Mozambique, the Magic!

There's an exhilarating spirit of adventure that awaits you in mystical Mozambique. Devanshi Mody picks seven resorts on two dazzling archipelagos  that you must put down for the bucket list

Text: Devanshi Mody

Beyond gloss and glamour is little-tread territory, Mozambique, an emerging destination that is wildly exotic, ravishingly raw, hauntingly African. Two archipelagos, Quirimbas and Bazaruto, straddle 2500 kms of pristine shoreline and in them you find some of the world’s densest mangroves, deepest diving spots, finest coral, besides dunes and mermaid-myth-inspiring dugongs (the manatee family). Mozambique – quondam slave colony the Portuguese swayed over for 500 years – spellbinds with its dark history, kaleidoscopic coral and life shadowed by black and white.
Moreover, it captures the romance of remoteness, engages local chefs deploying local or regional produce in simple but exquisite creations, often an extraordinary confluence of African, Arab, Indian and Portuguese influences, reflecting the potpourri of the nation’s culture and served up with imagination in astonishingly beautiful locations.
It is that time of year again, July-October, when great big whales effect the famous “whale migration” when the brilliant blue waters around these parts are pregnant with these grand maritime mammals showing off their acrobatic feats as they breach, often sporting their newborn calves. Isn’t this a wonderful excuse to discover this en-vogue emerging destination?
But those in the know will tell you that you need no excuse to head off to Mozambique with its savage splendour, exhilarating spirit of adventure, hypnotic mystique and an epic sense of eternity.

Anantara Bazaruto:
Dining by Design is the speciality. A comely marquee receives you for dining designed by Chef Donaldson who has worked at the celebrated North Island where he purveyed celebrities and royals (more difficult in their exigencies for steaks at obscene hours than in their epicurean rigours). Chef registers your preferences and designs a menu. Innovative salads with fragrant garden-fresh leaves and herbs are his forte although he insists it’s his pea risotto. If you didn’t like South African Merlot you will after Chef has you discover 1692 Spier Merlot. Breakfast convenes fabulous regional cheeses and you must pick some for a picnic on ethereal Pansy Island. Then snorkel at the Two Mile Reef. The coral isn’t electrifying as in The Quirimbas but the terrific structures resemble something out of a space-age city dwelled by large lissom fish, a spectacular explosion of colourful sinuosity ribboning around the coral. Or head past streaming dunes and natural lakes teaming with birds and crocodiles to Dom Carlos, the dramatic and enthralling end of Bazaruto Island where Anantara conjures picnics; and they are majestic, set on a carpet of white sands fringed with brilliant blue waters. Thereafter, hit the destination’s plushest spa laid out on a cliff peering down at the sea before retiring to your revamped villa.
Cost: Doubles from $1170

White Pearl:
At check-in, a bottle of sparkling wine is popped. You’re handed a champagne flute which your butler refills all the way from the resort’s reception across stretches of wooden way through arches of kissing trees past a cobalt pool, to your pool suite on stilts. Outside, your private pool, intensely cobalt, too, blazes against the sombre immensity of the Indian Ocean.
Breakfasts brings one of the world’s top 10 home-roasted granolas best savoured over a Bush Breakfast in the Maputo Special Reserve over a thrilling game drive with resort guide, Domingos, who can tell a tale or two as your jeep veers away from tetchy elephants – they haven’t forgotten the slaughterous Civil War when elephants were butchered for ivory and rhinos annihilated  for horns.
Over sundowners at White Pearl’s private lake you can spot crocodiles and, Domingos insists, even leopard. Otherwise, Domingos entertains with stories of black mambas and American guests who discovered at White Pearl that they are neighbours back home. “Imagine, their lives are so work-centric they have to come to Mozambique to realise they are neighbours!”
Following an ocean safari to see dolphins and turtles, if not whales (which you watch breaching from your bed or a day-bed placed decadently round the resort), an Amarula-laced hot chocolate reception awaits.
You dress for supper – you would when the wine cellar has the beach for its floor – but instead of a blonde, you find Billecart-Salmon champagne reclining on white sands. Supper might comprise curry served with flourish, finished with stunner home-made macadamia ice-cream and South African GM Hamish’s remark that the Portuguese were “unceremoniously evicted.” Strangely, nobody mentions atrocities the natives endured over 500 years of Portuguese dominion. What matters is the ONE day when the Portuguese were expelled in 24 hours.
MD Cordelia Mascher, over another supper, over rich Kanonkop Kadette Cape Blend, recalls growing up in apartheid South Africa when right credentials but wrong skin colour disqualified you from top jobs. Indeed, White Pearl’s Mozambican owner, Florival Mucav, encountered opposition from South African neighbours who run Mozambique’s hospitality industry. During an emergency they didn’t send help, instead a message, “This is not your place here.” Yet, Cordelia and Florival have stamped White Pearl on the luxury tourist circuit. After all, you are dining at Mozambique’s classiest restaurant – collar and tie required!
Cost: Doubles from $1360

