Cycling the Rice Patties around Beira

I went biking this morning with Peter and Bob. (Bob is an FP from England, who with his wife, Anna, is coordinating the curriculum at the medical school.) We headed north from town , past the airport and out to the mouth of the River Maria. Although Beira is not as oppressive as developing world cities can be, it was good to get away from the concrete and the noise.

Beira is pretty much built on a few sand dunes at the mouth of the Pungwe river, and is surrounded by a big swamp (which makes this a hotbed for malaria). Villages are situated in a few areas that are a few feet higher, and drier. The juicy areas are used to cultivate rice, and as we rode through them, we could see people harvesting by hand.

In the higher areas, we would rode past dirt compounds of thatched roof houses made of sticks. What struck me was the large numbers of people walking along the roads. We passed women carrying everything on their heads, chickens scurrying out from underfoot, and occasional young men on large, black, Chinese-made bicycles.

Cursed with too-long legs, my seat was too low, so I had to work hard to keep up with the other two, who were in it for the exercise. This had the effect of keeping me tired, and humble. Still, I managed to sneak in a few pictures which I have posted.

After, we went to the part of the city near the market on a special quest: Peter´s car side mirror was stolen the other day, and it cost him 1300 Meticals, (about $40) to replace it (probably with one stolen from another car). To discourage this happening again, we tracked down a guy who works from the median strip of a major street downtown, and etches the license plate number on the mirror. You pull up onto the median strip in the middle of the road, oblivious to any traffic that has to stop and pass around you, he pulls out his tools, powers them from the car battery, and gets to work.

Then we went to a small shop to have little steel bands strapped over the side marker lights, so that they wouldn´t be stolen too. The area we were in is thick with thieves, and Peter says about once a week, a thief gets caught in the act, and lynched by a mob.