Adrift in the land of the good people

Inharrime, south of Inhambane, 5.30pm. There was to be no rest here. The promise of camping on a beach next to the electric-blue lagoon, glimpsed from the bus as it trundled down the EN1 highway into the town, evaporated with the faded red metal sign, swinging on a piece of barbed wire, a white skull and crossbones and the words “Perigo Minas!” 

“Muito landmines,” said a policeman sadly. “Many, many ...”

We gazed at the lake and its fringe of pearly white sand like cows staring at the grass on the other side of a fence. 

“Dammit,” said Thurlow, my long-suffering travelling companion. “What now?”

The nearest hotel was at Maxixe (say “masheesh”), 100km up the road. We stuck out our thumbs.

The first vehicle to stop was a truck driven by a stick-thin Rastafarian with a vacant stare from years of driving trucks on Mozambique’s rotten highways or by his well-honed weed habit, evidenced by the hefty blunt gripped in his wheel hand. 

One theory in Mozambique then was that the best time to be out on the roads was in the early morning when the bad guys were sleeping off their hangovers. Another was that it was best to travel after dusk when they were too drunk to hit a moving target such as our truck now hurtling down the EN1. 

The Rasta commandeered the middle of the road and drove without lights, shouting abuse at the vague shapes of people standing too close to the roadside while watching us speculatively from the corner of his eye. 

“Africa do sul?” he asked. 

I nodded. 

He smiled and slid a tape into the deck and Alpha Blondy filled the cab... America, ’Merica, ’Mericaa-aah, We gotta break de neck of dis apartheid ...

The driver sang along ... Nineteen-thirty-nine, nineteen-forty-five, Nazi war in Europe. Today nineteen-eighty-five, Hitler on de rise in Sout-Affrikaaah...  

So we sang along too and soon the lights of Maxixe came shining out of the darkness. 

The Rasta dropped us in front of the only hotel in town and sped off. Watching his brake lights flicker once and then disappear, I felt a crushing loneliness. 

The Golfinho Azul — the Blue Dolphin, now trading as Pousada da Maxixe — had seen happier times. When travel writer Douglas Alexander stayed in 1971, he found it “clean, modern and attractively decorated and furnished”. Best of all, Alexander continued, was the “rather cosy cocktail bar” which was the most popular rendezvous in Maxixe. 

There was nothing cosy about the hotel now but at least the hookers and their pimps had somewhere to cool their heels between trucks. Our door had a lock and the beer was cold. We sat on the veranda, drinking Laurentinas until the Golfinho’s horrors softened and loped off into the night.

In the morning, we would sail across the bay to Inhambane which perches near the tip of a skinny peninsula pointing north into the Indian Ocean. The town was founded by Arab traders some time in the 10th century and grew corpulent on ivory, gold, pepper and slaves. 

When Vasco da Gama made his first landfall at Inharrime on January 10 1498, he and his crew were humbled by the reception from the people who hurried down to the beach with gifts of chickens and coconuts and grain. Indeed, this was the Terra do Boa Genta, said Da Gama, and centuries later Portuguese colonists still boasted that they lived in the land of the good people. 

The town’s isolation at the end of the easily defended peninsula spared it from the depredations of the civil war. There was less war damage to repair and no landmines, at least not in the town. There were avenues of shade trees and a pavement café with tables and chairs. The town exuded a prosperity the rest of the country could only dream of.

As the ceasefire took hold in 1992, Inhambane seemed to wake from its 17-year slumber and look around. Then it rolled over and went back to sleep.

Three decades on, it still feels different to the rest of Mozambique. The airport has been upgraded and surfers, divers and tourists flock to a handful of resorts in Tofo and Barra, the villages on the ocean side of the peninsula. 

Even the journey by road from Maputo is no longer a nail-chewing slog along nearly 500km of bandit-infested highway, though heavy rains still turn the main EN1 highway into a quagmire.

In 2023, anyone strolling down to the beach at Maxixe at dawn will be greeted by the same sight as Thurlow and I were on that buttery October morning: the lateen sails of scores of dhows lit by the sunrise like the wings of so many seabirds.