Quilalea Pvt Island Resort:
Fly over opulent mangroves to this island with a brute beauty where the coral sparkles as if a sunken treasure trove was ransacked and its bejewelled contents left strewn coruscating across the ocean bed of the house reef.
Quilalea’s bar, which frames a beguiling terrace, pooled and guilefully-lit, strutting above the sea, is the prelude to nightly feasts, tastefully conducted in divers' locations around the island. Resort Manager Claudia painstakingly assembles menus for which her husband, Leon, insouciantly pairs intriguing wines. But no amount of wine can lighten the dark impressions of Ibo Island with its fortress which horrifically packed slaves like beasts. American guests justify, “Every civilised nation that conquered others did it.” Ah, it’s necessary to enslave and brutalise the simple to sustain the sybaritism of the “civilised.”
Well-crafted activities are punctuated with marvellous epicurean experiences. A marine walk follows breakfasts presenting exciting smoothies; after an ocean safari you’re lead up the Baobab Trail (the island boasts 58 ancient baobabs) to picnic on a beach opening onto seemingly an endless canvas a painter has streaked with myriad shades of blue and a craftsman inlaid with massive rock-hewn structures.
After kayaking through mangroves, return to sundowners in a forested,  flower-studded, sea-perched tub where Nelson sends you perfect pina colada. You happen to be conveniently stationed by the spa incorporated into the natural rock above the sea where you must check in for loooooong sessions with the amazing Anzhilla, the best masseuse in all Mozambique! Her husband disapproved her working and absconded. She says, carefree, “Let him go. Me, I want to work!” She’s a modern woman.
Quilalea’s “treats” climax in a Baobab Supper under a gigantic baobab when you are feasted regally. Think coconut rice and exotic curries (even with baobab fruit) and luscious lemon cheesecake. Couples can dine romantically under their own baobab where two’s company, three’s a crowd – rather a pianful one if a crab or beach rat gets under your table!
Cost: Doubles from $1200

&Beyond Benguerra Island Resort:
This retreat uniquely fuses safari lodge, beach haven and Portuguese colonial villa. Mozambique’s most romantic rooms  come in porcelain blue with dusky wooden furniture and a stand-alone tub. Rooms open onto lavish patios for outdoor massages, ample dining terraces, a long pool and even a beached sit-out. Wonderfully, on arrival you are taken straight to lunch on your own private terrace. Book butler, Gellario, who could educate Jeeves on the fineries of serving!
After the Island Drive, when Activities Manager Lorenzo takes you atop a dune from which you can extraordinarily see a whale in the Indian Ocean on one side and a crocodile in the lake on the dune’s other side, you dine on beach-set tables after apéritifs round a bonfire (the bar is a boat!). But invite Lorenzo and Isaac, who heads the resort’s Community and Oceans Beyond Borders projects, to sup at your villa and these boys – who dive with bull sharks – reveal Mozambique’s oceans are depleted of sharks because the Chinese and Japanese have been excavating them for fin soup. Lorenzo declares it must taste ghastly but because some Chinese emperor once expressed a partiality for it, it now passes for a “delicacy.” Lorenzo pleads, “Next time you see shark-fin soup on a menu, don’t order it! Save our sharks!” An entreaty echoing LAM Airlines’ CEO Joao Jorge’s, “Help save our coral!” with regards coral in The Quirimba which international firms will blast to extract the world’s fourth largest gas reserves.
Cost: Cabanas from $1880

