Vamizi - Mozambique

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 metres 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 sceptical, 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 metres 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.

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