With a butter knife, a 50-something Vrystaat farmer picked at a blister the size of an old R1 South African coin.
"What you doing?" I quizzed.
"A blerry spider bit me here and she laid her eggs in my hand. Check." He prodded at the blister, and bloody hell, inside were four black spider eggs.
"I'm just waiting for the day these guys decide to hatch and I'm gonna nail the bastards." He cranked up the volume of his TV. The SABC's talking-head, iconic news-yapster-icon Riaan Cruywagen, was coming at us live in a caravan park in Maputo.
The first time I visited Maputo, I was 25, dangerously exploring a city I never knew. I arrived by Kombi with two Irish dudes I'd met the night before at a Durban curry restaurant. We camped at a trashy R10-a-night caravan park off the beachfront's Avenue de Marginal. The campsite was crawling with members of the AWB, saying they were in Lourenço Marques.
"We're escaping the black take-over in South Africa," the big, beefy one snarled.
I was there just after the elections. UN troops were everywhere. Sheiks in turbans with AK-47s and cammo-clad armed security guards outside Casa Elefante fabric shop in Avenue 25 de Setembro. We saw a heavily-armed entourage that had enough ammo to blast Hotel Polana's guests to neighbouring |Inhaca Island. They were simply guarding Café Continentaal, a popular pastry shop.
It was 1995. Mozambique was |attracting everyone. On the south coast of Maputo, the seaside resort of Ponta de Ouro was teeming with lobster-red-bellied Natal South Coast fishermen. On the beach with their Bible-black 4x4s, they filled glutinous freezer-chests that spilled over with couta, kingfish, marlin, sailfish and wahoo. Off the Bazaruto Archipelago, local spear fishermen were catching parrot fish. Daily. After two decades of civil-war, no one was thinking about saving the fish.
Glossy magazine travel writers were catching Hotel Polana's crystal-windowed lift to wallow decadently in Maputo's five-star luxury at $200 a night. They sipped Bombay Sapphire gins on the terrace of the Club Navale yacht club, wrote about the "friendly locals" and raved about the "cheap Tiger prawns at Costa Del Sol". They simplistically dubbed Maputo's crumbling villas in the Portuguese Gothic Maunelini style, as "modernist architecture".
On my first visit I, checked into a skanky hotel in a street with no name. I was offered diamonds, a house on the outskirts of the city, fake Christian Dior in exchange for a strip, and drugs and chemicals I didn't know existed.
The prawns were dizzyingly cheap at R15 for 2kg, cashew-nuts at R17 a kg, a tin of shoe polish for 35c, and at Mercado Centrale on the black market I scored 1 300 meticais to the rand.
Maputo's 24-hour dance-a-thon drink fest is where the evening's |entertainment is getting wasted and dancing until dawn to Tabanka Djazz. Despite the self-imposed evening curfew I knew nothing about, I followed Eric Clapton singing Portuguese into De Museo. It's a series of 60 grass-hut shebeens jammed into the size of half a rugby field and had fish and chips for R1.50 washed down with cold Laurentina. It's never easy finding your way back to your hotel in Maputo, because if you're not in the centre of the city, don't bother looking for street names - there aren't any.
Even though Air France announced their first weekly flight from Paris to Maputo, I didn't meet any Parisians. I was rubbing shoulders with wily street children.
I met a charming poet, Job Chicolo, who gave me a poem neatly typed on blue airmail paper.
What I just appreciate in a poem is not through meaning, neither its structure.
But I feel myself amused: I do smile; I do jump, I go fast, I disappear sometimes into my own figure.
I do really feel like I'm speaking with God!
Maputo is a poetic city, if you |allow yourself to be romantic and you're open to meeting strangers. Less romantically, blind beggars, deep sockets instead of eyes, were led by nimble children across dirty side-streets. "Meticais, meticais," the children jabbed me with their pencil-thin fingers. The main city centre streets were littered with skeletal remains of burnt-out cars.
Maputo 10 years on. Still blazing hot, but no longer blazing cheap. At famed Maputo restaurant Costa Del Sol, be prepared to fork out R400 for a plate of peri-peri prawns. The streets are clear of burnt-out cars and very few street children roam.
We stayed at a fabulously dodgy hotel, Pensão Central, off 24 de Julho, near Praça da Independencia. Our hotel had tatty appeal with pistachio walls, art deco cupboards and polished parquet floors. It soon transpired (at only R60 a night) we had unwittingly booked ourselves into a brothel! But it was conveniently close to the cathedral which marks the centre of the city. It resembles a giant white wedding cake that chimes on the hour on the corner of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin streets.
"For me, everything is bright and alive in Maputo," reckons |Maputo-born Ira Manhice, a |student studying fashion design in Cape Town. She says the nightlife is very different compared to Cape Town. "In Maputo, it is so much more tropical, very Latino," she |explains. And dressing up |seriously stylish is crucial. Ira, in a tailored impala skin jacket she dyed midnight blue, crosses her legs. She is wearing Granny Smith apple-green skyscraper heels.
"The women of Maputo are very proud" she insists. "Even the poorest feel the need to be beautiful. At night clubs everyone is always dancing like couples, not salsa, but passada, a dance with very close body contact."
Eating out in the main streets of Maputo has certainly lost its charm. There are more Italian restaurants than women wearing traditional capulana.
For the most authentic lunch in Maputo - fresh barracuda with chillies and boiled potatoes - there's the Radio Mozambique Social Bar just above the Jardino Tunduru (Botanical Gardens). This is where the local cats hang-out. It's also where an old boarding house phone rings that no one picks up. The TV plays back-to-back reruns of MacGyver - but no one watches.
In Maputo we hooked up with nu-afro-beat funkster, guitarist and vocalist Chico Antonio, living on Eduardo Mondlane. Chico is |legendary in Mozambique. He has performed with the Marrabenta Orchestra and now has a cranking six-piece band we hope will get sponsored to tour South Africa.
We cruised to the Centre Culturel Franco Mozambiquan, the cultural hub of Maputo for music, theatre, art exhibitions, film and live concerts.
But whether you're into jazz or wild nights of drinking or both, whatever you do, resist the urge for a romantic late evening stroll on the beach, as you're likely to get mugged. Or as I was 10 years ago, hair-raisingly shot at, with my mate shot and wounded in the leg. My saviour was a dashing UN sheik in white who brandished an AK-47.
My only comfort that crazy night while soaking in a hot bath of Jack Daniels at the Parisian |Embassy was Winston Churchill's fuzzy chirp, "There's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at with no result."
- To get there: www.flysax.com or call 0861 606 606. South African Express flies Mondays and Fridays from Cape Town to Maputo from R2 842.
- It is a malaria area; take anti-malaria precautions.