The Mozambique Adventure…..

June 5, 2005

I'm getting quite addicted to blogging - I've always written in my spare time and once you've got sucked into a good scribbling session it can really give you quite a rush - starting nowhere in particular and just pouring out your mind onto the page through your fingertips and seeing where you end up a few hours later.

When I was in Malawi I wrote huge letters back to my friend in the UK about absolutely everything and my two years in Vietnam were initially catalogued via Nam reports, which I bulk emailed to anyone in my address book that wanted to listen - stories of which I think I will now transfer to here once I get my poor on the verge of dying laptop back on its feet.

In those cases I was experiencing new ways of life and cultures and getting involved in all sorts of mischief all of which made great story telling material - I also found that writing about them gave me a chance to relive it all and small details were never forgotten as they would be if you just used memory alone.

One of my most punishing and eventful journeys was the trip to Mozambique back in 2000 - I was packed off in a giant creaking, rusty haulage truck with a bemused driver called Lewis and sent to the port of Beira in Moz from my home at the time of Blantyre in southern Malawi (if you look at a map of Africa, Moz is that big chunk on the bottom right next to Zim - Malawi is that mini one above Moz whose make up is basically half a lake) - initially I thought being a trucker in Mozambique was fantastic, but my initial joyful face of unbridled optimism would soon be replaced by a steely thousand yard stare of grim determination by the journeys end.

For an immature little English troublemaking monkey it was a good wake up call, opening my eyes to the bigger picture of the world. The trips purpose was allegedly to give me an insight into how our tea got from point A to point B and observe all the relevant malarkey going on in the port and what not – I had been working in the Malawi office handling tracking you see – the process of updating folk on the whereabouts of their tea….. well I have to get a tea grind on here if you will allow – to explain about the job I do will give you an understanding for later gibbers and also the reason for the trip - I’ll give you a basic overview as follows:

The main tea producing countries of the world are China, India, Sri Lanka & Kenya – these all make the bulk of what is good in the average cuppa – they are added to by other countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Argentina, Malawi and numerous other southern & East African countries along with a couple of smaller quantities from the likes of Georgia, Turkey, Iran, Malaysia and Papa New Guinea. All of which is great for me because, as long as I don’t get sacked, I will manage to visit all these freaky & enchanting places before I cease to breath upon this fair earth of ours.

Now then, generally the process goes more or less like this:

1) tea plucked by field workers wearing colourful hats, they fill their back packs with the two leaves and bud from the top of the bush. As they get paid on weight they’ll probably throw in parts of the bush you don’t need and this will lead to crappy cup later on.

2) Trucks take the green leaf tea to the factory where usually one of two processes will be used - CTC or orthodox

3) I’m not going to bore you with the details but basically CTC feeds the leaf into long cylindrical metal tubes with lots of sharp pointy teeth in them, grinding the leaf into mushy pea like substance and eventually makes little black/brown grainy leaf that ends up in teabags. Orthodox spins and rolls tea in drums to form long twisted stringy leaf that ends up in packets across mainly throughout the Middle East and Russia.

4) After the tea is mush (CTC) or stringy spaghetti (orth) you pop it in the fermenting room for an hour or two where all the nifty natural chemical reactions take place involving therabugins and theraflavins that are within the genes of the leaf.

5) How much time & heat is added during this period balances your colour and flavour of eventual cup against each other.

6) Then once fermented the tea gets put through the drier – a bouncing conveyor belt of different temperatures

7) Once it pops out the other side, in both cases you’ve got a messy mass of different sized good and bad dried tea leaf and you need to sort it.

8) Sorting machines generally work on the principle of doing the hokey cokey, shaking it about a bit and the relevant sized leaf will all get shook into relevant bags/chutes along with all of its relevant sized buddies.

9) Primary tea (good stuff) is all the high end grades that come from the picking of two leaves and a bud. These grades sell for more money and have more of what you want to make a good cuppa ie: flavour/colour

10) Secondary tea is all the low grade stuff that is the by-product of the primary making process – if your plucker chucks too many leaves and stalk in their bags, it will come out of the process of manufacture as dusty crap or fibre – all of which is still sold as it is still essentially tea as it came from the bush – but it’s cheaper and not as good as the primary stuff – hence its secondary moniker….. wondering if I’m straying from the point here but never mind….I’ve started so I’ll finish…

11) These bags full of similar sized leaf get a grade slapped on them and an invoice number along with the name of the garden and then are packed generally holding 50-60kgs per paper sack. Usually 20 or 40 sacks to one invoice number.

