That night after the boys’ swim, we camp on Xobega Island. The plan is to sleep beneath the stars, sheltered by nothing more than white mosquito nets, under which no one has ever been attacked, or so our guide assures us. The color is important because it reflects the ambient light and, to predators, seems a substantial barrier. The lightning flickering in the distance from the bruised clouds seems to be getting nearer. “We haven’t had rain at this time in fifteen years of camping on this island,” he says confidently. It pours all night.
We’d started our Africa trip in Mozambique, a week earlier, for sentimental reasons. I grew up on Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique in the misty valleys of the eastern highlands, under the glittering quartzite of the Chimanimani Mountains, where my mother was one of the only doctors. Summers, we would drive over to the Mozambique coast, three hundred miles east, and set up camp on the beach, to be loosely supervised by a tag team of parents.
I remember my mother and father drinking wine from bottles in raffia slings and eating peri-peri crayfish on the veranda of the Oceana restaurant in the port city of Beira. As a special treat they took us to Mrs. Trinidade’s zoo, a novelty to us. Over the border in Rhodesia we had only game reserves—zoos were illegal. Mrs. Trinidade had an old lion that liked to lick your ice cream and crocodiles that moved only when she brought them live chickens to eat. “Fresco, fresco,” she explained. Fresh. Once, as the guerilla war against Portuguese rule was escalating, we went up the coast on the S.S. Mozambique, which had sailed from Lisbon. On the deck below ours were thousands of Portuguese conscripts, pale young men with blue-black hair and sad brown eyes, terrified of their first landfall in Africa, convinced they’d be eaten by lions. At night, they strummed guitars and sang mournful fado ballads.
In 1975, after more than four hundred years as a colony of Portugal, Mozambique became independent under the avowed Marxist party FRELIMO, and the Portuguese—some 350,000 of them—fled, leaving behind a Lusophone legacy in a country surrounded by officially Anglophone nations.
Constant civil war after independence left Mozambique among the world’s poorest countries. When I went there to report on the conflict in the mid-1980s, I found that even in the capital, Maputo, at the once swanky Hotel Polana, barefoot waiters served grass soup under dusty chandeliers, and Soviet helicopter gunship pilots lounged around the stagnant green pool in Speedos, drinking vodka shots with bikinied mestiço hookers. And when I went back to Mrs. Trinidade’s zoo, the lion’s cage had become home to Theresa Diaz and her four kids. For privacy, she had braided strips of cardboard through the bars.
Today, Mozambique has been at peace for twenty years and has enjoyed galloping growth, though off a miserably low base.
Our destination in Mozambique, Vilankulo, still can’t be reached by a tarred road, but it does have a new “international” airport. Sadly, the power is out for the second time in a week. In the sweltering arrivals hall, a line has formed behind a lone immigration official. In Africa, learning to distinguish between those situations you can alter and those you cannot is a coronary-saving skill. (This is the latter.)
At last, a startlingly young South African chopper pilot—sent by our tour operator—finds us, and soon we’re skimming over the dusty town, the palms, the beaches, and then the aquamarine swath of sea, dotted with brightly painted dhows. Ten minutes later, we land on Benguerra Island, the location of one of several small low-impact lodges on the six-island Bazaruto Archipelago, a marine reserve for more than forty years—created principally to protect the dugong, a manatee-like sirenian marine mammal.
It’s low tide, and the gently sloping palomino beach lengthens as the sea retreats. To reach the mainland, the island women hitch up their skirts, balance their bundles on their heads, strap their babies to their backs, and wade half a mile out to a waiting dhow. The luffing sails are made of a patchwork of recycled fabric, jute fertilizer bags, denim, hessian flour sacks.
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Article source: http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2013/06/african-safari-with-kids