If anyone needed help relaxing, it was Joaquim Chissano. For years, guerrilla warfare had consumed his country, flattening tourism and every other industry that had managed to take root in the preceding decades. It was a country of guns and politics, and seemingly little else. Though the civil strife was technically over, the nation was still in shock. It lay like a downed prizefighter, dazed and bleeding. The infrastructure in the capital had long ago been given up on. Power outages happened nightly, leaving cars and pedestrians to navigate the shelled-out streets by moonlight.

Maputo hadn't been as hard hit as the countryside, but mortar shells had fallen frequently enough to turn the occasional cement sidewalk blocks into sandboxes. Garbage hadn't been collected in weeks; it lined the streets like snowbanks in Wisconsin. Cabs were scarce and dilapidated, their trunks and doors held shut with coat hangers and packing twine. Soldiers were threatening revolt, demanding pay for services no longer needed. The atmosphere was spiked with resentment and discontent. If you ruled Mozambique, you'd meditate too.

This was my first visit to a place that had no tourism, a country that didn't know what to do with me. I had traveled to far-flung places before, but I'd been on eco-travel junkets, where they'd take you to the kind of remote mountain hamlet that "just got electricity last year," yet the pension owner's little boy had a Stimpy sticker on his door. More and more, "untouristed" doesn't mean remote. It means hostile and smelly. Travelers can get to pretty much anywhere they want to. It's the places they don't want to go that are left alone. As far as I could tell, I was pretty much the only foreigner on earth who wanted to be visiting Mozambique.

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In return for holding the passenger-side door in place on the rutted drive from the airport, the cab driver helped me find a room. Pensao Martins was airy and clean, so much so that I was lulled into thinking it was a-OK to drink the tap water. (Back home, weeks later, lab personnel would be trumpeting with glee at the bacteriological rarities found cavorting in my sample. "Endolimax nana! It's a first for us!") Because I wasn't meeting the president until the following day, I thought I'd do my usual Third World-interloper thing: a little wandering, a little lunch, a little shopping.

I stopped first at Banco de Mocambique to change money. The lobby was chaos, a human pasta of curling, overlapping lines. I was handed a plastic token and directed to a line. This was apparently the line you waited in to find out the proper line to wait in, which turned out to be longer again by half. I could ascertain no common theme to the plastic tokens being held by the people in my line. Mine was green and said P; the woman behind me had a red one with an impala on it. Perhaps they were gifts, a little something to thank us for our patience. I was the only one in my line changing foreign money. Apparently I was the only one changing foreign money in quite some time, for the teller seemed perplexed. Finally he disappeared and returned with a newspaper, which he opened and began reading, as though I had so overtaxed him that he felt the need for a break right then and there. As it turned out, he was looking up the exchange rate. So that was pretty much my morning.

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