12) Store sacks in whse at factory – draw samples – send samples to buyers/relevant auctioneer – argue on price for a bit – agree in the end – organise tea to be delivered to buyers whse usually via shipping direct from factory in containers

13) Tea arrives in destination – gets blended with other grades from other origins – filtered into teabag machine – packed off to supermarket.

14) Drink it fools!! Its full of comforting hot goodness! Sometimes! And sometimes it is full of crap that is swept off the floor of a factory in Iran!

So as a trader like me, you buy different grades from auctions/producers and sell on to packers & other traders at better prices when the market is in your favour - or when they’ve made a cock up in their planning and realise that they have to buy a few more metric tons quick sharpish to stop their teabag machines packing air and holding up deliveries to supermarkets etc. or deliveries to angry men with beards and donkeys who take bags of the stuff across rivers and deserts to markets in Afghanistan and other such sandy desolate places.

Or sometimes, even more like me, you buy tea because its got a really cool name like Kibena which reminds me of Ribena, or sometimes you buy tea because you like going to see the producer as its a nice trip and he always has strong whisky waiting for you when you get there.

And other times you buy tea because you really like the girl who works as a translator there and want an excuse to talk to her

Anyways, the devious part of it all is that some grades look like others depending on production methods – so you can buy some cheap stuff and blend it with good stuff and no ones none the wiser. As well as this, knowing which country makes what when means that as you concoct the recipe for your blend, you can mix in all kinds of different origins at different prices as long as you know your stuff and the best time to buy. Timing comes in due to quality and quantity coming in seasons all across the world and the prices are all linked to that main factor – for example if one country has a lot of rain, production goes up, overall quality comes down and knowing when the bottom of the dip is going to level out or when the tip of the top is going to be reached determines how much cash you’ll grab or how great a brew you can afford to make.

So to get back to the Mozambique story (don’t worry that’s the tea grind over with now - which upon reflection actually isn't necessary to the actual story I'm telling, but too late now eh?) – I was responsible for tracking in our Malawi office which involved tracing the position of invoices from whse to shipment. Up to this point I had always treated it as fact that if tea had been loaded on a truck outside in my yard and then driven off to either the moz port of Beira or the dry port of Jo’burg in South Africa, then it was more or less as good as in the port awaiting shipment.

My trip to Moz taught me there was plenty in-between. To give you an idea of the intended time – I was to leave on a Tuesday and travel the 2000km there and back to arrive in Blantyre again by Thursday or Friday in time to hook up with friends and spend my last weekend in Malawi at Lake Nyasa. All sounded perfect. Califragifuckinglistic in fact. In the end my journey can be summed up as a cooking broth of mayhem and frustration whose ingredients involved bureaucracy, documentation, a brothel of angry noisy hookers, home-brewed alcohol, mosquitoes, breakdowns in the middle of nowhere, politely refusing to sleep with someone’s cousin, no change of clothes, lack of food & water, sleeping two to the cab, money changing street robbers, dodgy wooden bridges across doom inviting ravines, minibuses with no doors or windows, 48 hours without sleep and a wrath of god Cyclone.

The whole story was documented in letter form that I was writing to my friend at the time – then, once I’d survived the ordeal and returned in one piece I turned it into the report I was supposed to write on the whole “trucking experience” for my bosses in Holland.

The report was unconventional to say the least and can be found here/links (The Moz adventure) Later on in life when I got the chance to go to Vietnam and set up the office there, the head of the company told me he'd read it and even though it shows my naivety and immaturity at times, it was still one of the main reasons he thought I could handle the job in Vietnam – as if I could deal with the chaos of Mozambique, I could deal with anything......

So it kind of is in some way responsible for where I am today and shall forever remain as a printed record of one of the most important weeks of my life – I’ll never forget the details and can relive it every time I go back and read it.

Isn’t that the main reason behind blogging?

Spo | June 5, 2005