This is the coastline that spoilt me forever. It is over half a century since I first came to know the beaches of Mozambique, the lullaby cadence of crashing waves and the suck of the swell, the sting of salt and sand on hot skin as my mother wrapped me in a towel to calm me. Each summer for the first 10 years of my life we would pack the old Vauxhall Victor with a few clothes and bumper bottles of Hawaiian Tropic and cross the Vumba mountains from Rhodesia into Mozambique then drive 300km down to the port of Beira.
Our beach holidays there came to an end for the same reason everyone’s did: a civil war that would last 15 years, leaving the country limp with fatigue, pockmarked with landmine craters and almost entirely emptied of wildlife. They say even the birds in Mozambique stopped singing for fear of being shot for the pot.
Since the end of the war in the early 1990s, I have returned to this coast many times, to sail around the dreamlike islands of the Quirimba Archipelago in the far north, pub-crawl the dive bars and nightclubs in the capital of Maputo in the south, and swim with manta rays in the Mozambique Channel in between.
I have scoured the world for a stretch of sand and sea to match this extravagant expanse of wild, dune-backed shoreline but have seldom come close. The tidy coral beaches of the Maldives are too confined for me; the Seychelles’ forest-backed coves too honeymoon brochure; the Atlantic waves of Uruguay and Brazil beautiful but cold; the lagoons of the South Pacific shallow and tepid. No, for me the coast of Mozambique is perfection, especially at its most terrifyingly loud, wild and windy when humpback whales breach offshore and whale sharks take shelter from storms in the bulbous coral outcrops and caverns of its depths.
The small, sandy islands of Mozambique’s Bazaruto Archipelago lie just a few kilometres from the sleepy mainland town of Vilankulo, where there are sand-floor bars and simple thatched lodges and campsites. The archipelago itself is in a protected marine park and consists of just five islands: skinny Bazaruto, the largest in the group with a 30km phalanx of dunes running down its spine; Benguerra (about half its size) and then, smaller and smaller, Magaruque, Santa Carolina and tiny Bangue. I first came here 14 years ago when news of the islands’ beauty had just started to filter further afield, but I had been hearing about them for many years before that.