GORONGOSA

Estimadas/os Amigas/os,


Pensei que vocês gostariam de ver este artigo escrito por Paul Ash, na revista sul-africana Lifestyle (Times / Sunday Times)


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Dear friends,


I thought you would like to see this article by Paul Ash, in the south-african magazine Lifestyle (Times / Sunday Times)


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http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Lifestyle/Article.aspx?id=877565


In the land of the gentle people
The Big Story: Mozambique
Published:Nov 09, 2008


Paul Ash gives you 10 great reasons to visit Mozambique.


In 1993, I went back to Mozambique for the first time since I was a child. The country was staggering around on its feet, bloody and snot- nosed from a nasty civil war. The streets of Maputo were paved with rubbish and wrecked cars. Trees had taken root in the cracks of the putt-putt course in the ruined holiday resort in Bilene, and an empty swimming pool and shot-out windows greeted visitors to the rest camp in Gorongosa National Park. The roads were broken and red signs painted with skulls warned that landmines awaited the imprudent.


But Mozambique then was an exciting place for travellers who didn’t mind a bit of hardship. Given time and patience, you could get anywhere by bus or truck as long as you didn’t mind camping when you reached the end of the road. People were quick with a cold beer or a plate of grilled sardines, but they watched us warily, as if we were ghosts, or, worse, Soviet advisors. One man said, “Turistas? Here? Why?”


Fifteen years has brought dramatic change, though. The wrecks have gone from Maputo’s avenues, and so have the Soviets. Old resorts have been refurbished and new ones built. Pothole rash breaks out from time to time on the skinny national highway to the north, but there are no bandits and no TM46 anti- tank mines on the hard shoulder. The beer bottles have labels and pao is still sometimes baked in clay ovens on the ground and comes out hot and gritty.


Mozambique is no longer a playground for South Africans looking for fat prawns and cheap beach thrills. International tourism has arrived here, with prices to match. Meanwhile, there are still many reasons why you should take a trip to Mozambique. Here are mine.


# 1. Gorongosa National Park


One of the first things a party of conservationists saw when they drove into the park for a post-war recce in the late ’90s was a man with a dead sable antelope strapped to his bicycle. It might have been the last sable in the whole park. Most of the elephant, buffalo, and antelope were shot during the war, supplies for Renamo’s larder and trophies for officials. But Gorongosa — one of Africa’s magnificent game reserves of the colonial era — is Mozambique’s Lazarus and game numbers are increasing steadily, if slowly. Now the philanthropic Carr Foundation is to co-manage the park — and spend an estimated 40- million over the next 30 years.


Gorongosa has a long way to go while its staff grapple with poachers, but given time and a bit of cash, there is much to be hopeful about. The original Chitengo rest camp was shot to pieces but new chalets have already been built and the park is open. E-mail travel@gorongosa.net or visit www.gorongosa.net. R448 per person double, camping R50 per person.


# 2. Horsing around on Bazaruto


I’ve been wary of horses ever since I managed to provoke one into kicking me and busting my hip when I was three. So the offer of a dune patrol on rescued boerperde on Bazaruto was not entirely thrilling — until I was introduced to my mount, a gentlemanly greybeard pony who brushed off my fears and manfully plodded up and down the dunes and let me gallop him along the beach. The horse trails are run from the stables at Indigo Bay Island Resort, as fine a place as any to indulge in a Mozambican island holiday. Phone 011-467-1277, e-mail enquiries@raniresorts.com or visit www.indigobayresort.com. 300 per person sharing.


# 3. Adrift on Lago Niassa


Malawians call it Lake Malawi, Mozambicans call it Lago Niassa. Some people say this is Mozambique’s better coast. It’s certainly less trafficked, a lot cheaper and you can drink the water. The best way to see it is from a kayak, preferably during a long, slow paddle along the shore, camping on the empty beaches.


Or you could head for Nkwichi Lodge in the Manda Wilderness area. Nkwichi is a low-impact lodge, built into the rocks and around the trees of one of the lake’s most beautiful and utterly unpopulated bays. Take the lake ferry to Likoma Island and hop down to the lodge. Swim, eat, lie in the sun, paddle a canoe, have a cold beer, repeat. E-mail info@mandawilderness.org or visit www.mandawilderness.org. 380 double.


