The station is a blackened shell. The train slows to walking pace as a small figure scurries from beneath its carapace into the flare of sudden heat. Cleft stick high, he lopes across, stretching a scrap of paper towards the reaching ticket inspector."It is still from the civil war," a passenger says, sweeping an arm across the station, somewhere between the South African border and Maputo. "Since it was blown up, the man must give instructions for the next piece of the journey."
Wattle-and-daub houses and reed huts cluster lush valleys, women carry water and children race along the railway line. But the civil war is still present in the carrion of broken trains, rotting beside the line.
The journey from Komatipoort to Maputo, only 120km, takes eight hours. "Just few years ago," my companion avers, as I grow hot and restless, "it would have been five days."
It is just the previous evening that we leave from Johannesburg station, through the dark underside of Braamfontein. Beyond Doornfontein and Jeppe, Castle trucks speed along highways. Evening reddens the mine dumps and summer clouds throw mottled patches over marching pylons. Lights come on down the corridor - the rattle of bed-making and the smell of supper defeating the desolation that sudden darkness brings. Steakroll, burgers and toasteds, roast chicken and pap or rice? The steward waits as I decide, twitching at his bow tie in the window reflection. My chicken, brought to the coupe, is as crisped as my hunger could have fantasised it. And at R14, who could complain? "I’ll compliment my chef," says the steward, a wryness to his tooth-shy grin.
Komatipoort, at 6.30am, is hustling with commerce and colour. Women, resplendent in radiant sarongs, sling babies and tote great woven plastic bags, packed with tinned foods and duvets, bedspreads and mealie meal.
If I had the trip to do again, I would take a bus or a taxi from Komatipoort. But now I have done it, I would not replace my drenched journey, creeping through the growth of bananas, the reed villages of waving children, the frangipani trees and wild growths of hibiscus and bougainvillaea. Crushed between the diaphanous florals and silks of the merchant women of Maputo, I can smell the sweat of us all. Potatoes and onions, bottles of oil, great packets of yellow chips and box upon box of eggs are stacked beneath our feet.
When we have not left by 9am, I begin muttering about taxis. "Ooh no, no." The woman flutter in horror, calling the ticket collector to support their case. "Too full skollies. Too full. Stay," they chorus, slamming fists into palms. And so we stay.
Twice the train halts at border posts, and twice we trudge over the railway lines to queue under a lean-to. But each time, my companion women wordlessly retrieve us to a place near the front. The ticket inspectors do their shopping - bread and tomatoes off upturned cardboard boxes. No-one is in a hurry. Women send daughters for ice-creams and gossip. "Yeesh" - glancing at the source of this malevolent heat.
Moving again, the women offer meat from tupperwares. I offer biltong and dried fruit. "Yeesh," they say, wrinkling noses. Nibbling delicately, they giggle and raise their thumbs in polite approbation. But they refuse all further offerings.
Candida and her daughter Sandra make the trip twice a week to stock their shop. But the eggs intrigue me. Every South African village is filled with the scurry and scratch of chickens. But these have none. Didn’t somebody once say something about a country being in trouble when it has no chickens? "Ovos," I say, flipping my phrasebook. "You bring ovos. Why?" I shrug. "No kip kip in Mozambique. Why?""Ooh." They all laugh in recognition. "Frangos. Frangos too small. In South Africa, frangos too full" – hands slapped into palms – "and imali too small in Mozambique to get big frangos."
Maputo. Just as I begin finally to lose heart, we are there. Maputo – for me still filled with romance, palm trees and sea. This is my first time back since I sat in LM cafes as a child, nibbling chicken livers and sipping red wine with my wicked uncle, fingers yellowed from too many Portuguese cigarettes.
Taxis judder over deep potholes into the baixa. We are staying at the Hotel Central downtown, pressed between an intricately trimmed mosque and the once notorious Street of Sin.In a cramped shop alongside the mosque, bearded men gossip quietly, hands folded on sticks while lumps of incense are weighed. But the Street of Sin is silent now of the strippers and whores and teeming revellers who would once have called from balconies and leant against the Victorian supports.
Later though, rising in the hush of a Sunday dawn, we pass down it again. Submarino is locked and silent, but in Club Mundo the party still raves. And the streets are paved with bottle tops. In tar which has melted countless times over decades, embedded "Dos M" beercaps are a sign of parties past and still being waged.
