Ilha De Mocambique

We don’t consider ourselves ‘off the beaten track’ travelers. Sure we are traveling for a year and seeing some far off places but for the most part we stick to the backpacker routes and use the “bibles” (Lonely Planet books) as a general guide for travel. We thoroughly enjoy the unexpected and also highly anticipate many of the journeys more so than the destinations but for the most part we tread our path with at least a small amount of guidance or advance knowledge of the areas we visit. Northern Mozambique does not fit the Kuehl travel status quo.

The Portuguese landed in Ilha De Mocambique in 1498. As we write this post we are sitting in a hotel room of a building built within a year or two of their arrival. The island sits 4 kilometers off the mainland in northern Mozambique, a handful of hours from the Tanzanian border. Roughly a couple kilometers long by a couple hundred meters wide, the island community is small and tight knit, centered around the ocean, fishing and tourism. As we noted in our last post, unless you are traveling with a loose budget and can charter in a small plane, the only real way to reach the island is by a series of several day long bus rides north of the beaches and cities that populate southern Mozambique. For this reason alone, tourism to the island is somewhat limited in numbers but as the locals will tell you, ’No trip to Mozambique is complete without a trip to Ilha’.
We have been anxiously anticipating the island for a couple weeks now. We arrived to the nearest large city in the mainland, Nampula, several days ago. Nampula is the capital of the providence and bustling with energy. As our bus entered the city we witnessed several skirmishes on the street and although we had heard no forewarning, we knew the city was one to proceed with caution (all is well but it will definitely be included in our end of trip ‘incidents’ post). From Nampula it was a 3 hour chappa ride to the coast and then across a very long, narrow and unmaintained bridge to Ilha de Mocambique.

Upon exiting the chappa we were befriended by a young man by the name of Mohammed (the island contains Christian Churches, Muslim Mosques and Hindu Temples) who was able to point us in the right direction of the hotels we hoped to look at. We toured every pensao (budget hotel) on the island and settled on the nicest one we found. We had told ourselves that our days on the island would be to relax after the long challenging journey north and even had labeled our time here as a mini vacation within our trip. Our hotel was by far the nicest one we have stayed at in Mozambique, with air conditioning, a pool, and a toilet seat! Trust me, those are not common.
Ilha seems to be an island where time stops and it is in somewhat of a time warp. Everyone does not have a cell phone as in other parts of Mozambique and people lead of pretty simple life. The people here are very friendly and you can wander around with a relative sense of security. The buildings were all built in the 16th century, which makes for beautiful landscapes and the island boasts the oldest European colonial fort and church in the southern hemisphere. It was easy to spend 5 days here, wandering around the streets, playing with the kids (they like to touch our hair and arms), lazing by the pool, helping teenagers with their resumes and buying treats off the island women. Yesterday we rented a dhow (hand hewn wood single-sail boat) to take us to a nearby deserted island. Unfortunately it was a bit windy and we ended up on a different island, but after a 20 minute hike we were able to find a beautiful beach to enjoy for a couple hours. It was a great way to end our stay on Ilha.

Today we head back to Nampula before catching a train to take us close to the Malawi border. After 3 weeks in Mozambique we feel that it is time to move on. It has been a challenging and enjoyable country, and we have learned more about ourselves and the country as a whole then we every imagined. Mozambique is really on the move, and the country is quickly recovering from their 17 year civil war that ended in 1994.