city with no map and all we knew is we needed to take exit 14B. Having sufficiently gotten this point across well ahead of time, when the moment came my dad pulled car on to exit 14A and my dad proudly announced "14A, just like you said," or something to that effect. The rest of the car let out a big collective, "NO! We wanted 14B, not A. B-as-in backtrack, B-as-is botched, B-as-in bungled."

In that sense, directions here can be easier because you tell people to go the stoplight and take a right. That is a really easy direction because the stoplight is 5k from here. And the next one after that is two more kilometers. There is one more stoplight after that, but people don't consider it a stoplight because it hasn't worked in over two years. If you make it past that, you can go straight out of town without bumping into another stoplight.

And anybody that has ever been to Nampula and given a ride to a Mozambican knows that the one question you can never ask under any circumstance is, "How much farther?" This question does not have an answer. It is answered always with the reply of, "Almost, we're really close." It doesn't matter how far away you are, when it comes to this question you are always very close. I learned very early that you are never very close, no matter how close people say you are.

I have been in so many situations so many different times that people have said, "We're really close, just keep going," or even, "just maybe five or ten more minutes more." That is usually a red flag for we are nowhere near yet. If somebody actually points out a landmark and says it it at that mountain or that river or that intersection I will keep going, but often somebody saying "Just a little farther," is codeword for being nowhere close.

That being said, sorry for the sporadic posting the last week or so, but I'm really close to finishing another story and it'll be up any day now.