I wasn’t supposed to stay in Maputo, yet on my first day in Mozambique I found myself aimlessly roaming the streets of the nation’s capital. My surfboard-less surf bag, carrying only some of my miscellaneous items after I left my last board in Madagascar, didn’t make it on the short, one-hour flight from Johannesburg. The airline staff informed me that the bag would be on the next flight, seven hours later. Some airports can keep you comfortably entertained for seven hours, but Maputo’s small international terminal is not one of them. So I wandered outside looking for something — anything — to pass the time.

If you’ve followed my travels, you have heard about how much I despise the inevitable taxi rip-off when you arrive in a new country. They know you don’t know the local prices yet and know you don’t exactly have a ton of options, so you begrudgingly pay for an expensive taxi knowing that the price is inflated. I will do anything to avoid these scammy negotiations, so I strolled out of the airport on foot and found my way to a busy boulevard where I flagged down a tuk-tuk passing by.

I inquired with the driver if he could take me to the city center, any nice place to walk around. He was on a beer delivery run and asked me if I wouldn’t mind joining him en route to downtown. Why not? We rearranged the stacked cases of beer in the back to make room for a passenger and I even helped him unload at the dropoff point.

On our way downtown I chatted with the driver. Five years of Portuguese lessons and six months in Brazil had prepared me well for a visit to Mozambique, which only gained independence from Portugal in 1975. For the most part, I could understand the driver’s accented Portuguese, consciously avoiding words I knew to be uniquely Brazilian, like beleza (what’s up?) and abacaxi (pineapple), but I wasn’t afraid to lean into the “chee” and “jee” sounds of the southeastern-accented Brazilian Portuguese that I naturally learned. A Brazilian would never mistake my Portuguese accent as native, but here in Mozambique where they don’t have as much of an ear for new-world Portuguese accents, my driver, and many others to follow, asked if I was Brazilian. I’ll take that as a compliment.

My driver dropped me on the city’s waterfront, a place he thought would be nice for walking. I looked around at the shadeless, concrete walkway, practically bare of any commerce or people, shrugged my shoulders, and got out. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but what did I know about Mozambique? I eventually wandered to the city center on foot and found a cafe to get some food.

Maputo isn’t exactly Paris or Rome, but it’s markedly different than the previous city I had been in — the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo. Maputo’s downtown has wide boulevards with medians, crosswalks with walking signals, and the unmistakable white and black tiled sidewalks common in countries where the Portuguese have left their influence. You can tell it was built with a plan in relatively recent times. Antananarivo, on the other hand, is a messy conjunction of narrow, windy, ancient, chaotic streets.

After a few hours in the city, I called the same tuk-tuk driver to come pick me up. As promised, my bag arrived on the next flight in the afternoon and I was on my way. At this point, the mid-winter sun was already setting behind Maputo’s towering coastal highrises. My new goal was to get to the southern beach town of Ponta do Ouro. Since the taxis were absurdly expensive, I returned to the city center to catch one of the shared vans, or ‘chapas’, as the locals refer to them.

Riding a chapa is an adventure in itself, not too different from the ‘taxi brousse’ adventure that I described in my Madagascar leg of the trip. The chapas all wait on a certain block near the waterfront creating an area that teems with commerce, shouting, traffic, and movement. Chapa fixers try to hustle people into the vans, vendors slang chips and peanuts, and drivers haphazardly tie cargo to the van roofs.

As soon as I stepped out of my taxi, the chapa fixers swarmed me, trying to get me in their vehicles, which were all equal in specs and all going to the same destination. It didn’t really matter which I boarded. I had no choice but to reward the most aggressive fixer, throwing my bags on the roof and getting a coveted seat in the front. Of course, once I was seated the price of admission tripled, supposedly due to the size of my bags. I couldn’t tell if I was getting ripped off or if this was actually a policy. I turned around to the Mozambicans sitting in the back for some advice, but they just responded with shoulder shrugs as if there was nothing they could do for me. Though one man sensing my predicament stood up and began an animated conversation with the fixer, changing the conversation from Portuguese to a local African language. The conclusion was that he couldn’t do much to help me. There was no precedent price for a large surfboard bag, so the price was essentially whatever they determined. I still don’t know if it was a rip-off or not.

Eventually the chapa filled and we were off, crammed with a dozen or so people and lots of cargo in the cramped van. The road was paved, so the trip to Ponta is pretty straightforward and simple. But, as I learned, things are never that simple when traveling in chapas.

I was dozing off in the front seat with my headphones in when I sensed a commotion within the van. I removed my earbuds to see what was going on, trying to tune into the rapid-fire commands circulating the vehicle. I couldn’t understand anything. The van pulled over, flipped a U-turn, and started driving in the opposite direction. That’s when I saw the reason for our detour.

The cargo on the roof had fallen off and tumbled across the highway, skidding to a rest on the sandy shoulder. The men of the van exited to fix the problem, and I too got out to assess how destroyed my bags were after a 60-mph highway ejection. In a stroke of luck, I noticed that my bags had remained on the roof while most of the other cargo had spilled onto the road. I breathed a sigh of relief. I chuckled to myself as I stood in the pitch black on the side of the road, remembering that the taxi fixer had specifically assured me that the rope tying the items to the roof never fails.

The van pulled into our destination of Ponta do Ouro and left us all in a dirt lot. For the first time in months, I had descended a bus from a long journey and was not being harassed by taxi drivers. But this time I actually needed a taxi. On a Monday night in Ponta the streets were dead. There was no way to get to my hotel other than a trudge through the dark, sandy roads. It was a rough end to a long day of travel.

Ponta was my home for the next three weeks. It’s a unique town located on rolling sand dunes just a kilometer or so north of the South African border. It’s a tourist town where restaurants raise their prices by 50% and barricaded vacation villas are scattered among the locals’ makeshift cinder block houses. During the week it can look desolate with an empty beach and lifeless restaurants, but every weekend the town revives as tourists swarm the sand, rent obnoxiously noisy ATVs, and fill the oceanfront restaurants. The population is a mix of vacationing South Africans, wealthy Maputans visiting their weekend beach homes, and wandering surfers.

Due to the proximity to South Africa, nearly everyone in Ponta can speak English to go along with Portuguese and several African languages. The locals would often address me with their South African slanted English, greeting me with a “howzit bru?”.

The next three weeks of my life were pleasantly unremarkable. I holed up in a cabana on a hillside just a short walk from the beach, blending in with the flocks of South Africans. I surfed every day that the conditions allowed, found the best local restaurants, and rifled through a book. I chatted a lot during my breakfasts with the local hotel staff, listening to their dreams of visiting the US, which unfortunately we both know are unlikely to ever come to fruition.

On days without surf life in Ponta was very slow. I could feel myself getting restless but was always quick to remind myself that when I started this trip, the idea of waking up on a warm, sunny beach in Africa with few responsibilities and worries in the world would have sounded ideal. It’s important to recognize those moments, as insignificant as they may seem, when they actually happen.

Mozambique marks my 21st month on the road — another gem added to the list of countries that I have truly enjoyed visiting. Visiting Mozambique and Madagascar has further inspired me to explore this gigantic continent further. But I know that it would be a lifetime of travel to visit all the corners of Africa. I’m off next to South Africa, the eleventh country of my journey. I’ll check back in later.