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Other travellers’ who had been to Mozambique warned us that we would likely be pulled over by the police at some point during our stay in Mozambique. We barely made it passed border control and the first toll plaza, and we were pulled over…

We hand over our South African license, and the policeman says what we have is not a license. And that we are driving illegally. And it is” Big, Big trouble, my friend…” “up to six months in prison…” “We will need to go to Maputo to the jail…” “it will cost you very much…”

Now, while we were in South Africa we’d been pulled over a few times at random check points and never had a problem showing them our South African license. Usually after a friendly chat, we were free to go.

For some reason, the police in Mozambique would not accept our South African license. Six other officers were standing around, out of earshot from us pretending nothing out of the ordinary was happening… Actually, nothing unusual was happening. They know what their fellow officer is doing. They are just waiting for their turn to “shake down” another tourist in order to make some extra cash.

We politely asked him what we could do to make the problem go away. The Moz officer said he wanted “something”. Then he actually walked around our truck to look into the back to see if there was something in the back he might want. We pretended we didn’t know what he wanted… Maybe he was hungry. I have lots of snacks.

But then he said ” I want mon-ney”. Pretty specific. Wish I had a tape recorder. He also specified how much, which ranged from 200 to 1000 rand($26-$130).

The ordeal went on for quite some time, and he held onto our documents, so we couldn’t go anywhere. He actually called another officer over, and she also confirmed there was a problem. Finally we said we had the number to the US Embassy, and we were dialing. He finally started to panic, we gave him 200Rand and got our passport and license back.

I guess this is what people mean when they say, once you leave South Africa, you’ll see “the real Africa.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Mozambique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.