In Africa, soaking up serenity African coast

Peace brings new prosperity to several island retreats poised on the brink of discovery.

By Ted Botha, Special to The Times
12:00 AM PST, February 26, 2006

A cyclone was churning off Madagascar when I arrived at Indigo Bay resort last February. The storm was several hundred miles away and wasn't threatening this southeastern African nation, but the resort's staff had brought in its fishing and diving boats just in case.

I sat on the porch of the Moorish-influenced villa, sipping a Laurentina beer as I looked out over the vanishing-edge pool and the long stretch of beach, watching the wind build to a crescendo of swaying palm trees and the sea turn a gray that you wouldn't dare go near.

Only hours earlier, the water had been that aquamarine you immediately want to dive into. I had seen it from the air as I flew to the Bazaruto Archipelago from Vilanculos on the coast. After the small twin-prop touched down at Indigo Bay's airstrip on the main island, which is also named Bazaruto, I was driven up to the open-air reception area, all Indonesian woods and deep couches, where a smiling waiter held out cold fruit juice in a glass beaded with condensation.

He led the way along a polished wood walkway to my quarto (Portuguese for room, even though it was more like a cottage). About 40 quartos lie between the main building and the beach, and a dozen more, as well as a presidential suite, are strung along the hillside.

On my way to dinner that evening, as the wind gathered force, I passed some of Indigo Bay's other attractions: a shop selling designer beachwear, a new water-sports center and a beachside bar. The only thing lacking was other guests, as if the resort were decorated for a party and no one had arrived.

At least not yet.

Mozambique is not on many people's radar. It is twice the size of California, abuts six countries, has about 1,560 miles of some of the most gorgeous beaches you will find anywhere, with coral reefs said to surpass those of the not-too-distant Seychelles, and abundant seafood. But there aren't many hotels on the coastline. A civil war had a lot to do with that, but more about that later.

Indigo Bay is the first resort of its luxurious caliber and size on the Mozambican coast, clearly in anticipation of a tourism boom. It used to be a smaller, much less conspicuous property but was taken over by a Saudi Arabian businessman several years ago and jazzed up. Not everyone is happy about the change, seeing that it has pushed a land of laid-back lodges into the realm of ritzy resorts. But with this kind of sun and sand, change was inevitable.

A terrier, a crane and dolphins

ON my first trip to the archipelago a year earlier, I had started off at one of the more traditional lodges, in fact the one by which all other beach properties in Mozambique have been measured since it was built in the early '90s.

Benguerra Lodge, on the island of Benguerua, has fewer than a dozen open-sided bungalows done in a Zanzibari style — carved four-poster beds, richly colored walls and fabrics — and topped with palm leaves. The bungalows are set beneath a canopy of trees just in from the beach, and each one bears the name of a province of the country.

Benguerra Lodge is homier than Indigo Bay: Someone's pet terrier hangs around the lounge, and a white crane has made its home in the garden. It's considered one of the two must-stays in the country, along with the Polana, a confection of a hotel in Maputo, Mozambique's capital. Added to those are a growing number of newer properties: Marlin Lodge, which is not far from Benguerra Lodge, and Quilálea, a teensy island resort in the Cabo Delgado province to the far north.

My arrival at Indigo was as different as the two lodges. Instead of flying in, I took a boat from Vilanculos, Mozambique. It had seemed the most obvious way to get to the islands, which are in the middle of a marine reserve that has one of the largest surviving populations of dugongs in the Indian Ocean as well as whales and manta rays.

Dolphins escorted us on the 40-minute voyage, crisscrossing our bow until shortly before we beached in front of Benguerra Lodge's dive center. But mostly the action was on the surface: Hundreds of black-winged flamingos gathered at the northern end of the island while fishermen headed home in their dhows, their distinctive short-masted sails making this southern country feel like Arab-influenced East Africa.

In the 13th century, Bazaruto and Benguerua were ports of call for Arab and Swahili merchants sailing south from better-known places such as Lamu, Zanzibar and the old fortress town of Ilha da Mocambique. Indeed, it was off Bazaruto island that divers were said to have found pearls that eventually made their way into the jewel box of the Queen of Sheba.

From the air the view was appropriately jewel-like. Countless islets of sand protruded from the water-like apostrophes on a turquoise tableau. The main islands appeared in sequence: Magaruque and the coral Santa Carolina, followed by the larger Benguerua and then the largest, the 20-mile-long Bazaruto.

Magaruque and Santa Carolina are big enough to have their own landing strips and resorts, but no one has used them for many years because they are awaiting development.

One day the Indigo Bay dive instructor took me to Santa Carolina after a picnic lunch on Pansy Island, a huge sandbank with a sheltered bay on one side and on the other Two Mile Reef, a popular place to see reef and game fish and coral.

