6 ★ FT Weekend 4 April/5 April 2020Travel
M
uezzins and birds greet
the morning on Ilha de
Moçambique. Every
dawn their calls of faith
and hope echo off the
pale walls of mosques and mouldering
colonial trading houses, roll over the
fishermen’s shacks and fade in the
shush of the surf.
In the blue light before sunrise you
think for a moment you are seeing
ghosts. They are women wearing white
moisturising masks of pulverised mus-
siro wood, kindling the business of day.
Gravely kind in their welcome to a
stranger, they say, “Bom dia,” as their
children cry, “Tata batane!” — hello
friend.
Two miles long, 500 yards wide, rising
at the northern end in a town of Portu-
guese architecture mingled with bright
painted houses in Swahili style, Ilha —
also known as Mozambique Island — is
where I wish I were, planning a boat ride
later to the golden sands across the bay.
It lies 1,400 miles by road north of
Maputo, about where you would put a
stud on the edge of the ear of Mozam-
bique. Tourists tend to stop short —
the South African trade sticking to the
beaches of the south — or fly over to
swim and sail at Pemba, up near the
Tanzanian border.
But to stroll out through Stone Town,
after a night in one of the old Portuguese
villas, where you slept under dark Indo-
nesian hardwoods and the smile of a sil-
ver Thai Buddha, is to feel you have
found somewhere that will always, in
memory, be yours.
The island is linked to land by a
thin, two mile-long causeway, and to
eternity by its perch between Africa and
the East. Mia Couto, the nation’s great-
est novelist, called his country “a
veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean”.curve of Cabaceira, sweet
and salt waters mingle in the
toes of the mangroves. You
can snorkel here, nose to
nose with baby barracuda.
They look at you with eyes
like liquid onyx. There are
snowflake eels, red-scribbled
pipefish, devil firefish and
one-spot damsels, glowing
orange and blue.
Couto’s description is of
the ocean side, where the
beach is a seemingly endless
bulwark of a dune raised
against the ocean. It sounds
whimsical until you hop out
of the boat, wade on to the
sand and breathe. Da Gama
came ashore here, seeking
water. He must have cut a
very different figure from
the bronze brute whose
statue stands on Ilha, like a
giant butcher with fists fit to
seize whole coasts.
D a G a m a’s m e n c o n -
structed wells in the village
of Cabaceira Pequena which
the people still use. The old
Portuguese governor’s man-
sion has been dilapidating
for a couple of hundred years. It makes a
fine and eerie place from which to watch
all the birds, the giant egrets, the bee-
eaters, the collared sunbirds and the
coucals whose calls bring rain. Coconut
palms move in the breeze, the sound
like a second sea-wash. Caravels of oce-
anic clouds cross the skies beyond Ilha,
which looks like a fish-tank
toy now, patrolled by the
white sails of dhows.
A sandy-footed stroll of
about a mile takes you from
the village to Coral Lodge, a
luxurious thatched hotel on
the headland. It was founded
by two Dutch diplomats who
had been captivated by
Couto’s description of the
beach, and is the perfect
place to end my fanciful
return journey.
When I was last there, I
took a walk with Marufo Uss-
ene, who works at the hotel,
to a sacred spot at the end of
the land called Makichando,
where small stones lie
beneath a baobab tree. A
woman named Maziza once
fell asleep on these pebbles,
Ussene explained, awaking to find a
month had passed and that Mashine,
the great spirit, had given her a message.
“If anyone comes to this tree and prays
they will be granted what they wish for,”
Ussene said. We stood there for a long
time as the sea flexed its fingers and rat-
tled its rings on the shore. I asked Uss-
ene what he wished for. “A good life,” he
replied.
It has taken me the intervening years
and the last few weeks especially to
understand something of what a good
life might be. We all know it now: health
to our loved ones, something to eat
tonight, a good bed to sleep in and a sun-
rise you greet with hope.Mossuril
Bay
Fort of São
SebastiãoCoral
LodgeLumboCabaceiraIlha de
Moçambiquemaps news.com/©HEREMOZAMBIQUE
kmFrom top: the former
naval arsenal; sailing in a
dhow, a design still crafted
with hand tools. Below: a
lounge at Terraço das
Quitandas, a hotel in
acolonial-era villa
Andrew Clunies-Rossi/DE TA I L S
Whenthe current crisis eases, potential tour
operators include Expert Africa (expert
africa.com), Farside Africa (farsideafrica.com),
and Natural World Safaris (naturalworldsafaris.
com). In Stone Town, the Terraço das Quitandas
(terracodas quitandas.com) has six suites in a
300-year old former merchant’s house. Coral
Lodge (corallodgemozambique.com) has 10
thatched beach villas at CabaceiraNew series With the world in lockdown, we are asking travel writers to journey in their imaginations, to tell the
story of a distant place they love and long, one day, to revisit. This week,Horatio Clareon the Ilha de Moçambique
Wish I were
there...
