Living the Vida Louca in Tete

The crazy life – or vida louca in Portuguese, pretty much sums up how we live in this town of opportunity, north (or south, or east) of the borders of where we call home. 

Tell people you are heading off to live in Tete and they’ll gasp in horror, saying you’re crazy.  An interesting observation from people who usually haven’t visited themselves, but perhaps they aren’t too far off the mark – there is plenty here to make you crazy, if you weren’t already so when you arrived. 

Collar a veteran ex-pat, and they’ll regale you with toe-curling stories of no shops, no roads, no restaurants, no supplies, no electricity, no potable water, no English…and then tell you how easy ‘you new un’s’ have it.  Still, here’s the list of crazy-making daily challenges we face.

Dust.  Wafting and curling its way through window cracks and under doors.  Softly layered onto every horizontal surface, clinging to your hair, creeping between your keyboard keys, hazing the screen, sucked up by the fan and forcing your computer to run slower and slower until eventually it spits and splutters out of life.

Reverse hazard beepers – a safety measure the mines insist on: their continual screeching drills inside your brain, making your teeth ache.  Why, oh why, can’t someone invent an on/off switch for them, so that they can be switched off when they leave the mine and use the vehicles in the suburbs and town?  As an early morning wake up call, the neighbour’s rooster can be dealt with (piri piri chicken) but land mining his driveway would be frowned upon.

The leisurely processing at retail pay points, and, if you are unlucky enough to require a factore, waiting for the painstakingly handwritten itemized listing of the entire contents of your grocery trolley.  After you’ve already received a till slip and paid for them.  Sigh.

Ordering food immediately when walking into a restaurant, and arriving well before we plan to eat.  I don’t know what I’ll want to eat in an hour’s time, but I do know that stirring hunger pangs are not the time to call for a menu.

Road traffic and obstacles of all kinds – cars, trucks, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians, taxi’s, goats and cows, tractors, potholes, subsided road shoulders - hazards fly at you from 360° and dare I mention the officials stalking the byways...

Just a few of the things testing us as we live the vida louca in Tete.  

WHAT LIES BENEATH

For all the turbulence surrounding the coal mines, international companies, local politics and mining in general here in Tete, until now there has been very little sign of the actual resource that’s caused all the trouble.

Imposing company signage for "Tayanna" overwhelming the smaller sign for "Minas Moatise" stood adjacent to a few small piles of black dust surrounded by some machinery, neatly placed next to the main road between Tete and Moatize.  We passed it several times before I thought to ask that was all about, and was told that I was gazing at a coal mine – I’d thought they were a road construction camp!  So much for visions of headgear and an impressive mine infrastructure.

There are many stories of people struggling to establish gardens, as the coal lies less than a spade depth below the surface.  Its proximity causes tremendous surface heat, killing plants even if you can dig down deep enough to plant them.  This resource, which has global industry sitting up and panting, literally just lies in the streets.  As for large mining houses and set ups of the sort we’re used to on the Witwatersrand, not a bit of it.   Just some signage announcing the mining companies, with a few branded cars and bakkies parked next to small office buildings, very little else to show.

But things are changing.  On the surface, Tete is slowing down.  People are packing up and moving on and there’s a glut of rental houses on the market at prices much lower than they were. The community notice board is filled with posts advertising cars and household contents for sale.

At the same time, the range of general items we take for granted in less out-posted places has exploded and (ignore the cost – rule one of international travel, DO NOT CONVERT TO ZAR!)  – Provita, beauty and hair salons, bath towels and stationery are quite easily come across now.  Don’t shriek with laughter at how excited I was to find sponge scourers for washing up - persuading Elita to keep it intact and not remove the scourer side attached to the sponge is another matter.  Decent coffee, tea light candles, clothes pegs…the list goes on.

 Since my last visit two lovely new restaurants have opened up; we now enjoy superb Indian cuisine from the little place across the bridge in Tete town and the sundowners on the deck at Agua do Coco in Moatize are fabulous.  Pizza from Chingale beats any we’ve eaten in White River hands down.  The wizened Italian proprietor, who doesn’t speak a word of English but always visits our table to ‘chat’ and nod, leaves us a little uneasy – we’ve seen too many godfather / mafia movies, I think, but there is definitely a whiff of the Italian underworld about him.  So life here is getting easier especially as we are still in the cool season and the temperature remains in the low 30 degrees C.

But comfort living and consumer goods are not the only changes in town – the mountain of coal heaped at  Minas Moatize now is staggering.  Huge boulders of the black rock gleam out of the pile which is taller than a double storey house.  The number of processing conveyers has multiplied and the activity level bustles positively.  And this is a minnow compared to the mammoth global mining conglomerates up the road.

Earlier this week I was transfixed by the sight of a passing train.  Freight car after car loaded with coal clattered past for many long minutes. The railway woes keeping the ‘bullion’ hostage in Moatize for the past year appear to be clearing and the business of mining and exporting coal is picking up.

I’m not sure why the sight of that train so stirred me.  Coal is, after all, the underlying reason for the frenetic development of the region and why we are all here.  Why should a noisy steel monster bearing piles of black energy cause any wonder?  After some pensive thought, I realize that the growing mountains of coal and the rattling railway cars herald change.  The town is moving forward, the time of pioneering derring-do has passed and everything is growing up –transforming into and establishing adult status.