04 May 2024

Mozambique

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Mozambique once made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Sarah Sands finds it has been reborn as a holiday destination of sublime charm.

Mozambique - Strolling the empty shoreline

1 Supper on the sand 2 The local catch 3 Strolling the empty shoreline

THE HARVEY NICOLS sales assistant folded my electric blue bikini and asked if I was going on holiday. ‘Yes, Mozambique.’ She looked bewildered. ‘For a holiday?’

Her reaction was understandable. Until the early Nineties, Mozambique was one of the African countries devastated by civil war. Yet in the past ten years, South Africans have taken beach holidays in the increasingly prosperous south of Mozambique.

Now the magic is spreading north, all the way up to Tanzania.

The sensational and underdeveloped coastline of Mozambique, long, empty white beaches drawn sharply against the bright blue of the Indian Ocean, has made it a smart choice for holidaymakers.

Since the 17-year civil war ended in 1992, it has become an astonishingly successful economic model and beacon for tourism.

Soon the cognoscenti began heading for the string of 32 coral islands within sight of the mainland. The Quirimbas offer wonderful beaches, snorkelling and fishing.

Perhaps the most luxurious is Vamizi. For addicts of the TV series Lost, honeymooners or investment bankers who want an environment as personal as a yacht, Vamizi is the answer, with miles of white sand and only two dozen tourists.

Vamizi is subtle and dazzling. We flew in on a small plane, watched by children from the village that sits by the airstrip. Then we bumped along in a Land Rover on a sandy road for 30 minutes to the lodge, the only one on the island. The flowers along the roadside were as fragrant and delicate as you might find in Devon in July. Butterflies were everywhere.

The sparkling sun

We had flown overnight from London to Johannesburg, transferred to a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Pemba, on the Mozambique coast, and then taken the one-hour hop to Vamizi.

The island has its own rules. For one, we wouldn’t need shoes for the next five nights. It even has its own time, arbitrarily adding an hour to Mozambique time (just an hour ahead of British summer time) to get lighter evenings.

The lithe Italian manager Nadia guided us down a path to our first glimpse of Vazimi Island Lodge’s colonial style bar and restaurant.

The terraces look out over an empty beach. The setting sun set a a sparkling track across the ocean.

There are 12 villas, with large verandahs, but they are so far apart you are barely aware of them. They are made from umbila wood with roofs woven from palm thatch. You can shower looking at the monkeys on the edge of the forest and gaze at the sea from the bed.

The electricity works on a generator, so lights are intermittent and the shower is never going to be New York standard.

Despite the nets over the big beds, Vamizi seems free from mosquitoes. Vamizi probably does not reach the criteria for even four stars. That is its seductive charm.

World of coral

Lobster, tuna and dorado are caught from the end of the beach but meat and vegetables have to be brought in from South Africa.

In the evening, tables are arranged on the beach by lamplight and the most hardened and querulous of married couples are transported back to honeymoon tenderness. It is only at meal times that you see the other guests, unless you pass on one of your happy strolls along the miles of empty beach.

Other guests said the diving was fantastic, led by a team from the hotel’s dive centre. We snorkelled over astonishingly colourful and varied coral reefs, a few hundred yards off the beach. A marine biologist told us about the world of corals and turtles.

An eager Zimbabwean took us out fishing, expertly locating a shoal of enormous yellowfin tuna.

We pulled in three, with half an hour of exhilarating reeling and tugging, and enjoyed slices of sashimi three hours later.

After a few days it was hard to imagine a life of strain and cars. The visitors’ book used the word ‘paradise’ in every other sentence.

We left Vamizi with a wistful heart and headed for Ibo Island, farther south.

It is a photographer’s dream. Ibo was once another Zanzibar, a port through which Africans, Arabs and Portuguese traded cloth, gold and silver, ivory and slaves.

It reached its zenith in the 19th century, a town of three forts, fine colonial mansions and wide streets, until seagoing ships became too big to navigate the narrow straits between the mangroves.

The decline accelerated in 1975, when Mozambique gained independence and ordered all the Portuguese and Indian merchant families who lived in those grand houses to leave. The business classes left and Ibo fell into ruin.

Superb Snorkelling

Today, trees grow through the broken roofs of pillared mansions. Piles of documents, detailing the cargoes and passengers of every visiting vessel, lie undisturbed in the abandoned customs house. But Ibo is being rediscovered.

A South African couple have created Ibo Lodge from three renovated waterfront houses. Locals are being trained in silversmith skills going back centuries. Foreign aid is rebuilding the town and the 18th-century Catholic church is being refurbished.

Property investors are tracing the owners and buying up dilapidated houses. In five years, Ibo is going to be hip.

Almost everything at Ibo Lodge has a vista. You open a bedroom window on the sandflats that fill at high tide. From the infinity pool, you are part of the harbour. In the roof restaurant, you watch the sun setting. There isn’t much electric light in Ibo to compete with the brilliant starlight.

The food, lots of shellfish, is daintily cooked and the service is terrific. The waiters heard my 16-year-old son was interested in rumours the locals had set up a Friday night disco in one of the abandoned houses. He returned with great excitement at 1am, the disco having ended only when the generator packed up.

In the early morning, we took a boat out to a sandbank between Ibo and the mainland. The waiters constructed an awning and cooked a breakfast of fish and beans. We snorkelled through the shallows around coral reefs, watching a gorgeous range of tropical fish and left just as the rising tide began to cover the sandbank.

Later that day, we took kayaks along the edge of the island, watching the herons and exploring the mangroves. We splashed back just as the sun was setting.

There are no real beaches on Ibo, so I recommend the greater stretch at Vamizi with a couple of days at Ibo. By then, you will have become Robinson Crusoe in reverse. No one would wish to be rescued from these islands.

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