So many whales!

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We mostly went there for the diving, which was wasn’t very good. However, Mozambique was great!

This trip comprised one week in Cape Town for a conference, one week in Botswana for fieldwork, then one week in Mozambique for more fieldwork and holiday. I’m often working at the bottom end of Africa so have done several blogs on South Africa (see Looking for Water, The Mighty Drakensberg and I could live here. If you could please just remove all the electric razor wire and guns.) and one earlier this year on Botswana (Okavango Dreams, or why we need more sustainable solutions for development). Therefore, from this trip you only get one blog from Mozambique. It was my first visit to the country – something that doesn’t happen often these days as I run out of new countries to visit – but hopefully won’t be my last because I really liked it.



In Vilankulos, we had prearranged a diving trip to the Bazaruto Archipelago, a place I’d wanted to visit since I first backpacked in Africa when I was 21, which must be almost a decade ago (actually, and frighteningly, when I do the maths, it was 22 years ago – more than half my life in the past!). The islands are host to just a few very exclusive and very expensive resorts; the sort that are owned by European royalty and cost 15,000 euros a night to stay there. The guests are shuttled by helicopter directly from Vilankulos Airport, thus never having to lay their privileged eyes on actual Africa. A boat trip is the way to see the archipelago for mere mortals, or go diving and you will normally have a lunch stop on the islands with some time to explore.

We dived on the first day because it was forecast to get really windy; they didn’t end up diving at all on subsequent days. Already the swell was quite high making the boat ride quite exciting and requiring negative entry dives. As I mentioned, the diving was quite disappointing. I expect that this feeling is mostly since we have become really spoilt in recent years regarding diving. Trips to Indonesia (Finally made it to Indonesia!), Maldives (The Magical Islands of the Maldives) and Palau (Paradise Found) will always be hard for anywhere else to match. We did see octopus, big lobster, grey reef sharks, turtles, garden eels, and the corals were healthy, but the visibility was only around 8 metres which required sticking closer to dive buddies for safety and meaning larger pelagic fish were quickly lost in the gloom.

The stop on Bazaruto Island was the highlight. We could wander up and over the sand dunes for wonderful views across to the neighbouring islands. I really like the classic “desert islands” with just deserted white sand, a few palm trees, all ringed by coral reefs; Bazaruto ticks all the boxes.



The beach in Vilankulos reminded me of that first Africa trip in 2001 when I got to Nungwi on the northern tip of Zanzibar and never wanted to leave. When the tide goes out in Vilankulos, it goes out a long way. Little wooden boats are left resting at jaunty angles as people come to bargain for fish of all shapes and sizes as they are pulled from the nets. I’ve heard that over the last 20 years, Nungwi has become quite a resort, but Vilankulos still remains more a place for locals. In fact, a lot of the hotels here, which were all quite unobtrusive anyway, have never re-opened post-covid and are currently being recolonised by nature.

On our second full day we set off walking south as the tide revealed a huge expanse of sand, shells and white/grey mangrove mud. After about five kilometres we reached Chibuene. It’s an archaeological site that was the point of trade between Africans on the continent and seafaring Arabs dating back 500-1000 years. This is on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site Tentative list, meaning it will become a fully-recognised site in future. There’s not much to see other than layer after layer of shell beds from the huge quantities of oysters that were consumed and lots of pottery fragments, as well as loads of baobab trees. It’s worth the walk just for their excellent restaurant and all the museum staff are lovely.



A 5am bus transported us at frightening speed to Maxixe where we queued for about an hour for the ferry across the inlet to Inhambane. A crammed minibus then took us the hour or so to Tofo. We had read this journey could take all day but we arrived by late morning, including a lengthy brunch in Inhambane.

Tofo is very different to Vilankulos. You don’t find fishing boats bringing in their catch to sell to the locals; everyone seems to be there on holiday. It is still pretty low-key and reminds me of somewhere like Panjim in Goa or a beach in Thailand. For example, the moment you set foot on the sand you are accosted by people selling you stuff. They are generally polite and you have to feel for them after tourism took such a slump during covid times, from which it is just recovering. However, they generally all sell exactly the same stuff and it gets tiring. We only bought off of one, the only woman we came across selling on the beach who also happened to have unique items – in this case it was lovely hand-dyed little batik-y postcard greetings card things.

I’d heard of Tofo because of the diving. It’s famous for whale sharks and mantas who are there for the plankton. We definitely saw the plankton, thick clouds of tiny jellyfish-like creatures that reduced visibility to around 8 metres and even less closer to the surface. But we didn’t see any whale sharks or mantas. As at Vilankulos, we still saw sting rays, big lobster, countless moray eels, big stone fish, sea apples, but it was quite gloomy so not as colourful as it would have been. Still quite rough as well. Throughout the dives we could hear whales singing and we saw them on the way to and from the dive sites. Though it was even better watching them from the beach…



We asked the owner of our Tofo guesthouse about walking down the beach and he said we should look out for whales. We asked how often he sees them and the rather blaze reply was “they are here every day”. We took this with a pinch of salt and walked north around the bay. Quite soon we realised that those puffs of water and big splashes that we kept just catching in the corner of our eye, were indeed whales. Loads of them. Humpback whales migrate via this patch of coast and they stay here for months raising their young. If you stood still for long enough facing any particular direction out to sea you would see them. We saw even more whales from the beach than we did from the dive boat, especially from the sand dunes where you could get a higher perspective. I’ve seen whales plenty of times before, generally from dive boats and once from an unpleasant whale watching/chasing boat trip in Sri Lanka. However, this was my best ever whale watching experience. Not only did we just see the puffs of water as they breathe and their backs as they surface, they were leaping around. Sometimes we watched them for minutes on end from one side of the bay as they leapt twisting from the water making a huge splash, which was then repeated a little further on, then again, until they were out of view on the other side of the bay. We spent the following day walking the other direction and had the same experience, also seeing pods of dolphins closer in playing in the surf. The locals in the sparse beach bars we stopped in were less impressed than us as whales leaping around just off shore is an everyday occurrence. The equivalent for me of seeing a sheep in a field.



