Alternate post title: Panic! at the border
The next morning after the Great Sore Butt on the Orient Express adventure, I woke up from Brianna’s house in Cuamba and got a chapa to Lichinga, and would get off halfway in Mandimba. I arrived too late the previous night to attempt to change money at the banks, and I would leave before they opened, so I just bet on this town Mandimba being able to change my Mozambique Metacais to US Dollars. It was a border town to Malawi, whose border office to Malawi only accepted USD for the visa, so of course it should be able to exchange dollars. Right…?
Anyway, so I’m on this taxi to the border town, and was on one of the roughest roads I’ve been on in Africa. For 3 hours. The chapa absolutely sped down it, making my bones rattle and cheeks jiggle. At one point, the conductor took the entire (skinned, red, raw) balk half (hips/legs) of a goat from someone on the side of the road and it made the whole chapa smell like a butchery. I was almost gonna barf.
I got out at Mandimba and went straight to the bank, Millenium BIM, which, despite papers posted on the wall advertising the exchange rates, indeed did not have USD. Discouraged, I walked outside and sidled up to the security guard, and in my baby Spanish/Portuguese/English combination, explained that I needed USD for the Malawi visto. He called over the Metical/Kwacha street exchange guys, who brought over one guy who said he had USD, then promptly left to go get them and I was told to wait. As I waited, I watched as the security guard oversaw many sketchy kwacha exchanges behind the bank. The first USD guy did not show up, then another guy came over who knew a guy who knew a guy with old USD, which aren’t accepted. The only dollars accepted are ones 2009 or later. Then another guy knew someone with USD on the Malawi side, and could potentially call him to come to the border and meet me to do some exchange. So in summary, I was kinda screwed, because I knew that none of these things would every actually happen.
My host the previous night, Brianna, gave me the numbers for PCVs in Mandimba, and I had been texting them in the mean time wondering if any of them had USD. One of them FINALLY responded to me like, “Yeah of course if have USD!” and was happy to sell them to me. YASSS! My heart was so happy. I left the hotel near the bank, where I talked them into letting me chill until the Dollar-possessing PCV was able to meet me. She said she would be a few hours, because she was teaching and she wouldn’t be out of class for a little while. Then she called me, saying that no kids showed up at school because it was the last day of Ramadan. She shortly met me at the bank, where we had a Metacais/USD exchange (as lots of kids stood there watching us, wide-eyed). I promptly turned around and handed all the rest of my remaining Metacais to the exchange guys to get some Malawi Kwacha, then immediately turned around again and got on a motorcycle tax to the border. I got an exit stamp at the border post, then walked into no man’s land between Mozambique and Malawi. It’s a few km through a village of people with no nationality, which was really weird. I reached the Malawi border at the town of Chiponde after a short walk. A few minutes and $75 later, I had my Malawi visa. Good. I was in the clear. I confirmed that they only took USD, not Kwacha or Metacais, and they confirmed that they wouldn’t accept anything else.
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