With the sun come the scents of
daybreak, frangipani, ozone, wood
smoke, bougainvillea and something
like sour wine. A cat pauses her groom-
ing to watch the shipwrights, a man and
two boys, going down to the builders’
beach. They carry the same five tools
they have been using since at least 1330,
when Ibn Battuta sailed the east African
coast. Then as now, all the measure-
ments are done by eye.
A shipwright called Ali once chatted
to me as he worked, explaining the
dhow under construction was his sec-
ond and that when it was done it would
carry 30 people to sea with nets and har-
poons. They would sail on five-day trips
as far as Pemba. As the builder, he would
get a cut of every catch. Watching him
work, I realised the gentle thunk of his
axe and his instructions to the boys were
the unbroken sound of millennia.
“The Iron Age lasted here until the
16th century,” says Sandra Rodrigues, a
marine archaeologist I met on my last
visit. “And then the Portuguese came.
With gold and silver they bought spice
and silk; they traded beads from India
for slaves. In the wrecks we’ve foundivory, silver, bronze from Europe,
Chinese porcelain.”
Beads and fragments of Ming dynasty
porcelain sometimes wash up on the
beach; you can find them for sale in
cafés near the shore, some of them set in
silver using techniques that arrived
from Goa centuries ago.
The lanes are abuzz with small scoot-
ers now. Last night’s catch is coming
ashore, sold on the beach below the cen-
tral mosque. A short walk to the north is
a door in a red wall which seems to open
to the sea. This is the Garden of Memory,
a memorial to the slaves shipped from
here to the Americas, the Indies and the
Persian Gulf. Twelve sculpted heads
overlook the skeleton of a rowing boat.
A display board makes a valiant effort to
see goodness in evil. “The memory of
the people enslaved and of the living
culture of Mozambican origin is hon-
oured and brought to light. We observe
the past and the future looks at us.”
Dialogues between pasts and futures,
the calls of tangible ghosts from unimag-
inable histories, are the territory of the
writer Mia Couto. The son of Portuguese
immigrants, Couto’s novels, translatedAbove, from main: the church of
Nossa Senhora dos Remedios, in
Cabaceira, built in 1579; a woman on
Ilha de Moçambique wearing a
mussiro moisturising mask
Andrew Clunies-Rossinto many languages, have taken some-
thing of the sensibility of Mozambique
from places such as the Garden of Mem-
ory out to the reading world.
Couto’s fiction is primarily concerned
with the emergence of Mozambique
from the abyss of the civil war of 1977 to- There is no distinction, in the psy-
ches of his books, between the living and
the dead. Narrators turn into trees.
Dead men dictate their thoughts
through the writings of grandchildren.
InUnder the Frangipania ghost inhabits a
police inspector. Nothing, Couto dem-
onstrates, is more unlikely or fantastic
than the actual behaviour of the ambi-
tious of the continent, “who govern like
hyenas”.
Under the Frangipanialso contains a
description of an elemental beach
“where time rests, where the earth
undresses and where the gods come to
pray”. It isn’t far away — on a sandy
headland called Cabaceira, just across
the channel on the mainland (which
everyone here calls “the continent”), a
short journey in an open boat past reefs
and sandbars that reach up through the
lucent blue. On the landward side of the
POSTCARD
FROMANTARCTICA
i/ L I N K S
To read more about the British Antarctic Survey
and the International Thwaites Glacier
Collaboration project, seebas.ac.ukand
thwaitesglacier.orgW
hen Kelly Hogan said
goodbye to her 10-
year-old daughter to
embark on a mission to
the bottom of the
Earth, the name Covid-19 had yet to be
coined. It was late January and the
global coronavirus death toll stood at
about 20. The World Health
Organisation was playing down any
potential spread beyond China. There
was nothing to suggest that, little over
two months later, a health crisis would
have consumed the planet. Nor could
Hogan, a British scientist, have
imagined that she would now be cut off
from it all in Antarctica, the only
continent so far to escape the grip of
the virus.
“We always feel far away from home
here anyway, and when something big
happens at home, I think you feel even
more distant,” Hogan tells me by
satellite phone from Rothera Research
Station. The British Antarctic Survey’s
base on Adelaide, an ice-bound island,
is 9,000 miles from her home in
Cambridge. “There’s a sense of
helplessness,” she adds.
