The most magical place on Earth (and no, I'm not talking about Disney World)

I found paradise. Yep. You can rest easy now knowing paradise is a real place, and it's called Tofo, Mozambique. While my awesome travel buddies may have had something to do with the overwhelmingly amazing week we spent in Tofo (thanks KG, AMP, & GWO), I can safely say that Mozambique tops my list of favorite non-Barnstable beach vacations. What an incredible place.

As always in Africa, a few snags in the travel plans are inevitable. For example, when we showed up at the Avis desk at the Maputo airport to pick up our reserved rental car, the company refused to give us a car because we didn't have a voucher. Because we never received one. Because we booked online. After an hour of negotiating (thanks, Kellogg!) I packed myself into a compact Chevy (yes, you read right, they have American cars in Mozambique) with three giant men. And I was behind the wheel because I'm the only one competent with a stick shift (thanks, Dad!). So it was pretty much already a dream vacation. Well, after I spent a terrifying 30 minutes trying to figure out how to drive on the left hand side of the road. Rotaries are scary, FYI. Also scary: driving through dunes in a 2WD vehicle when you've never driven on sand before, especially with three guys yelling "Just gun it! Pin the accelerator! Ohhhh, you wasted that guy in the face with sand!". Also scary: the fact that the GPS we rented gave us directions like this:


But despite the snafus, we pulled into Casa John in Tofinho, a small beach over the hill from Tofo town center, around 5:30PM on Sunday. Commence Round Two of negotiations (they had our reservation for Monday night, not Sunday), fast forward an hour, and we end up in a six-person house with two bedrooms, a giant living room, and a sea-facing deck (complete with porch swing) overlooking the Indian Ocean. We had stocked up on pasta and beer (only the essentials, naturally) on the way up, and after a light dinner of homemade mac and cheese with extra butter, we hit the sack.

When we woke up the next morning, we were pleased to find there were humpback whales breaching ALL OVER THE PLACE. Seriously, all over. Like, it wasn't even worth it to point one out to someone because they were simultaneously looking at three completely different ones. Awesome. Commence two days of doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And I mean that. Here is a list of activities:
Sit on porch swing
Read "Game of Thrones"
Walk on beach
Sit on beach
Shop for fresh fish in Tofo market
Cook fresh fish from Tofo market
Sit at Dino's Beach Bar
Drink beer
Play Hearts (I especially like this one since I won three times in a row)

Since it's difficult to write about doing nothing and make it interesting, I'll just show you some of my photos:
Enjoying lunch at Dino's Beach Bar:


Walking down Tofo Beach (note the flying egret....baller):


My preferred mode of sitting (Casa John House #5's amazing porch swing):


Strolling down the beach to Tofo town center:


Our local town market, where Kunal's new girlfriend sells her delicious chili sauce:



Tofo and Tofinho are absolutely gorgeous. The beaches are completely unobstructed, and stretch for miles (literally - from Tofo town center down to the point on one side is 6KM) in either direction. Casa John, where we set up camp for the week, is a 20-minute walk from the town center in Tofo by dirt / sand road over the dunes (the very same dunes that offered me my first sand-driving experience), and 30-40 minutes along the beach. The beach route was my preferred mode of travel, since we got to see cool things like a blowfish that had exploded from the inside with guts all over the place (Kunal wouldn't let me take a picture...meanie), little blue jellyfish with foot-long tentacles, and people learning how to surf on the giant windy-season waves that rolled in all day long.

After two days of the previously aforementioned "nothing", we decided to do "something", and chartered a fishing boat for an afternoon. We met Chad, the fishing captain from Casa Barry, at 1PM on Wednesday, and headed out to sea in his 21-foot flat-bottomed motorboat (with twin Yamaha 85's...that thing had juice). Well, headed out to sea after putting all of our combined effort and strength, as well as the effort of a Land Cruiser and strength of a few chains, into launching the boat directly off of the beach into 6-foot waves. It was wet. And completely unsafe. And completely AWESOME. Five minutes into our boat ride, while zig-zagging 100M offshore, we found ourselves surrounded by a school of dolphins. This made me think I would like to be a dolphin - you get to swim all day, play with your friends, and jump around a lot. So fun! After two hours of watching, waiting, and boating, we finally got a bite on one of the six lines we had trailing off the back of the boat, and Greg reeled this guy in:


Yep, that's right. It's an 11-kilo, 1-meter bludger kingfish. And it was DELICIOUS on the grill at our place later that night, accompanied by a pot of homemade piri-piri rice and a fresh avocado salad. Yummy.


Thursday brought another day of activities, in the form of an Ocean Safari through Tofo-based dive operator Diversity Scuba. We spent the first 30 minutes with Leo, our ocean tracker, learning about the proper procedure for dealing with whale sharks, then hit the (very rough) seas. Again, within five minutes we were surrounded by dolphins, and within fifteen, there was this:


Yes, ladies and gents. That is a whale head. A humpback whale head. A head which is attached to a 30-ton humpback whale. Which was six feet from our tiny pontoon boat. Pretty incredible. And, according to KG, "insanely dangerous and totally unreasonable". But also incredible. A few more minutes of getting tossed around in the waves ensued (August is the windiest month in Tofo) before our tracker spotted a whale shark, shouted "GO!!!", and we all frantically pitched backwards off the pontoons, snorkels in hand, kicking each other in the face violently with our rented flippers trying to swim towards the shark. The visibility wasn't great, but luckily we were able to get pretty close. Even more lucky? Greg has an underwater camera. Here's our whale shark:


You obviously can't tell that it was 15 feet long in this picture, so you'll have to take my word for it. But it was huge. As I swam over it, I can't say I wasn't nervous, but we couldn't keep up for long because that sucker was FAST. I was swimming a full-on front crawl as fast as I could, choking on sea water that kept splashing into my snorkel, and the shark still got away from me. But at least we got to see one. Super cool. Winter is the low season for whale sharks in Tofo so we only got to hang with the one big/little guy, but that was enough for me. Plus, being six feet from a giant humpback whale was sort of okay, too.

Friday morning brought our departure from Tofo, which was sad. However, barring any drastic unfortunate events, I will DEFINITELY be back. Greg and Andrew got on a flight to Jo'burg as soon as we got back to Maputo (with zero damage to the car, might I add), and to console ourselves from leaving Tofo and losing the company of our friends, Kunal and I promptly checked into the nicest hotel in Maputo (which will remain unnamed because I don't want my dad to be able to figure out the nightly rate). As I write this post from our sea-facing balcony overlooking Maputo Bay, I can safely say that this was an awesome, incredible, amazing beach vacation that will be repeated.

Up next: a safari through South Africa's Krueger National Park with Erin and Ali...will let you know as soon as I see some rhinos.

Thanks to my boys for being such good friends, companions, and eaters this week. You rock. I'm going to miss this...




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad from some awesome, fabulous, amazing, dangerous international location

Location:Praia Tofinho, Mocambique