Anantara Medjumbe Island Resort:
You may have done many private island resorts. Nothing quite like this one, with a nonchalant allure, capturing the exotic enthrallment of East Africa. Medjumbe is about doing nothing, Resort Manager Fernando prescribes. Other than lazying around beached pool villas (just 12) endowed with sun and star beds and vandalise-worthy home-made cookies. You wake to lazily glorious al fresco seafront breakfasts when platters heaped with vibrant fruit gleam in a halo of sunlight. The bread basket is  fragrant with warm, fresh-baked dough. You can have lobster for breakfast, should you wish, swilled up with seas fanned in sapphire-emerald-jade-pearl. The strident call of wild birds offers a strange entrancement.
Post-breakfast, a sweet boat ride conveys to Quissanga Island for snorkelling (you are in the Cradle of Coral, the Quirimbas Archipelago), after which you can loll around the islet with a bottle of cool, crisp Chardonnay Fernando hand-picks for you but barman, Abdul, will also have dispatched a splendid peach, nectarine and pineapple smoothie. Shorty, the Activities Manager, lays out a picnic narrating a dhow ride into the mangroves when in high tide a crocodile – big one – plopped into his boat. You can sleep under the stars in Quissanga’s Crusoesque love-nest. But then you miss the aura of soirées on Medjumbe. All under a hypnotic bedazzlement of coloured light from resplendent East African lamp shades cascaded onto the bar where gowned Barbie-like girls hook round debonair men’s arms and Abdul must devise cocktails to match the colour of the dresses of fanciful females (how Abdul, who doesn’t drink, creates thriller cocktails is a mystery). With cocktails come lovely little samosas attesting Indian influences on Mozambican cuisine and the famous Mozambican cashews, freshly-fried, devilish with red chilli.
There’s Dining by Design in secluded romantic nooks but best are beach dinners when the sands blush under flamed poles standing sentinel by an array of tables beautifully bedecked. You better have had a sumptuous Kalahari facial to look fit for supper and if steward, Thomé, charms you quite utterly, you might find yourself gifting him champagne only to discover he managed to topple the bottle onto the beach. Medjumbe is so posh even its beach drinks champagne!
Cost: Doubles from $1330

Serena Pollana:
The 1920s icon, every bit the Grande Dame of Maputo, looms majestically over vast sea-lined lawns. An aura of quaint dignity pervades. Ladies stroll about in gowns. The historic lift taking you up to charmingly old-fashioned rooms is an experience. Breakfast on lawn-facing lofty terraces is a gentrified affair with waiters swirling round you like you were a queen. The quintessentially East African spa is irresistible, but most delectable is the service evocative of gentler, halcyon times.
Must-do: city tour with the eminently charismatic chauffeur, Manhinho!
Cost: Doubles from $300

Azura Benguerra Island:
It has an impressive wine cellar, including wines from the owners’ vineyards in France, and ensures you don’t dine in the same place twice. Breakfast can be post-snorkelling on the celebrated Paradise Island where nature offers up a banquet. Truly paradisal. But that Paradise isn’t of this world is resoundingly impressed upon you when the placid waters agitate from vociferations of your guides unremittingly on their mobiles throughout your breakfast.
Cost: Doubles from $1000