Fading Suntan

Tofo (pronounced like the meat substitute) is a beautiful stretch of crescent sand along the Indian Ocean. Its only a few hundred kilometers north of the Mozambican capital Maputo, but the treacherous potholed road between the two ensures that those who are willing to put in the effort will be rewarded. So, after a 12 hour cashew filled journey we bumped along the sand road into town. In Tofo, the sand extends from the beach throughout the entire town, the roads, the market, the bathtubs of Tofo, are full of sand.

Tofo is hemmed in by dunes on the north and south (which offer wonderful vantage points to watch the breaching humpback whales or to build a sand tree house of sorts, away from it all). To the west is a marsh and, to the east is, of course, the clear and warm blue waters of the Indian Ocean. Most people go to Tofo to see what's in those warm blue waters and Tofo doesn't disappoint: Humpback whales, coral reefs, manta rays, other types of rays whose name escapes me, but they are the biggest in the world, and of course, the whale sharks.

Tofo was simply too incredible to tell you all about it, so rather I'll tell you about the whale sharks:
We took a tiny boat, which, to me, was barely a step up from the inflatable rafts we use to float down the rivers of Northern California in July. After fumbling over the waves, we broke into stride over the sea, with one man perched above the boat in a lifeguard type chair which ironically came equipped with a seat belt, to keep him from plummeting into the ocean as the wind-swept waves rocked our little boat.

A few times during this adventure, the calm of drifting over the swells was mixed into a frenzy. A whale shark would be spotted; we would don our masks and snorkels and our over sized flippers and hurl ourselves awkwardly into the water, much like beached whales ourselves. Then there would be a frantic swim toward the shark and flippers would flip and expensive underwater cameras would snap and bubbles would blow. But the shark would swim on.

His extreme length (16 meters-ish, I hear, although I don't use that crazy metric system) and subtle movements dwarfed the frantic limps which clambered above and beside him. He was truly a majestic sight, with the power to destroy you with one slap of his tail, but not the desire for destruction. His peace and serenity was matched only by the deep blue depths of the water he would dive to, when the flipping and the snapping and the blowing were enough. Then we tourists would sit awestruck in the churning sea. A little bob on the horizon of Tofo, meaningless to those depths below that hide so much more life.

And somewhere between the life-size humpback whale sand castle and watching the sunrise and dinners of heaps of rice and fish and birthdays and new friends and white sand and waves and surfing and mosquito zappers and houses in the dunes and walks on the beach I fell in love with Mozambique.