Hazards on the Highway: goats and bicycles and Ali

Last Monday I had a truly terrifying experience…I drove for the first time on the left-hand side of the road. It was, relatively speaking, a successful experience in that I didn’t crash the car or hit any pedestrians or have a complete nervous breakdown. If I said it was a pleasant experience, however, I would be a big, fat, liar.

My housemates and I had rented a car for a weekend trip to Beira, the capital of neighboring Sofala Province some 200km from Chimoio. Ricardo drove the car on the way out to Beira and I was a happy passenger, playing dj and eating handfuls of roasted cashew nuts that we purchased from roadside vendors. The highway system in Mozambique is notoriously precarious, full of livestock and potholes and unpaved stretches, but I have become quite confident in Ricardo’s driving abilities. I am at the point now where I can look out the window and appreciate the landscape, oblivious to the myriad hazards of the road. The trip was bumpy and long, but pleasant. It didn’t really sink in at that point that *I’d* have to drive on the way home.

How did I get stuck with that job? Ricardo had to catch a flight from Beira to Maputo on Sunday night, and none of my other companions knew how to drive a car. That’s right. All of the twenty-something Brazilian males in my company had either 1) failed their driving exams, or 2) never learned to drive in the first place because, living in Rio, the risk was greater than the reward. So it was up to me to get us back home to Chimoio.

I get nervous driving under lots of different circumstances (parallel parking and navigating unknown cities topping the list, as many of you might know), but the mere prospect of driving down the left-hand side of the road in a rental car with the steering wheel on the right was almost too much for me to bear. Even under ideal conditions, I am admittedly not the world’s most talented driver. This was not a good scenario. I had no choice, though. We had to get back to Chimoio.

So I sucked it up, helped my housemates load the car, and promptly managed to reach over the wrong shoulder for the seatbelt and stall the car. I could feel my friends suck in nervous breaths of air, realizing exactly how precarious our trip back would be. In an attempt to disguise my frazzled nerves, I started to babble. I chatted on and on to myself about the car, my previous experiences driving, the weather, our delicious shrimp lunch the day before, and on and on and on. All the while I gripped the wheel with white knuckles and prayed for a flash of spontaneous super driving skills. Needless to day, that divine intervention didn’t come.

I had no concept of the width of the car, grossly underestimating the boundary of the left-hand bumper and nearly smashing into a post and a man on a bicycle within the first 5 minutes. In the middle of downtown Beira, trying to find the highway, I almost sideswiped a bus. Once on the right track back to Chimoio, my travel companions somewhat frantically alerted me that I was driving really close to the middle of the unmarked strip of asphalt that passes as a highway. I had to reverse the trick my dad taught me when I was learning to drive in the US and imagine that my left knee was tracing a line down the middle of my imaginary lane. Other than that, I had no clue whether or not I was within a safe distance of the oncoming traffic and the various obstacles on the other side of the car.

In the 3 hours it took us to drive back home, I honked more than in the 8 years I’ve had my license. I easily leaned on the horn more than 100 times. No joke. Highways in Mozambique are *full* of men riding bikes, women walking with stacks of firewood and basins of corn balanced on their heads, kids running around barefoot, and lots of livestock. Lots of goats and chickens, and the occasional cow or turkey. All of these people and animals invade the highway and leisurely follow their paths completely unaware of the cars and busses zooming by. They meander into the road space and will literally only move onto the shoulder if you honk the horn like a maniac. I remain undecided as to whether the people or the goats are more stubborn. And then there are the other drivers. Big trucks full of gas and agricultural products, vans packed full of passengers with suitcases precariously strapped to the roof, decrepit cars, and well-maintained 4x4’s that are the property of NGOs or government agencies. The highway is poorly asphalted, full of potholes and completely lacking any lines or lane markings, and in some stretches reduced to a miserable expanse of gravel and dust. And it’s all backwards, on the wrong side, with reason and order cast to the wind.

I made it home, though, with no major casualties other than my sanity. I think that my housemates and I all agree after this experience that it is in everyone’s best interest for me to never drive the car again.