Santa Carolina is beautifully shaded and has a jagged coral shoreline and a ghost resort of two small, tree-lined boulevards, a church, a clinic, a small school, and a hotel where you can almost hear the strains of fado music echoing down the cracked hallways. Frayed though it is, the island's beauty is unmistakable, and you can see why it was named Paradise in its heyday in the 1950s and '60s, when Portuguese vacationers flocked there from Lourenco Marques, Maputo's name before independence.

In 1975, Portugal granted Mozambique independence, but it was hardly a joyous event. A guerrilla war had been raging for a decade, led by the Mozambique Liberation Front, or Frelimo, a merger of three regional nationalist groups. To quell it, as many as 60,000 troops were sent from Portugal. The colonists, when they finally left, did so lock, stock and barrel.

At independence, the political situation only got worse. Frelimo established a one-party socialist state, immediately opposed by the newly formed Mozambican National Resistance, or Renamo, a rebel group supported by Rhodesia and later South Africa. The resulting civil war of more than 15 years left as many as a million people dead.

In 1992, a cease-fire was signed, made possible by the fall of communism and the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. Against all expectations, the peace held, with Frelimo repeatedly winning multiparty elections ever since. In 1995, Mozambique became the first non-British country to be accepted into the Commonwealth, and today it is often listed as one of Africa's success stories.

During the fighting, the islands were a popular haven, being out of reach of the rebels and the ubiquitous landmines. It wasn't the first time they had played this role; in the 19th century, tribes fleeing the warmongering Zulu king Shaka escaped from South Africa into Mozambique and onto the Bazaruto Archipelago. During the civil war, however, the largest group of refugees made their way much farther north, to Ilha da Mocambique.

Ilha, as it's more commonly known, had been a waystation of a different kind for many centuries. When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail this way, on his way to India in 1498, he stopped at Ilha, which lies at the narrowest point in the channel between Mozambique and Madagascar, 217 miles away. Arab sultans had created an outpost there, which the Portuguese took over. It became a major trading post for ivory and slaves.

Ilha was not on my itinerary, even though I dearly wanted to go. It is there that one can best see a cross-section of the cultures — African, Arab and Portuguese — that have influenced this country. But Ilha isn't easy to reach, lying about 500 miles north of Bazaruto, and not on any major air or road routes.

Another chain of islands is even farther north than Ilha but is easier to get to: the Querimbas. Unlike the southern archipelago, the 32 islands of the Querimbas are coral, lie close to shore and stretch about 150 miles from the town of Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado, to the Tanzanian border.

By land, that trip takes many hours over a bad road, making this part of the country seem undiscovered.

From Pemba, I flew once again in a twin-prop. The last thing I noticed on the mainland was the Pemba Beach Hotel, standing like a citadel on the shore, almost identical in its Moorish look to the Indigo Bay resort and owned by the same Saudi businessman. We followed the lush green coastline and its puzzle of estuaries, inlets and coves before we reached the Querimbas.

The first two islands have no buildings, only thatched shacks for adventurous fishermen. Quilálea is the fourth along, about 20 minutes by plane, and it's so small that you have to land on the next island, which is the biggest in the chain — Querimba.

It's full of coconut trees and cows and has been farmed for the last four decades by a man of German descent, who drove us from the plane to a boat that would transport us to Quilálea. This section of the trip had to be carefully timed to coincide with the tides, which retreat so far and fast that certain areas become impassable at various hours of the day.

Quilálea is a morsel of an island whose size and isolation belie its sophistication, and its lodge is a work of love. Marjolaine and John Hewitt used to dive in the area and wanted to turn a piece of the Querimbas into their own sanctuary. They built nine spacious and tastefully decorated chalets with huge bathrooms and showers; each opens onto its own private beach. At dinner, Zambian chef Nathan Mkando turns out marvels you'd never expect at such an out-of-the-way place: tuna carpaccio, mackerel with coconut rice and a vegetable compote. His wife, Grace, is the pastry chef, so desserts might include a freshly made flan or a fruit-filled meringue. During the day, Grace doubles as a masseuse, working at perhaps the most outrageously situated spa you'll ever get to — a grass hut at the edge of a rock overlooking the water.

At Quilálea, I was reminded of another role that such lodges play — as conservationists. After years of war, when animals were killed for food, for fun or by landmines, the return of tourism has alerted people to the value of the country's wildlife. Now game parks are slowly being replenished, and fishing is strictly catch-and-release.

But old habits die hard. On the far side of Quilálea is a littoral called Turtle Beach, its sand often crisscrossed with the trails of female green and leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. A week before my visit, poachers had stolen 18 turtles. The Hewitts said they immediately set out by boat, intercepted them and set the turtles free.

