A Working Beach

Vilankulo fishermen

I go on a walk down the beach most days, and almost every time the dogs (we are now up to five dogs, so we have a real pack) like to come with me. While I always love taking the dogs on beach walks, doing so means that it is nearly impossible to speak to anyone else on the beach, as the dogs tend to become pack minded run at people, who in turn tend to therefore become afraid. Today, however, I took a walk without the dogs, which gave me the perfect chance to take some photos illustrating just how much of a working beach the beach near our house is.

By “working beach”, I mean that it is a beach where local people fish for their livelihoods for most of the year. Not surprisingly (since Mozambique has almost 2,500 kilometers of coastline), one of the main businesses in Vilankulo is fishing, and thus many people make a living doing just that. In the photo above, you can see a typical scene - a crowd on the beach (mainly of women and children) waiting for fishermen (almost always men) to bring in the catch. The women will then sort it into baskets and carry everything to the market in town, nearly 15 kilometers away, to sell. Sometimes, fresh caught fish and homegrown vegetables are also hand-delivered to the lodges, and we often buy fish right off the beach.

Vilankulo is known for maintaining this traditional lifestyle; the coastline here has been a major fishing area for hundreds of years. The fishing boats used are traditional wooden dhows: sailboats handmade on the beach and painted beautifully in all different colors. I love the dhows, and photograph them almost every day on the beach. Even better is getting to ride horses or waterski past them!

(This last photo is borrowed from the Mozambique Horse Safari page.)

The dhows are made from mangrove wood, which is a hardwood (locally collected from the beaches) and very dense, so it does not expand or contract when wet. This makes the boats strong and long-lasting for fishing voyages out to sea, some of which can last for days at a time.

Today, the catch was made up entirely of crabs. Here, some of the women begin carrying their wares away. You can see some of the crabs laid out on the ground in front of them, ready to be sorted into different buckets before being carried off (these photos were taken with permission).

This woman has a bucket full of crabs ready to be made into a traditional curry, steamed, or eaten with matapa, a delicious local meal cooked with ground cassava leaves and coconut milk.

I hope you have found this working beach tour as interesting as I do.

Until next time!