For anyone with an ounce of escapism in their soul, there is no-where as magical as the Quirimbas Archipelago in Northern Mozambique with its Portuguese forts, tales of Arab merchants, ivory and slavery.
At tiny Pemba airport, in Northern Mozambique, a row of clocks on the wall tell different times around the world, but every single one has stopped. This oversight nearly results in me missing my flight to the Quirimbas Archipelago.
'Don't worry so, Sir, you'll still make the flight. It's just you and 3 others on the plane. And you won’t require a watch on Medjumbe, Mr Nic,’ says the check-in assistant. ‘Happy holiday in Moz-am-bee-kay.’
I climb into a single-engine 12-seater Cessna, and am thinking that the name of the destination – Medjumbe – sounds wildly romantic and idyllic, when the whup-whup of the propeller announces our departure.
‘We’ll fly over some of the most beautiful coast in Africa,’ says the pilot, an ineffably chilled goggle-wearing South African, after take-off. His appearance and the feel of the Cessna evoke the romanticism of flying in these small planes. It's not at all like taking a flight in Europe: there's no stewardess, no in-flight magazine and not much in the way of air conditioning. It is aviation as basic as possible, and it is this that makes it feel like such an adventure.
We're not particularly high but we are flying at some speed; the only other option would be to take a dhow, but the wind was in the wrong direction.
The Indian Ocean, seen from my window, is ridiculously beautiful: gulfs of the most exorbitant turquoise, mottled and torpid, diluting into shoals of jade-green and powder blue. Some islands have mud huts, and as we buzz over them, a young girl runs out into a field and waves at us. Others are uninhabited. I see the dark, unmistakable shape of a dolphin in the deep blue.
The Quirimbas National Park stretches 248 miles from Pemba to the Tanzanian border. That's virtually the same distance from London to Fishguard, and the guidebook says only a handful are inhabited, some, with small get-away-from-it-all retreats, others traditional villages with no accommodation but a chance to see rural life.
The civil war ended in 1992 and Mozambique is now at peace and ripe for exploration. Mercifully, tropical cyclone Favio and the floods in January 2006 did not reach Northern Mozambique.
I had come to Moz-am-bee-kay (for this is the correct, Portuguese way of saying the name of the country, when in the country) after a 20 year wait. After I finished my education, I had moved into a room above a shop and the previous tenant had left a couple of books there, one of them being about Mozambique. I treasured turning the dusty pages of this book, full of legendary white sand beaches, countless islands and the little-known historic jewel that is Ibo Island, as well as the Portuguese-Swahili culture and cuisine. It was from that time that a yearning to visit this off-the-beaten-track destination grew inside me.
But, of course, Mozambique was not always open to visitors; not because it didn't want them but because there was the 17 year civil war, the droughts, famines, hurricanes and flooding. But due to aid and investment from South Africa and better fortunes, Mozambique has started to appear in specialist travel agent's brochures in Britain. It's not too difficult to get to from London either: you can fly from London to Dar Es Salaam on Kenya Airways and then catching a Precision Air flight to Pemba is one of the preferred routes of entry.
Medjumbe floats into view – a mere blip in the ocean – dead-flat, coralline and laced with a green flannel of vegetation under the megawatt sun. Quite where we intend to land, I’m not sure, but it’s a trick of perception, because we angle in hard, drop suddenly and come to an ingracious halt on a half-built airstrip near a ruined lighthouse that imparts a cheerful primitiveness. When the propellor comes to a halt, you cannot hear a pin drop.
Jumping out, I meet Tony, the hotel’s manager. He speaks in half-whispered, reverential tones about the island: ‘Medjumbe is 800 metres long and 350 metres wide. We have our own time, Medjumbe time, one hour ahead of the mainland. Welcome to our paradise.’
He points to a ribbon of navy-blue ocean and says this is the edge of the reef. ‘You can wade out and the water is only waist-high; it’s a quarter of a mile. By the way, don’t bother locking your doors. It’s only us.’.
He gives me a blue plastic watch, set to Medjumbe time. I think it an eccentric feature for a tiny island to have its own timezone. The watch stops working 10 minutes later.
My dark-wood chalet is approached down a lane and feels isolated, its thatched roof and high-spec, log-cabin style interior blending in with the surroundings.