Hogan, a 41-year-old marine
geologist and geophysicist, was
supposed to have flown home late last
month, via Chile and Brazil. She had
spent two months on an icebreaking
research vessel at the foot of the
Thwaites Glacier, a vast but rapidlymelting mass of ice the size of Britain.
But when the airlines tore up their
schedules, the British Antarctic Survey
gathered all its teams at Rothera,
where a runway and green, low-slung
buildings are surrounded by icebergs
and towering mountains.
At some point in the next week or so,
they hope to fly by small aircraft to the
Falkland Islands. A military plane will
then transport them back to Britain, a
country Hogan may now struggle to
recognise. In the meantime, one of the
world’s most extreme environments
has become its safest place. At the time
of writing, there have been no cases of
coronavirus on the dozens of
international research bases that dotwalks and calls her daughter, who is off
school and with her father. She has also
been able to start working through the
data she came here to collect at an even
more remote location. The Thwaites
Glacier is a giant mass of ice on the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet, more than
1,000 miles from any research station.
“It’s one of the most stunning and
brooding places I’ve been to,” Hogan
says. It is also melting and fracturing at
such an alarming rate that some
glaciologists have referred to it as the
“doomsday” glacier.
Aboard the research ship Nathaniel
B Palmer, Hogan and colleagues
collected sediment samples from the
sea floor. By dating and examining the
shell chemistry of fossilised micro-
organisms in the mud, Hogan can
deduce the water temperature at the
time they lived. That historic data will
improve modelling for future melting,
and inform efforts to mitigate a slow-
motion catastrophe.
While doing this work, in 12-hour
shifts from noon to midnight, for eight
weeks without a break, Hogan learnt
that coronavirus was spreading way
beyond China. The internet connection
on the ship is too slow for TV, but brief
phone calls home and a printed daily
news digest told an increasingly
alarming story. Leisure time is limited
on the vessel, and alcohol is banned,
but conversations in the mess hall soonturned to events beyond the ice. “It
started to feel like a huge deal when
countries closed their borders,” Hogan
recalls. “The obvious concern was —
how will we get home?”
The Americans and other
nationalities on the ship sailed back to
Punta Arenas as planned, to try to find
their own routes out. The ship paused
as it passed Rothera, on March 22, so
that a rigid inflatable boat could take
the 10 Britons ashore.
Hogan is cooler than a glacier when
contemplating her strange isolation
and delayed homecoming. But she
admits this trip has been unusually
taxing emotionally. “I just can’t wait to
see my daughter again,” she says before
returning to her data. She had planned
to take an afternoon walk, but a vicious
wind is blowing.
The scientists surveying a continent
whose decline has disastrous
implications for us all have also had
time to reflect on the current global
health crisis, and the emergency
response to it.
“If climate change had an effect as
immediate as coronavirus, I imagine
you’d get a similar global response,”
Hogan adds. “It can be frustrating
because the pace of climate change is
slower. But maybe it’s reassuring to see
that a response of this magnitude can
happen when we want it to.”
Simon UsborneMatthew Cookthe coast of Antarctica. The biggest —
the American McMurdo Station, which
can house 1,200 people — reportedly
threw the largest St Patrick’s day party
in the world this year.
Rothera is home to as many as 100
scientists and engineers in the southern
summer. A hardy skeleton crew keeps
it ticking over through winter. Hogan
says good hygiene is already part of life;
much milder viruses can be dangerous
somewhere so isolated. Even so,
posters have gone up and hand-
sanitiser stations have multiplied. New
arrivals have been limited and
standard medical screening beefed up.
With little else to do, Hogan is getting
used to life back on dry land. She takesIlha, which creaks in the wind, is its
swing-seat.
The locals, the Makua people, call this
place Omuhipiti, meaning refuge. Every
explorer, trader and traveller who has
ever been here felt variations of the
same thing. Vasco da Gama arrived in
1498 and the Portuguese saw it as a per-
fect anchorage on the sea-road to India.
By 1522 they had constructed Our Lady
of the Ramparts, the oldest European
building in southern Africa, a little
white chapel, its paint sea-washed, that
seems now to belong to the winds. In
1583 they completed the fortress of
São Sebastião, a massively sinister
edifice where you all but hear the echoes
of slave traders’ shouts under the
rising sun.
From here the Portuguese did regular
battle with the ships and marines of the
Dutch. There are more than 40 known
wrecks of caravels, trading ships
and men-of-war out there in the bay.
Had they taken Ilha, the Dutch East
India Company planned to site their
provisioning vegetable garden on the
shore. Cape Town sprung from a reluc-
tant second choice.APRIL 4 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 2/4/2020 - 17: 27 User: matthew.brayman Page Name: WKD6, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 6 , 1