Maputo is not cheap. Prices are on a par with those in South Africa and – this we learn before we reach our hotel - taxis just as expensive. Unofficial taxis are cheaper, but only if you agree on a price before setting out.
Downtown Maputo is faded and down-at-heel, brandishing its burnt-out buildings as a sign of what it has gone through. Victorian flourishes and 1960s murals give it the feel of a town caught in amber; a city trapped in a world thirty years younger, as though all the clocks stopped at once, never to restart.
The Hotel Central has been painted and restored . . . not quite to its old Victorian self. It has taken on a new identity, a vibrant African frieze both on its walls and in the comings and goings around its café bar.
You might need to walk down the corridor to shower, but the water is hot. And perhaps nobody thought of mirrors, but the decorative mirror on the landing permits a quick check on the way to breakfast.
Money is our first concern, since we arrive too late for the banks. They’re closed on Saturdays.
"No problem," the hotel owner says. Returning with a borrowed car - and a small gang to pushstart it - he rattles us across town to the Polana. We all faff and queue at the Bureau de Change while he sits, the car idling. "No problem," he says.
The Polana is flush with comfort, bearing its historic charm with a new worldly style. But the foyer rings with American accents and cell phones and somehow, I’d rather perch on a stool and order a Dos M, while Portuguese soapies lament in the corner. Perhaps amble across the road to the Snack-bar Rossio, where café tables bustle with locals, all chatting and chewing, doing business and quaffing red wine. I still dream of its prawns, grilled in butter and chilli, smothered in coriander leaves.
Saturday is marketday in the scruffy Mercado Municipal - fresh fish and cashew nuts, chillies and spices, songbirds in bamboo cages. Old white-robed men selling fruit, young men hustling curios.
And on to the arts and crafts market on Central Square. Lurid lion hangings flap in the brisk breeze. Stall tenders shuffle batiks and glance warily at the grey sky. Someone told me not to bother jackets in summertime. But a cold front is sweeping across South Africa and lashing Mozambique with drizzle and sharp wind. For four days I live in my tracksuit.
The trouble with hustling is that, while I don’t want a wire bicycle, no matter how many gears it has, it isn’t really that pricey, for the work. And perhaps, since the man is following me . . . oh, but suddenly two paintings leap out from the crowded grass. One is a vision of nightlife, of cities and Africa; the other a fisherman
Nduna, the artist, speaks some English and, after a year on scholarship in Avignon, very good French. He invites us to his studio later, to meet his wife and see his sculptures. Work your way up past Karl Marx, he explains, and turn when you hit Ho Chi Min . . .
The wind slaps at my legs. Grit and Sainsburys packets swirl past the bare legs of children hawking hard-boiled eggs with salt. Another mystery this. Every stall, every souk, every market, uses packets from the British store. There’s no-one to ask, so we twist down to Av. 10 de Novembro and find the government ferry, being discharged of its load of dried palm leaves.
On the front deck, between the sarongs and breastfeeding babies, we reach Catembe, once the place to live. Through the reed village, past the palm grove and the grazing goats, on past the children steering bicycle rims with wire. Down as far as Diogos, a blue house from another era, where the owner comes from Goa and serves prawns with Portuguese wine.
A table is moved, on the strength of my romantic notion, to the edge of the veranda, where beyond us children score goals between the fishing boats. A young man is picnicking with two girls on a Tortilla Espanyol and a pink-iced cake. It is Feliz’s birthday, he says. It is mine too, so we take pictures of each other on the sand under the trees.
Chilled from the ferry in the late afternoon, we stop on the way to Ho Chi Min to drink tea with hot milk at the Café Continental Pastelaria. Tables cluster with cakes and tea cups and suddenly we could be anywhere. We could be in Barcelona or Lisbon, or even Paris.
Nduna’s street is wide and tree-lined, a lazy charm to the gracious houses, the promenading couples and dogwalkers. He tells us many of the houses are beautifully restored inside, but remain unpainted to fool burglars.
With his wife and two children, he lives in a garage. He shows us write-ups from French exhibitions. But back in Maputo, he says, he struggles to sell. I buy the fisherman and, as the city darkens and we start for home, promise to send painting materials.
"My-yy way . . ." It is late and we are hungry and this is our one truly colonial meal. Restaurant 1908, where the singer croons, and the exquisite floortiles have remained intact through all that has passed. Over my head is a turn-of-the-century photograph of LM, its prom packed with deckchairs.