It’s rustically decorated with two four-poster beds, sea-weathered furniture, a bath and outdoor shower, a hammock and jacuzzi. It has a barefoot luxury, ideal for those who enjoy the pleasures of nature, simplicity and absolute relaxation.
But best of all is the beach. The beach is an S-shape of moon-white coral sand, waxing and waning to an interminable distance, the whitest white I have seen anywhere in the world. It feels like my own private beach and leaves me feeling hysterically happy.
There’s no-one to pick up the hundreds of perfect, pink conch shells, each one the size of a kitten, washed up and lorded over by black herons who bully the scuttling crabs. The curious noise - the only noise on the island, I should add - is the water rushing over the reef. Later, when flooded by the outrageous turquoise of the tidal Indian Ocean, the Medjumbe Lagoon is a soothing temptress to my jet-lag. I plunge in.
The resort is all-inclusive and the menus change daily: that evening, we dine on tuna sashimi, followed by lobster and prawns. The black, treacly Mozambican coffee, now a national obsession thanks to the Portuguese influence, is superb and an excellent complement to the pink watermelons and sweet pineapples.
Time slows to a few frames per second as this classic island experience gets the better of me: snoozing in the hammock, bathing in isolation, watching glorious sunsets that turn the whole island crimson and snorkeling on the reef among day-glow fish. There is no spa or TV, just a dodgy internet connection and a radio for calling the plane. It suits me down to the ground.
Two days later, I catch a 15-minute flight to Medjumbe’s sister property, Matemo. A larger island with four villages, Matemo Island Resort has Moorish undertones, with 24 chalets and more leisure and night-time activities. From the resort you can walk through forests of baobabs to the local village or there is the option to take a sunset dhow cruise.
Dinner is a scrumptious seafood barbecue, served on a rocky promontory above the sea and lit by hurricane lamps and the moon where I hear tales about Ibo Island from other guests. The staff at Matemo can organise trips to Ibo, and it takes just 45 minutes by boat to get there.
Next morning, we’re sailing to Ibo, past dhows, traditionally constructed with a triangular sail while the fishermen’s songs carry across the ocean. These dhows make me think of tales of Sinbad.
The yellow blur of Ibo appears, a strange and mysterious air lingering about it. We land at a tiny anchorage, overlooked by the ancient stone walls of one of three pentagon-shaped Portuguese forts.
Going ashore is like travelling back to the 1800s, emerging into a ghost town bearing the tatters of an extraordinary beauty. It's said to be one of the most ancient European settlements in Mozambique and certainly one of the most fascinating in all of Africa.
The main square is baking hot, the chocolate earth inset with lumps of coral, with Muslim men cycling past on black bicycles, their panniers stacked dangerously high with 20 boxes of eggs, the ground pecked over by hens and goats and gone wild with bright-red flame trees, maize and palm. There is a ramble of faded, yellow and grey palatial buildings, all derelict, but forming an incongruous museum piece – moss-covered, jungle-stained, and exuding grandeur. The former bank with a splash of pink ironwork and grand stairways is a few steps from the cathedral, the Church of Our Lady of Rosaria built in 1580.
This is all that remains of once-elegant Portuguese merchant's houses. Tropical rot seeps through everything. I walk inside these deserted buildings, over colonnaded verandahs choked with ivy and through overgrown gardens, filled with an indescribable sense of discovery and exultation. The place is a carefully preserved ghost town.
The Muslim villagers are politely curious. They live in reed huts on the outskirts of Ibo town, and there is neither a restaurant, tourist office, or any facilities except one small guesthouse. A little boy bows with a sad and subdued courtesy, as he tells me about Ibo’s 200-year-old town and the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, who landed here in 1502 when the island became a major trading port for ivory and slaves.
The Quirimbas Islands were thought to have been occupied by Muslim traders well before the 15th century, who were industrious in manufacturing a type of cloth called Maluane that was traded up and down the Swahili coast.
