The end of the Isuzu

Well, the Isuzu has served us well, but as it has no back seatbelts and shitty lights and seems to spend about half its life getting fixed..... we have decided that the baby is a good as excuse to get a new car. Not content with the offers on the market in Pemba (either of them), and deciding to pretend that we are more competent than we are, we opted for the Japanesevehicles.com route. After months of careful selection, we picked a lovely Nissan Terrano, and duly paid our 4200USD for the vehicle. Awesome buy for a 4X4 with only 92 thousand clicks on it, right?

Then the fun started - we knew we would actually pay about double this with transport and import duties, but we hadn´t counted on the fantastic creative accounting of the Mozambican Customs officers. First, they refused to send the proper certificates to Pemba, saying this was impossible (many others have done this with no problem). With car in the port, they decided that they would class it as a luxury vehicle (ie pay roughly triple import duties), and then smugly informed us that we COULD challenge this, but it would require the exporter in Japan to re-do the certificate, which would take weeks, and of course we would have to pay the daily port fees... Even after calling in professional assistance to get through this crap, still ended up over the barrel - and all told, more than 14 000 bucks lighter, plus another 1000 for the ´professional help´. Hmm, next time, just buy a car locally.

However, at least the car is nice - and comes all equipped with a super-useful GPS navigation system...for Japan. Oh well, at least it´ll tell me if i ever take a wrong turn and end up in Kyoto.