I’m leaving Huambo from the Praça Nova with one of the little Toyota mini busses, stacked full of luggage. We’re waiting for one extra person to fill the tin to leave. A police patrol walks by and orders to empty the carefully loaded minibus. Everybody has to show his papers. The officer in charge looks to my ID as if it was a curiosity and ponders what to do now. The visa page doesn’t interest him the least. A few women have to open their bags, but soon is clear there isn’t a lot worth of their attention and they walk away.

Reloading the minibus is another piece of cake though. How hard they try, there’s always one bag left which doesn’t seem to fit. Soon is clear there are too many people and too many bags, let alone space for someone extra. In the meantime, it’s 9AM already. After a heavily disputed solution which involves switching people from another yassi doing the same trip, we’re ready to go. The guy who rents out the taxi stand, a hysteric youth with a red hat and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt shows up to take his cut. As there are only 15 people travelling instead of 16, yet another dispute develops about the rent. I’m missing out on most of the details (fine print in Portuguese is not my strongest point), I suspect this might have something to do with it. But soon enough we’re on our way on the dusty track direction main road, although with the Lynyrd Skynyrd fan hanging on outside the drivers door, arguing about a missing 100 kwanza. In a stolen moment, he manages to grab a roll of banknotes from the dashboard, jumps from the minibus, and runs back to the praça, which means one thing: return to the taxi stand…

At the taxi stand, while the driver recuperates his money from the little office, yet another problem needs the operator’s attention. A girl who switched yassi after the police episode is missing one of her bags. Which turns out to be hidden at the bottom of the stack, behind a huge suitcase, pushed half under the back seat. Unload again…