The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
FOUR MORE BEACH BREAKS IN MOZAMBIQUE
Set in the Quirimbas National Park – the largest protected marine reserve in
Africa – Guludo is a small, barefoot lodge of stone and thatch villas, or bandas. There’s no electricity and no Wi-Fi (except in emergencies) – not that you’ll need it with eight miles of beach on your doorstep. From £185pp per night. guludo.com
The mansion at Ibo Island Lodge was once the headquarters of the Niassa trading company, and you’ll still enjoy the colonial-style architecture today. Take a boat trip to discover the best beaches of the archipelago, and learn about the wildlife that calls this island home. From £275pp per night. iboisland.com For all-out luxury, try the Anantara Bazaruto Island set in the Bazaruto Archipelago, 20 miles off the coast of south Mozambique. At 37 miles long and 12 miles wide, there’s more pristine whitesand beach than you can possibly explore, plus diving, dune bashing and fishing.
From £330pp per night. bazaruto. anantara.com
Tuck into fresh seafood at breezy beach bars and watch fisherman haul their nets on to the sand at Wimbe Beach, close to Pemba in north Mozambique. Base yourself at the Avani Pemba Beach Hotel &
Spa which has its own lovely white sand beach out front.
From £121 per room. minorhotels.com
smoky barbecues mingling with the salty air of the surf-pounded beach. Behind them, sandy lanes of paintdoused stalls sit next to crumbling baroque villas adorned with mossstrewn Portuguese tiles – a reminder of Mozambique’s colonial past.
Ponta do Ouro serves up its own heavenly version of rest and relaxation. R&R – a half-rum, halfraspberry pop flouro-pink cocktail that’s fondly downed by locals and visitors – comes with a wink and warning. “One is good, two is great. No more than three,” the bar’s owner tells me. I’ve never slept better. The next day calls for something a little more sedentary. I drive 11 miles north to Ponta Mamoli and arrive at White Pearl, one of the few luxury resorts on this southern coast. The clue’s in the name: the all-white interiors and squidgy sun loungers-withviews are the sublime antithesis of Ponta do Ouro’s bustle.
It’s here I explore another seemingly never-ending stretch of wave-lashed sand. I saunter along the coast on a ginger-tinged horse called Blazy (“because she’s a little lazy,” Lorenzo, the hotel’s activities guru, tells me), squint through a telescope at the moon and devour traditional deepfried Mozambican snacks. I could spend many hours bobbing about in the ocean, but the new road has made it even easier to revisit the Maputo Special Reserve, rolling a bush and beach break into one afternoon.
Please, let me see elephants this time. I’m in the right hands.
Domingos, my guide and a former reserve warden, is an expert in predicting football scores – and the animals’ whereabouts. We turn off the Tarmac and take a “hippo highway”, so called because the animal’s dung lies fresh in the sand. We stop to pick black monkey oranges, a slippery stoned fruit that tastes like custard. We watch monkeys launch themselves from the low, wide branches of waterberry trees, see 12 giraffes striding regally alongside us and spy crocodiles snoozing in the late-afternoon sun. Finally, in the distance, we spot a herd of elephants. The jeep crawls closer and we watch them roam the grassy savannah until sunset.
Things move somewhat faster on my ocean safari. This southern stretch of coast is a hotbed for divers, and Lorenzo takes guests to the Pinnacles reef to see 12 species of (friendly) shark and to Croc Creek (for crocodile fish).
All very good, but I have other things on my mind: dolphins.
“Swimming with dolphins is a privilege, not a right,” Lorenzo tells me. “They can sense your mood, your anxieties, your stresses. They can tell you’re pregnant even before you do.” I’m nervous already.
The conditions are perfect: the sky a cloudless cornflower-blue, the wind low, the waves flat. We zip south along the coast, then follow it back north. Miles and miles of uninterrupted sand are backed by jungle forest, without a single eyesore in sight. Then we see them. A small pod of bottlenose dolphins starts wiggling around the front of our boat. “They are taking a nap,” Lorenzo says, “they close half their brain to swim and sleep at the same time.” Multitaskers, take note.
It would be rude to wake them. Instead we hurtle north, Lorenzo easing the throttle at a reef just off the beach. Mozambique’s tourism has previously suffered at the hands of political tension in the north, but here, 1,500 miles south, it’s a different story. “Investors want to build a port in this very spot,” Lorenzo says. “It would destroy the beach, the marine life and the peacefulness. We must all work to protect our coast.”
It’s hard to picture. Just yards away is another stretch of empty, dazzling white sand leading into lively jadecoloured ocean. I promise to play my part, pull on my snorkel and fins, and jump straight in.