Vamizi Island - A Luxury Barefoot Paradise

Vamizi lodge in Mozambique is aimed at conserving the land and the marine ecosystems - as well as providing a luxury getaway.

Dhows with billowing white sails are moving silently against the blue space of the Indian Ocean. Nothing afloat is so elegant as those simple wooden fishing boats turned into flying things by their lateen wings, an image as romantic as a tale of Sinbad. In my mind, the dhows symbolise east Africa, and the fishermen I meet speak both Swahili and the local Mozambican language Kimwani. Southern and eastern Africa blur together here, at the northern reach of Mozambique's 2,000 mile coastline, close to the border with Tanzania.

My dive-boat is faster than the dhows, and it belongs to the newly-opened island resort of Vamizi, where 10 wooden villas have been built to house guests who want to experience the remote and barely developed islands of the Quirimbas archipelago. Few of the diving sites have been properly mapped yet and my guide, Luis Cardoso, is searching for an underwater plateau where a coral reef plummets into a deep ocean channel. Seven miles south of Vamizi we find it, and in the sparkling shallows I see the unmistakable shape of coral heads just a few meters below the surface. A line of darkest blue water marks the drop-off, and leads to the seabed 500m below.

It is one of the healthiest underwater landscapes I have ever seen. I had been told that the reefs here were special, but I was skeptical, having seen other parts of the south-western Indian Ocean lose much of their coral over the last decade. Overdevelopment in Mauritius, deforestation in Madagascar and rising water temperatures in the Seychelles and Maldives have caused many reefs to silt over, bleach and die.

Here on Vamizi there are sponges, yellow, green, brown and black. Some grow like fingers sticking out from the wall, others creep across the limestone like spilled paint, and some are barrel sponges, dark brown gourds big enough to hold a football. Giant gorgonian fan corals sprout from the wall, their delicate skeletons as wide as I am tall. There are forests of them, ghostly shapes fading into the deep below me. A starry puffer uses one gorgonian like a chaise longue while a striped wrasse picks its gills clean of parasites; 35 meters down, a barrel-chested giant grouper with fat lips and bulging eyes comes up from the dark, 5ft long and weighing around a hundred kilos. Looking up towards the shining surface of the sea, I spot groups of shy unicorn fish, pointing their humped foreheads like bowsprits.

All too soon it is time to ascend, but I study the wall for the minute creatures that make diving so much more than a quest for close encounters with big fish. Within 10 minutes, I have spotted three varieties of nudibranchs (sea snails) that I have never seen before, one of richest blue with purple marginal bands. Twenty meters below the lip of the plateau, the limestone has eroded into overhanging ledges and small caverns where shoals of yellow-stripe snapper move together in a bright living chain. On one shelf are dozens of vivid anemone sacs, their stinging tentacles hosting pairs of clown-fish from two different species. Such anemones, and I count 48 on one small patch of coral, can only thrive when the reefs do.

On the plateau, we drift in the current while below me the healthy coral stretched on and on. All over the tropics, reefs are in terminal decline, prey to global warming, over-fishing and pollution from hotel sewage. Here, close to Vamizi, I am looking at a reef in all its raw natural beauty. Without a doubt, this undersea wall is one of the best dives in the world.

A few days earlier, flying north towards Vamizi from Pemba a hundred miles away, I had seen many more reefs where men from the mainland cast their nets from tiny wooden pirogues. The Indian Ocean was a clean bright space clear to the horizon, and I spotted a group of pilot whales in the deep. Many of these islands remain uninhabited, and for tourists there is still the sense of this being a frontier land.

Vamizi Island is uncultivated: a thin crescent of thickly forested limestone 12km long that runs almost exactly east-west. Protected by its thick barrier reef, it is covered with acacias and hibiscus and fringed with wispy casuarinas. The lodge's villas are all tucked discreetly into the trees and back from the beach so as not to disturb nesting turtles. Inside, the villas are enormous (175 square meters), built entirely of mahogany brought from the mainland and carved in local style. King-size beds are draped with muslin mosquito nets - though the island is malaria free - and, instead of windows, wooden latticed shutters give shimmering views of the cobalt sea. Mozambique marble has been used to create a great sunken shower and "his" and "hers" sinks. My room had a day bed built into one corner of the villa with curtains that turned it into a cozy nest. African sculptures and ornate ironwork lanterns on the veranda made me feel like I was a genteel character in a Karen Blixen story.