We wake early, in time to make the ferry to Inhaca Island. Setback number one: the hotel is locked. A bit of halloo-ing and we rouse the owner. "No problem," he says. Setback number two: the ferry has broken down. In response to the ferrykeeper’s vague gesturing, we set off up the road, growing despondent as we pass a silent Diskoteka and a deserted café.
I spy boats. It’s the Merchant Navy Training Centre, but what the hell. "Inhaca?" I ask the security guard. Even to my surprise, he beckons us in. Two young deckhands are busy with ropes on a catamaran. "Inhaca?" I ask and a sun-lined skipper steps from within.
"I’m leaving in 15 minutes," he says gruffly. "Ferrying the Symphony passengers to Inhaca,"
"We’re ready."
"Oh are you?" he says with the twitch of a smile. "Come aboard and have some coffee."
We head out over the chop. It’s drizzling slightly and Terry lends me a windbreaker. Originally from London, he has lived in Africa since ’69. "In a couple of years," he says, "this’ll be a wonderful place to live. It has to be. This is my last chance."
We head toward the faint dot on the horizon, which is the passenger liner. Terry stands at the wheel, cupping his umpteenth cigarette against the spray. We make two turns to run alongside the ship. I get a chance to hold her steady while we wait to try again.
"Going to be a touch wet," he says wryly as elderly passengers, clutching handbags, are loaded into rubberducks for their excursions to the island. In a flash of brilliance, I tuck my precious tracksuit inside my rucksack while Terry instructs his deckhand to drop us on the beach.
As we leap for the rubber duck, the second deckhand tosses his buddy his iridescent rainbow sunglasses. Terry laughs. "Girlfriend on the island. They both grew up there. No hanging around though, hear? We’ve got the passengers to rescue."
In my tee-shirt and windbreaker, I wallop over the chop, while the duck flails against the spray. We land sodden and half drowned, and make for anywhere, just anywhere dry.
Lucas is an Inhaca homeboy. He grew up there and worked for the Inhaca Hotel, where he eventually became manager. It was about then that it occurred to him: "Hell, I should be doing this for myself."
That’s more-or-less how we end up in a traditional reed hut which serves as Lucas’s Restaurant. We are lent sarongs to drape over cold shoulders and fed probably the best calamari I can remember tasting.
The sun comes out during the afternoon, pouring warmth over the wild mangoes and palm trees, silvering the wet dhows and fishing boats. In this almost too perfect paradise, I am hardly surprised to meet a man, running a makeshift bar in a lean-to,
rumoured once to have been a mercenary. But who knows?
We head back as Maputo grows faint and then bright again - an inverted saucer pinpointed by lights.
"See that building?" says Terry, pointing to a wedge of darkness on the skyline. "It was being built when the war began. Before the Portuguese left, they filled the drainage and sewerage pipes with concrete – if they couldn’t have it, no-one could. Isn’t that a shame."
Terry can’t quite believe the recent changes in Maputo. "There’s a brightness, a friendliness – oh, it’s still pocked and wartorn, but there’s an energy of life." Coming around, we head for the small harbour. Terry strains into the darkness. "You have to watch so carefully for fishing dhows. They have no lights."
Terry comes for a couple of Dos M’s before whisking us to the Feire Popular de Maputo, a fairground built by Samora Machel, now a cluster of open-fronted restaurants. On Av 10 de Novembro, we pass Maputo’s Indian population. Parking under the palm trees, they are promenading, sharing food, catching up on gossip and admiring each other’s babies. "Every Sunday night," says Terry. "Like clockwork.".
We settle for peri peri chicken at Mike’s, run by an eccentric Englishman - slightly the worse for wear - who says Lord Lucan is alive and well in Mozambique. Oh, and he says Sainsburys packets are manufactured in Maputo.
Moaning in a desultory way about kickbacks, he becomes quite lyrical over the country’s beauty.
"The pity is it becomes more beautiful as you head north."
"Why a pity?" I ask._
"Well, you’re not seeing it, are you?"
The hotel is locked when we roll home. But a homeless man leaps from the doorway to yell "Fernando. Fernando" – so rousing our long-suffering host once again. "No problem," he says sleepily.
We minibus it back to Komatipoort – Mozambican driver to the border posts, South African on the other side. Our South African driver is very circumspect, I think, but perhaps that’s just comparative.
"Hey," shouts a policeman as we trudge across the border. "Where’s your car?"
"Taxi," we yell back.
He laughs and laughs. He is still laughing as we hit South African soil.