The Bazaruto Archipelago

The Bazaruto Archipelago is five islands of dune and mangrove off the coast of southern Mozambique — Bazaruto, the largest, with dunes a hundred metres high, freshwater lakes with their own crocodiles and a lighthouse; Benguerra, where the lodges are; Magaruque, Santa Carolina, the old Paradise Island with its ruined hotel, and little Bangue — protected as a national park since 1971 and holding, in the seagrass of its channel, the last viable population of dugongs in the western Indian Ocean. Around them the water is the reason: Two Mile Reef for the diving and the snorkel, humpback whales from July to October, manta and whale shark, turtles nesting on the sand, flamingo on the tidal flats at low water; and across the channel on the mainland, Vilankulo, the gate — an airport, a beach of dhows, a market, the backpackers' town and the lodges' town at once, two hours' sail from the islands on a wooden boat that has not changed in centuries.

The traveller flies to Vilankulo from Maputo or Johannesburg, and chooses the scale: the town, with a day on a dhow to the islands — the sail out, the snorkel on the reef, the climb of a dune on Bazaruto for the view of the whole archipelago, the fish grilled on the beach at Magaruque, the sail home in the afternoon wind —, or the islands themselves, at one of the lodges of Benguerra or Bazaruto, for the days that are diving, dhow, horses on the beach, the dugong watch at dawn from a quiet boat, and the whales beyond the reef in their season; and, either way, the market of Vilankulo, the peri-peri prawns, the Portuguese bread and the 2M beer at a table on the sand.

The Guide's honesty: the islands' lodges are among the most expensive beds in Africa and the town's are among the cheapest, and the archipelago is the same from both — the difference is the boat one sleeps near; the channel's tides rule the day, and the dhow leaves when the water says; the cyclone months of the southern summer are real; and Mozambique's troubled north — Cabo Delgado — is more than a thousand kilometres away and its winds do not reach Inhambane province, though the prudent traveller checks conditions all the same; the dugongs are seen by the patient and the lucky, and are not promised; and a dune of white sand dropping into water of that particular blue, with a dhow's sail crossing it, is why the Guide keeps this page in the light.