Vamizi is not just a luxury castaway retreat. Other islands in the Quirimbas have already been grabbed by developers wanting to capitalise on the growing Mozambican economy, but Vamizi is part of a more ambitious scheme. Owned by a syndicate of private investors, the island forms part of the Cabo Delgado Biodiversity Project, aimed at conserving 33,000 hectares of savannah on the mainland and two other islands close to Vamizi.
For almost five years, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London, researchers have been studying the mainland reserve, the three islands and their land and marine ecosystems. Already, turtle populations have been counted, tagged and protected and on the mainland there has been work on helping farmers avoid conflict with elephants over their precious crops.

The only native Mozambican population on Vamizi consists of about a thousand people living in two villages at the eastern tip of the island. During the civil war that afflicted Mozambique from 1976 to 1992, they moved from Cabo Delgado province to escape the fighting. Life on this beautiful island was not an easy option, since there is no fresh water. Vamizi lodge has its own desalination plant, but the villagers must either sail five miles to Olumbe town on the mainland to collect fresh water, or else buy water from traders who bring it by dhow.

Money from the tourism development on Vamizi is already finding its way to the villagers, and has been used to build a clinic, supply medicine and books for a school. Villagers have also been employed directly at the lodge, and fish is bought from the local boats whenever possible.

Half an hour's boat ride from Vamizi lodge, I visited Lança, where fishermen from Nampula, three days away by dhow, have established a new village. "There are no fish in Nampula anymore," said one elderly man with a shake of his head. Laid out on wooden drying racks there were sardines and octopus, small sharks, barracuda and reef fish too: Moorish idols, parrotfish and pipefish, their bright colors all faded to uniform grey by the harsh sun.
On the western end of Vamizi, I dived on a reef where fishermen had done considerable damage. Broken coral covered the sea floor and dirty gobbets of brown filamentous algae covered what remnants were left. Compared with the reefs at the other end of the island there were barely any fish here at all. One of the long-term aims of the Vamizi project is to show the fishermen the value of sustainable fishing techniques. Dead reefs will eventually lead to starvation for the villagers.

My stay on Vamizi overlapped with a group of wealthy Europeans, several of whom were investors in the lodge. I asked one of them why he had put money into building a lodge in such a remote spot: "I think we all like the idea of 'putting something back', especially here, in Africa," he said, "where we still have a chance to make a difference. You know, once you've seen Vamizi you become obsessed with saving it, and you understand what damage we've done to other parts of the world."

The development of Vamizi is being carried out with the co-operation of the Mozambican government, and a flick through the pages of the visitors' book in the lobby revealed an interesting early endorsement: Nelson Mandela and his Mozambican wife, Graça Michel, have already stayed here. The only other guests to have occupied a whole page in the book, and rely solely on Christian names for identification are "Sven & Nancy". Enquiries revealed that these were indeed Mr Eriksson and Ms Dell'Olio. Both couples left suitably rapturous messages on departure. One of the attractions of the island is that the lodge is designed with privacy in mind, the villas are at least 25 meters apart and honeymooners are given the house at the far end of the beach.

The appeal of Vamizi is seemingly wide, but not difficult to understand. In the early mornings, cicadas filled the air with their song. On the trunks of the casuarina trees, I spotted little brown nymphs, the hollow skin cases from which the winged adults had hatched. Close by, the new cicadas dried their still moist wings in the morning sun, gathering strength for the dusk chorus. A Samango monkey ferreted insects from the bark of a tree next to my room, and there were turtle tracks across the pure white sand. They led to that sparkling sea, and those magnificent reefs.