Missed opportunity

THREE islands along in the Querimba chain is Matemo. The resort there, one of the newest of those built by the Saudi businessman, is on a gorgeous bay. Here, as with Indigo Bay, more attention was given to size and extras than to the exoticism of the locale. What could have been an intimate, out-of-the-way experience turns out to be generic.

Twenty cottages of wood and thatch are set in a row along the beach, allowing for little privacy, and they will soon be joined by 30 more. Their interiors seem to have been tossed together by a designer who had no sense of the place: Not only are there the indispensable TVs, safes and minibars, but there are also thick Oriental rugs that hardly suit a destination with lots of sand. Muzak plays constantly in the reception areas, and the buffet is extensive but bland.

For anyone in search of something familiar, Matemo has the obvious toys — big boats anchored in the bay — and enough activities to keep anyone happy. But I had hardly checked into the place before I was already missing Quilálea.

In its favor, Matemo is only a 20-minute boat-hop from Ibo. For anyone who cannot get to Ilha da Mocambique, Ibo is the next best thing, giving historical perspective to a country that many a visitor could easily leave thinking is all beaches and palm trees.

Ibo, several centuries old, is one of those curiosities whose location could only be justified by colonialists, who made it the capital of Cabo Delgado province, forcing locals on the mainland to travel many miles out of their way to get administrative work done. It's not hard to see how difficult this must have made the lives of the local people, what with the fast-receding tides leaving boats stranded hundreds of yards from shore and forcing people to walk the rest of the way through squishy sand.

Which is exactly what happened to me and a staff member from Matemo, a British woman named Laura Collier, one of the few white people to have lived on Ibo in recent years. When we finally trudged ashore, we found only a few people on the dusty streets, and Collier greeted everyone we passed.

"Bom dia" — good day — she would call out in Portuguese, and they smiled and asked her where she'd moved to. Others would throw their arms around her and buss her on the cheeks like an old friend.

Forty years ago, 10,000 people lived on Ibo, and the town had bakeries and blacksmiths and a large hospital. Today, there are barely 1,000 residents, and they live without electricity, water, phones or even a rudimentary clinic. Many of the buildings have been claimed by thick vines. Even the 250-year-old Fort of St. John the Baptist seems as if it were put there by mistake, to fend off an invasion that never happened. Once used by the authorities to incarcerate people, many of whom did not come out alive, the fort is now a crude museum, its entryway an impromptu shop for a dozen bespectacled men beating jewelry out of old coins.

Afterward, we walked along the overgrown esplanade, where you could imagine people in their Sunday finery strolling to take in the gorgeous views across to the mainland.

Collier pointed out the Bella Vista, the only guesthouse in town, which had recently been renovated, and we toured a thick-walled old mansion that was being turned into an up-market guesthouse. There was a sense of a place about to be rediscovered, but meanwhile, Ibo is like Santa Carolina in the Bazaruto Archipelago: beauty in decay.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Off Africa, treasures await

GETTING THERE:

Most flights to Pemba and Vilanculos, departure cities to Mozambique's islands, leave from Johannesburg, South Africa, or Maputo, Mozambique's capital.

From LAX to Johannesburg, connecting service (change of plane) is offered on British, Virgin Atlantic, Air France, Swiss, United, American and Delta. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,524.

From Johannesburg to Maputo, Mozambique, South African Airways has nonstop flights. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $196.

Transfers to the islands sometimes cost extra, and there is usually a choice of going by boat or plane.

WHERE TO STAY:

Benguerra Lodge, 011-27-11-452-064, http://www.benguerra.co.za . The lodge recently added a two-bedroom villa and a pool, and the lounge has been refurbished. Doubles from $752.

Marlin Lodge, 011-27-12-543-2134, http://www.marlinlodge.co.za . Its 21 bungalows have air conditioning and feel more up-market than at Benguerra, even though they're cheaper. Doubles $426 to $910. Buffet lunches are de rigueur, but they tend to be good and often inventive.

Quilálea, http://www.quilalea.com . Its spacious chalets are evenly split between the sunset and sunrise sides of the island. Doubles from $750.

Indigo Bay, and sister lodges Matemo and Medjumbe, (800) 524-7979 or 011-27-11-465-6904, http://www.indigobayonline.com . Doubles from $374.

ESSENTIALS:

To call Mozambique from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 258 (the country code for Mozambique) and the local number.

The weather on the islands is good most of the year and best in April, May, August and September. During cyclone-prone February, most lodges close.

TO LEARN MORE:

Mozambique Tourism, 011-27-11-803-9296, http://www.mozambiquetourism.co.za .

— Ted Botha