I should mention that many of our wanderings were spent hunting for cash. Mozambique has recently rolled out contactless payments and the new terminals rarely accept Mastercard, even though we have Mastercard debit cards. Likewise, many ATMs also don’t accept them. What’s more, we arrived on payday and there were veeerrrry long queues at ATMs (like more than an hour) meaning they ran out of money. We were rescued in Vilankulos by our hotel who gave us cash and just added it onto our final bill (we ate there every night because the food was so good!), which we could then pay for with Mastercard. We thoroughly recommend Hotel Baobab. In Tofo, we ended up travelling all the way back to Inhambane for money because closer ATMs had run out or didn’t work with our card. Visa debit is the way to go.



On the topic of food; it’s really good. I was expecting peri-peri chicken but didn’t see it once (it seems Nando’s isn’t that authentic). We had delicious seafood every day, ranging from possibly the best squid I’ve ever eaten, king prawns the size of lobsters, and tiny shellfish collected from the mangroves. The highlight, because I’d never had it before nor heard of it, was matapa. We had lots of varieties of this cassava leaf, groundnut, garlic and coconut mush; all were excellent. It made a nice change from all the meat unavoidably consumed during the Botswana and South Africa legs of the trip.



Another highlight of Mozambique was the people. Everyone was really nice and just fun. There is music playing everywhere, people are dancing, and there is quite a lot of English spoken meaning my poor Brazilian Portuguese didn’t have to be relied on!



This part of the trip was supposed to begin with a flight to Vilankulos from Johannesburg on the apparently not overly reliable Mozambiquan national carrier, LAM Airlines. A couple of weeks prior, we were notified that our plane would be leaving ten minutes earlier but arriving nearly an hour later. Only when checking in did we discover that we were now flying via Inhambane. Turns out, this would be the inaugural flight of the route to Inhambane thus we were met at the airport by politicians, dancers and tables of food and drink. Before we could sample it, we were ushered, utterly baffled, into a small room with rows of seats where we and the other thoroughly confused passengers had to sit through speeches by local dignitaries as photographers snapped and filmed. It was all in Portuguese and all while supping from coconuts that had been handed out on entry.

When we were released the food was actually delicious. Though such a buffet on the edge of a runway was a novel experience. After a while they asked us to get on the plane but when showing our passports we were now chastised for not yet having immigration stamps. We explained we just did as we were told and they hastily sent us to the immigration counter, which for me on a UK passport was straightforward – I just paid US$10 and got a stamp. Magdalena on a Polish passport needed a visa (this wasn’t a surprise, we had already applied and been approved online and had the paperwork). They couldn’t be bothered to sort this out so told her to sort it out when we arrived in Vilankulos.

We got a LAM Airlines mug when getting back on the little plane for the 25-minute hop along the coast to Vilankulos. But now it was a domestic flight so we were sent into the airport to collect our baggage and go. But Magdalena didn’t have her visa. We could have just set off to the beach but thought the potential problems when exiting the country meant she ought to sort it out. This took a while as nobody could understand how we had got there without visas.

In the meantime, I tried to rearrange our flights as we were actually heading to Inhambane in a few days overland but had to return overland to Vilankulos to fly out – why not just fly back to Johannesburg on this new route. The simple answer was we would have to pay a fortune to change; even though they could change our flight without even telling us, we couldn’t do the same.

Consequently, we had to get back to Vilankulos from Tofo to fly back to Johannesburg in order to travel home. A private taxi was extremely expensive, 10000 MZN, or about 150 Euros. The speedy, and cheap, journey on public transport in the other direction led us to believe this could be repeated on the way back. It initially went well as we got on the first minibus to Inhambane at 06:30, didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes for a ferry across to Maxixe, and remarkably managed to immediately get a minibus heading north to Vilankulos. However, rather than being dangerously fast – always a fear on African minibuses – we had managed to find Mozambique’s slowest driver. It wasn’t so much frequent stops to pick people up because there are long distances between sparse settlements. It was that on the empty roads he stuck to 60 km/h. After about 5 hours we were starting to get nervous about making it to the airport on time when he decided he wouldn’t go into Vilankulos but would drop us at the junction where we had to jump into a pickup taxi to take us into town. We were dropped off again to hail a tuk-tuk to get us the last few kilometres to the airport, arriving about an hour before take off. So the total travel for the day from Tofo beach to our friends’ place in Johannesburg involved: minibus, walk, ferry, minibus, tuk-tuk, aeroplane, train, taxi. We got there just in time for a load-shedding induced braai!

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Photos

Whales at Tofo
If you look up and left of the person; they are humpback whales.

Tofo
If you look closely, you'll see whales again in the background.