At the time the Portuguese landed on the islands, the main trading point was just south, on Querimba Island, where Muslims sought refuge from the Portuguese in 1507. Portugal attacked the islands in 1523, killing some 60 Muslims, looting large amounts of ivory and amber, jet, ivory, turtleshells, ambergris, millet and rice, coconuts and a variety of fruits, as well as cattle, pigs, goats and poultry. During the 17th and 18th century, this trade declined and was replaced by the slave trade. The slave trade became a major source of wealth. The islands were dominated by two Afro-Portuguese families -- the Meneses and the Moraes, who struck lucrative deals with French and Arab slave traffickers who were anxious to continue what was an illegal trade by the end of the 18th century. The maze of narrow tidal waterways that surrounds the archipelago was ideal for the running of contraband. Larger ships, however, carrying food and items, especially the British gunboats that patrolled coast after slavery was outlawed, could not penetrate the shallow channels, particularly the landing spot on Ibo.
By the end of the 16th century, 7 of the 9 largest islands in the archipelago were ruled by Portugese traders and the other two by Muslim traders. A description dating to 1609 detailed that Ibo was substantially fortified, and that the islands were prosperous and a major source of food supplies for the then capital of Mozambique, Ilha do Moçambique.
Ibo came into its own in the second half of the 18th century, as the major supplier of slaves to the sugar-plantation owners of France's Indian Ocean islands.
The Portuguese Crown resented the prosperity of the islands' independent traders, particularly fearing the islands might be captured by the Omanis or French, and in 1763 the Crown granted Ibo municipal status. By the end of the 18th century, Ibo was regarded as the second most important Portuguese trading centre in the country. It was leased to the Niassa Company in 1897, but the shallow, narrow approach to the island wasn't suitable for modern ships and so in 1904, Niassa relocated to Pemba on the mainland and Ibo gradually fell into decline.
We walk to the third fort, Fortaleza de São João Baptista. It is star-shaped and whitewashed in part, and is the best preserved. I wander around the walls that overlook the shoals of the brackish harbour. The place reeks of history with centuries old cannons and pepper pot-shaped battlements. In its heyday, the fort had room for 300 troops, food storage and armories, but today is an historical monument. The sooty interior is home to Swahili-speaking silversmiths who make jewellery using ancient Arab techniques that require blowpipes, charcoal, lemon juice and metal files.
The slave trade had brought prosperity to Ibo and by the early 19th century generous streets were laid out, gardens designed and planted, and a group of fine buildings erected round the main plaza. In 1897, Ibo was leased to the Niassa Company, who used it as a base for exploring the interior of Mozambique.
If it was Ibo's shallow approach waters which allowed it to continue trading slaves and to prosper, it was the shallow waters that were responsible, in part, for its decline. By the end of the 19th century, the Niassa company needed a deep-water port for increasingly larger modern ships and in 1904 Niassa gave up on Ibo and moved to Pemba further down the coast.
Today, Ibo is figuratively and literally, a backwater. Women collect oyster shells looking for mother-of-pearl and men fish for crab exactly as their forebears did. As a result, the reefs and mangrove swamps that make up the islands' ecosystems are still as nature intended them to be. There are turtles and dolphins in deeper waters. Much of the archipelago is still to be explored.
As dusk approaches, I can feel the ghosts of slaves and Arab merchants as I walk around the enchanting streets. I’ll not forget Ibo in a hurry.
Ibo sees very few tourists. During my trip, there was one other French couple. Time seems to have stood still here. I’ve devoted my life to exploring tropical islands, luxurious resorts and places of cultural heritage, but I’ve never been anywhere as pristine and magical as the Quirimbas islands.
FACTBOX
Getting There:
Kenya Airways www.kenya-airways.com flies from London to Nairobi and onwards to Mozambique or you can take a flight with Precision Air www.precisionairtz.com
Africa Travel Centre (0845 450 1520, ) can help you plan this trip.
Medjumbe Private Island and Matemo Resort are both run by Rani Resorts. Flights from Pemba to Medjumbe and between Medjumbe, Matemo and Pemba are organised by Rani. For information on Ibo: www.iboisland.com
Time Zone: GMT +2 hours
Flight Time: 7 hours to Nairobi, then 3 hours to Medjumbe via Precision Air
Language: Portuguese, but English widely spoken
Currency: US$ widely accepted
Best time to go: Dry months in Northern Mozambique are April to November.
Visa: Upon arrival in Mozambique US$30