# 4. Being cool at Piri Piri Chicken


This stalwart restaurant café was the first place I had dinner when I arrived in Maputo on a hot October day in 1993. Then, the clientele were local bigshots who left their two-way radios — status symbols in a country whose telephone network was missing in action — on the tables while they ate. These days the bigshots now have discreet little cellphones and there’s a waiter with a napkin at the door instead of a militiaman with a Czechoslovakian machine-pistol.


The grilled chicken, doused in the world’s best peri-peri sauce, is unfailingly excellent, as is the prawn curry. It’s an excellent place to sit at a pavement table and watch the city’s people go by. And after all these years, it’s still cheap. Piri Piri is at the top end of Av 24 de Julho.


# 5. Snorkelling off Paradise


Mozambique’s diving is reckoned to be the best in Africa but if you, like me, don’t dive, it’s mask and fins only. Just about any beach in Mozambique offers some kind of snorkelling opportunity but the setting of Paradise Island, or Santa Carolina, in the Bazaruto Archipelago is exquisite. The waters are shallow, warm and sheltered, and visibility is usually excellent. The reef isn’t particularly big but it was certainly busy with a healthy population of reef fish, rays, eels and a couple of Black Tip Reef Sharks. The ruined hotel on the island itself is a fascinating, if melancholic, diversion, soon to be revived as a new resort for Rani.


# 6. History — Live — on Ilha


Ilha de Moçambique is a crumbling colonial masterpiece — a fort and ornate villas, fallen on hard times, lining narrow streets. In its time, Ilha has hosted Arab and Chinese traders — a guide at the fort pointed to the bay and said, “There. Chinese pottery” — but it was Portugal’s explorers who built the first church in the southern hemisphere. The little Chapel de Nossa Senhora de Baluarte survives today, as do the original cisterns from which the island still gets its fresh water. Sixty-thousand people took refuge here during the war and the infrastructure blew apart under the pressure. Now it’s a Unesco World Heritage site and the government has taken steps to restore some of Ilha’s dignity. A good place to stay is the atmospheric O Escondidinho. E-mail ilhatur@itservices.co.mz, 36 single.


# 7. Rails across the North


Until recently, Mozambique had a couple of ramshackle railways, run by loyal workers on little more than ingenuity and a bit of oil. The ailing steam locomotives are gone now and so have half the lines. But up north, a passenger train runs three times a week between Cuamba, near the Malawi border, and Nampula. It’s hard, crowded travel and don’t bother trying to get on if you don’t have a ticket. The best place to watch the passing show as the train picks its way through the greenery and granite outcrops is in the dining car with its hot chicken and cold beer. Fares are 4 in third class, 10 in second. Book the day before travelling at the CFM station.


# 8. Seafood of the Gods


Costa do Sol, the art deco restaurant and hotel at the end of the beachfront road out of Maputo, is an institution. On weekends, people make the trek from all over the city to eat seafood on the terrace and watch the palms sway in the breeze. And I can see why: the food is bang-on brilliant, every time.


# 9. Sailing on the Bay of Dhows


Inhambane is the prettiest town in Mozambique. Tourists tend to head for the beach resorts on the other side of the peninsula and ignore the town, which is no bad thing. It also has probably the greatest collection of dhows in the country. The dhows are the centre of Inhambane’s life — they are the ferries across to Maxixe, they carry cargoes across the bay and they bring in the fish. The first time I came here, a dhow and its crew were put at my disposal for a week, and that is still the right thing to do. Go to the beach, find a good boat and make a deal with the skipper. Take a day. Or a week. Just get on the water, under an old sail and drift around the bay, racing other dhows, chasing dolphins and drinking coconut juice out of its shell.


# 10. And one for the Beer


In 1993, the local beer was called Impala and it came in big, brown bottles with no labels. It was sweet and potent, and the bottoms of the bottles were lined with an impacted debris field of mud and sometimes twigs. People talked of Laurentina but we could never find it. Now, of course, you can buy it in Jo’burg but it’s not the same. Time and place is everything in matters of taste, which is why a Laurentina Preto — the dark lager with the silver label — drunk in the open-air restaurant on the Vilankulo Airport roof feels like drinking gold.


# For a photo essay on 15 years of Mozambique adventures, see http://multimedia.thetimes.co.za/photos/