Today was an early day as we had to rush to the airport to catch our flight. It's a good thing that we left early since we got stopped by the police from Kampala to Entebbe. Apparently, our taxi driver almost ran into them, but I don't really know since I wasn't paying attention to the road at that point. They stopped us for a good 15 minutes and tried to make our driver pay about 20K Ug shilling ($8), which he didn't have at that time. They finally let him go when he promised to leave his phone number and come back to deliver the money to them.
Our flight was very smooth and we had the chance to process the survey data that we had and sync up with our client at the business lounge in Johannesburg. The survey processing was far to arduous a task, but we finished it by the evening.
For dinner, we explored the downtown area of Maputo. On the way home, we were walking back from dinner and 2 police with large guns came over and asked us for our passports, which we left at the hotel. The promptly told us that we had to carry our passports and show them so that they could know that we weren't hear illegally. My reply was "Really, how could we be here illegally", but that wasn't the right way to go. It was clear that they were just giving us a hard time. They said, they wanted to take us to the police station or "handle it right here" (i.e. get a bribe, which they never directly asked for). They told us how much the fine was at the police station to try to scare us. Vishal and I used our negotiation skills to slowly move the conversation over 30 minutes from the topic of taking us to jail unless we pay them off to being us being new tourists and guests in their country where they should try to help us get home because we are lost. We came over to find them because we were looking for some advice on how to get home. After a long long time, the policeman who could speak English the best was able to save face and directed us to the taxi where we went home and called it a night.
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