Inhambane has one of the largest dhow fleets on the East African coast. Most are solid cargo vessels, built for hauling freight and people along the coast as they have done for a 1,000 years. There are nimble fishing craft too which share the dhow lateen sail rig but little else.

We had hurried away from the Blue Dolphin as soon as it was light and bargained with the skipper of a dhow to take us across the bay to where Inhambane shimmered with promise. (There is a motor ferry too, and it’s cheaper and faster than the dhows. It comes down to sail or diesel. You choose.)

It being a warm morning, the first order of the day upon wading through the shallows on the other side was to get coffee to wash down our malaria pills. We found a dockside restaurant with a view of the bay and sat. 

A voice boomed from the shadows. 

“Well, fuck me! Are you Russians?”

A skinny white man in a faded black T-shirt and a pair of shorts sat at a corner table, cigarette burning in a holder, Panama hat tilted off his head. His face, the colour of buffed mahogany, had that sheen that expatriate adventurers get after lives dedicated to the pursuit of the good life. 

His name, he said, was Senhõr Mike. He was a “scout” for a major hotel chain and he was tarrying in Inhambane while he looked for a beach to build something that would lure tourists to this sliver of paradise. 

“It’s going to take a long time,” he said. “Things move rather slowly here.” He smiled with a face full of large teeth. It was like looking at a freshly peeled skull. 

Senhõr Mike’s current main quest in life was to find a decent chess partner. “Now that the Russians have buggered off, there’s no-one to play with. Do you?” 

Thurlow nearly broke a wrist trying to get his folding chess set out of his pack. I left them to their Kasparov dreams to explore the town, starting with the Art Deco railway station. 

The station was easy to find — just follow the rails that run down the main avenue from the seafront. It is a long time since the train ever ran from here but the nearby engine depot is a time capsule of old locomotives, wheels, pistons and gantries, layered in dust. Tools rest where the fitters left them, as if they had just taken a short 30-year lunch break.

More peace spills over from the nearby Cathedral of Our Lady of Conception which dominates the town. There is said to be a rusted ladder leading up the spire from where there are commanding views of the bay and town and from where you can look down onto the slow ebb of Inhambane life. 

Back at the coffee shop, Thurlow was grinning. Mike had offered us the use of his private dhow. His crew would sail us to Ponta Linga Linga, a spit of land pointing out of the coconut forest on the northern edge of the bay, where he had been building a low-key eco-lodge among the ruins of a Norwegian whaling station.

The lodge was not finished but Mike had commandeered one of the old whaling houses.

“Use my bed,” said Mike. “Just move out when my lady gets home.”

There was no sign of her when we beached. Mike told us to make ourselves comfortable. 

“See you in a few days,” he said, promising to send the dhow back every day “so you can explore”. 

So began our idyll in paradise. The days blurred, and only the sporadic appearance of Marino and the boat gave any sense of time passing. We explored the coast by boat, calling in at small fishing villages to buy palm wine which we drank in palm-roofed bars while watching the light on the water.

Our neighbours, Marino’s uncle and his wife, invited us around for dinner of grilled sardines which we ate squatting around a fire under the stars. 

The rest of the days were spent sitting on the sand and gazing across the bay at the sails of scores of dhows as they left for the fishing grounds in the morning and returned in the golden dusk. 

It was too good to last. One afternoon, a woman in a yellow and black kanga strode up the path. “Hello,” she said, “I am Mike’s wife. Who are you and why are you in my house?” 

In the morning, Mike and Marino arrived to take us back to Maxixe. He and Thurlow played a last few games of chess while the dhow flitted over the sandbars and dolphins sported in around us. 

The night was spent once more at the Blue Dolphin. We didn’t bother with a room.

Postscript. We never heard from Mike again. There are now three lodges on the peninsula, including the luxurious 20-room Castelo del Mar (http://castelodomar.co.za) and the more rustic Pura Vida Lodge (www.puravidalodge.co.mz). Both offer fast motorboat transfers from Inhmbane town. Take a dhow instead. This is no place to hurry.