Mozambique: travel nirvana

There’s something different about Mozambique. It moves to a gentle rhythm even by African standards. Men collect firewood and boys collect water, sharing what is considered women’s work in other countries. It’s a place of soft sell; vendors here try to get your attention by smiling, they may even turn the music up. Everything flows at a trickle over walking pace, yet it somehow flows with only a small token of the chaos that is associated with African time. There just isn’t enough momentum.

This is my kind of place.

Mozambique is a laid-back tropical haven with warm people who seem genuinely delighted you are visiting them. There are big South African holiday resorts dotted along the coastline but western commercialism is relatively scarce and you’re more likely to encounter the rural charms of Mozambique. It still brightens my day when a mama carrying 20 kg of firewood on her head stops to greet us and wave before continuing on her way. Despite its reputation for corruption very few people have asked us for money or food and only two soldiers tried their luck at extracting a souvenir from Australia. Neither of them seemed surprised or disappointed when we didn’t have anything and just waved us on without much fuss.

In Maputo we caught up with a Mozambican friend who has happily returned after 14 years in South Africa. I asked him what he liked most about Mozambique and he replied “the food”. The food is delicious. The mix of traditional, Arab, Indian and Portuguese flavours makes it the best eating I’ve done in the African continent (so eight countries so far). With chilli, coconut and seafood readily available our inner Malaysians came out and we made fish curry one night and xo sauce another night to stir fry clams, pak choy and crab. It was pretty exciting being able to create these dishes with local ingredients – the xo sauce was made with dried shrimp and fish sold at the Xai-xai market and coconut oil made near Vilankulos.

Our Mozambican leg started without extravagance. After a smooth border crossing with an amusing reminder of Moz’s socialist past – the insurance salesmen set all policies at the same price and simply take turns selling insurance so each company makes the same number of sales - we spent some special days at Ponta Milibangalala in the Maputo Special Reserve. The camp here is isolated and the beachfront wilderness is almost pristine. The ‘almost’ comes in because sections of the beach are fringed with waste, most of it plastic, brought in by the surf or discarded by tourists. It is a common sight in this trip and we’ve been trying to curb our plastic consumption as much as we can in the last couple of months. Unsurprisingly it was a lot easier in Mozambique where there are less supermarkets and more traditional fruit and vegetable vendors. In Ponta Milibangalala Andrew took it a step further by up-cycling old flip-flops and some of the plastic rubbish we’ve been saving for a special occasion: retro-fitting the esky so it keeps ice for longer than a day.

When in paradise, there’s always time for home improvement.

After Milibangalala we hit Maputo where we caught up with a friend and basically ate our way through town. After eating our fill we headed to Xai-xai where Bruce showed signs of a broken bearing. Xai-xai was a pretty good spot to be stranded, it’s a bustling town with an uncrowded beach – with good fish. We took advantage of the high speed internet by doing some remote freelancing and before we knew it new bearings were brought over by a lovely South African stranger on the same DriveMoz Facebook page Andrew’s on. Although we had ordered an accompanying tool to replace the bearing it didn’t do the job and it took visits to three mechanics to get Bruce back on the road. We’ve certainly appreciated how British and therefore understated Land Rover manuals and video tutorials are when ‘unscrew nut’ doesn’t mention a welding wand.

Next stop was Tofo, the holy grail of backpacker travel. A cosy beach with good surf, coral reefs, amazing marine life – whales, whale sharks, dolphins, an absence of corporate commercialism and a laid-back crowd of volunteers and travellers; it is exactly what I’ve always searched for. It does have beach boys but if you wear the same dress everyday they learn to give up on you pretty quickly.

Tofo Shopping Centre

We ran into a girl we had met near Cape Town at a reforestation festival who summed up Tofo was full of people taking a holiday from their holiday. This certainly applied to us and for a week we abandoned the simple life and just enjoyed ourselves by diving and, ah, eating a lot of seafood. I stopped writing, reading and possibly thinking. We ended our fantastic time in Tofo with swims with whale sharks and skedaddled to Vilkankulo for more diving. We had a beautiful dive on Two Mile Reef in the Bazaruto archipelago where we saw five turtles and stunning coral in a lot of purple hues.

Bazaruto Island

Driving from Vilankulos to Blantyre, Malawi via Chimoio and Tete is a visual treat. First the landscape changes quite dramatically when palm trees give way to baobab. Then there are the gnarled mountains framing the farms and the forrest. At Tete you cross the wide Zambezi river and the town there is another side of Mozambique that I wasn’t expecting, new-ish and orderly.

We’re about to enter Malawi and as much as I want to explore Malawi again I’m already thinking of another Mozambican leg for this trip. It’s turtle territory.