Well, here we are again, just back (April ’07) from a dive trip to fabled Mozambique, a remote African destination supposedly celebrated for its whale shark and manta encounters. Hmmm – we’re sort of famous for our generally very lucky dives, but this certainly wasn’t the case!

Landing in Johannesburg, South Africa, we were met at the airport gates by our beloved friends Leon Joubert and Claudia Pellarini-Joubert of bittenbysharks.com fame, who - after a ten-year long stint as shark divers and resident u/w photographers/videographers at Stuart Cove’s in the Bahamas - have recently returned to their native country to teach u/w photography classes to the local diving community. We had first met them while diving in Raja Ampat and then again in Bali, so this was a big happy reunion with lots of hugs and kisses!

After a brief stop at their place in Pretoria to pick up dive gear and various equipment (including tons of biltong – which is a local delicacy made of ready-to-eat, bite-sized, spiced dried beef), off we were to faraway, exotic Mozambique. Getting there took us two full days of driving on tarred roads - which from South African excellence soon faded to Mozambican pot-holed disrepair, finally turning to sandy, dusty tracks which only a 4-wheel drive vehicle could safely negotiate. One might also fly to Inhambane – but you want to have a car along while being there, believe us. A very interesting and colorful drive – if you keep on reminding yourself you’re travelling in dirt-poor rural Africa within a country which has been ravaged by decades of civil war.

Anyway, the first real disappointment of the trip unexpectedly met us at our arrival at Barra Dive Resort, a rather dingy and run-down place which despite its glossy website didn’t really keep up to its promises. Huge brown mounds of split, dirty coconut husks piled up untidily under the scanty palm trees, small depressing bungalows were grouped here and there among the sand dunes, bothersome sandflies were rampant and a general damp gloom hung all over the place. The mood didn’t get any better when the four of us were unceremoniously dumped into a dark, flimsy plywood chalet sporting a rusty fridge, a few white plastic garden chairs piled up in a corner and a rather dirty kitchen sink – so out of the icebox rose the first of the many Martinis which helped us along during this trip of ours, wisely brought along by the ever-prevident Claudia & Leon. God bless them!

Now, you have to remember that most of Mozambique unfortunately lies on an alluvial flat pan, periodically (and disastrously) flooded by the mighty Limpopo river, and that most of its coastal belt is thick in mangrove swamps teeming with billions and billions of unstoppable mosquitoes – this is a high-risk cerebral malaria locale indeed. Barra Resort, in fact, is situated on a sand-spit between the Indian Ocean on one side and a terribly unhealthy, muddy, impenetrable mangrove belt on the other. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, the South Africans and Mozambicans involved in running the place seem to like doing things the rough way – so visitors to the resort are not briefed at all on the health risks involved, paying clients are expected to do all their insecticide spraying in the room, and taking down the mosquito nets over your beds at night (a must for those in the know) is entirely up to you. It seems there’s a bit too much vital info taken for granted here. Ok, no problem – but be well informed first and bring your anti-malaria pills along, as you wouldn’t be the first unfortunate and uninformed soul to be quickly stricken down for good by this very dangerous and insidious disease. Anyway, a degree of discomfort is to be expected – sort of – in such a forlorn place, and is more than acceptable if the diving is good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Again, the local way of doing things is quite rough – after a rather bureaucratic and exceedingly detailed dive briefing, a big rubber semi-rigid inflatable is first driven to the surfline by a truck (yes, the humungous sand beach is that big!) and then everybody is expected to push it through the crashing waves till the outboard engines actually engage. It surely can be fun – but keep an eye on those flailing elbows and feet when everybody is trying to jump in the boat at last, as it’s quite easy to get a nasty, unexpected uppercut by a fellow diver. People also apparently enjoy getting sunstroke in this part of the world, so the boat has no roof of any sort (a little stretched canvas would do nicely, thank you) and you’ll have to enjoy the bumpy 40 minutes ride to the dive site of the day sitting in the tropical sun with all your dive gear on. It’s two dives a day (both in the morning, as in the afternoon the wind picks up) so you’ll be sitting under the sun for quite a time – bring your sunblock!

Oh, by the way, Mozambique also lies smack in the middle of the cyclone belt, and we were told the Indian Ocean here usually features swells ranging from 3 to 6 meters in normal conditions, but in this respect we were quite lucky and were saved that – the sea was a bit rough with lots of whitecaps, but nothing we could not safely handle. Had we come two weeks earlier things could have been worse – a few beach resorts were actually swept away by a cyclone. In any case, the rubber dive boats are not equipped for camera gear whatsoever, and the local skipper has absolutely no clue about your stuff, so that will add to the discomfort (unfortunately there’s a big language barrier in Mozambique, since the nationals only speak local dialects or Portuguese).On our first trip out we soon sighted a 6-meter sub-adult whale shark cruising at the surface (supposedly there are lots of them all-year round along the coast), but there was no time for snorkelling with it, so we simply went on.

The actual dives – all four of them – were the second biggest disappointment of the trip. Most dive sites are quite shallow (around 25 meters on average) and offshore, there’s barely any coral reef anywhere – the massive surge of the Indian Ocean swelling up to the coast of Mozambique all the way from Sumatra sees to that – and the number of fish species is quite reduced, even if the average size of individuals is rather large compared to other Indo-Pacific locations. Clearly, this is typical oceanic shore-diving at its best, with little color or numbers to be expected but good chances of meeting huge pelagics such as whale sharks, mantas and whales. We didn’t see any of those – just a very large unidentified stingray and a passing devil ray. The only good subject I was able to bag was a Spotted Soapfish Pogonoperca punctata, a rather beautiful and quite uncommon species which had eluded me for years. Whale sharks are certainly around – but I bet one can only expect very fleeting encounters with them, and most of the times only snorkelling on the surface. Mantas are also supposed to be plentiful, as several cleaning stations have been identified – but again, I wonder how well one can hope to photograph them in such horizontal currents, bothersome bottom surges and bad visibility.

The fact that dive conditions were quite atrocious on all four of our dives did not help either – bad visibility and rather strong currents had the four of us immediately losing sight of our dive guide on two dives out of four (keep in mind that Antonella and myself have about 1.000 dives logged each, and Claudia & Leon have about 5.000 each, so we’re not completely unexperienced). On one occasion, the local boat skipper simply stood transfixed after I had backflipped into the water, looking dazedly at me instead of passing me my big camera housing – while the inflatable he was standing on speedily receded in the distance in a strong current. By the time Claudia had torpedoed herself to the boat – beating me to it to retrieve the camera – the four of us were floating alone in the oceanic swell and the dive was screwed up for good. Clearly, most of these guys are not up to scratch, being used to rough-and-ready weekend divers only – forget about quality service. Well, to make a long story short, we had booked for a full week, but after two days we packed up and ran away to do some spectacular game viewing in the Kruger National Park and at King’s Camp in Timbavati Nature Reserve.

We have obviously been unlucky, since all experienced South African divers swear by regular, reliable whale shark and manta sightings, but a few hard facts remain: the cleverly-marketed resort wasn’t good at all, the underwater visibility was very bad (mantas and whale sharks wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t, after all!), and the local staff is absolutely not trained to cater to photographers’ needs. There’s a lot of hoopla going on at the moment among diving circles about Mozambique, so you might want to take your chances and dive there, but for us it simply isn’t worth all the trouble and health risks involved. There are a lot of other dive destinations which are much easier to get to and which offer incredibly better and safer diving. Sorry guys - this time, it’s thumbs down!