Mission Visa - Phase One

By that time I had finally finished my dive master course and had planned to go down to Maputo to announce that my passport was lost or stolen. Lack of luck or good luck, the road in Xai-Xai had been washed away by the floods, meaning there was no land transport to Maputo for a while. Flying without passport was out of the question. Instead I called the embassy on Monday morning. The call brought me one step closer to depression. They told me they could issue a new passport, which would take two weeks to get here, but that the visa would be handled by the local authorities. I told her about Abdul and the whole situation I was in (being two months late as well). She said they would be calling Abdul, which they did, and gave him until noon to hand them my passport over. Otherwise, I would have to sort out my visa problems myself and would probably have to pay a substantive fine of mts 1'500 per overdue day (about CHF 30.-). This would get expensive if I had to pay the whole amount for two months overdue.

The road from Inhambane towards Tofo

I finally got a call from Abdul saying he was now at the border taking care of my passport, implicitly saying he didn't do anything until now. On the 21st of January I had promised Abdul mts 2'000 if he gave me my passport back on the same day. He was now reminding me of that promise a week later. He called again later saying he dropped the passport at the embassy and told me he was going to ask Thomas, a friend of his, to collect the promised money. He was very quick in saying all this.
Obviously I called the embassy before promising anything more. It turned out there was no new visa in the passport. It would have astonished me, Maputo being at least an hours driving away from the border and he couldn't have gone there, done the job and been back in less than two hours in which we had the different phone calls.

When Thomas sent me a message, I just replied to him that Abdul fucked up and that I had nothing for him. He answered me with an « OK cool ».