No Crapping in the fish's Mouth (and Ibo Island)

After a journey of pick up trucks, tin boats, dhows and the successful avoidance of getting stranded on slightly submerged sand islands, we arrived at Ibo Island. It was low tide so we were dropped far from the shore and had to make our own way across the sand/mud and shallow water - another hot mission with big bags on our backs!


Here was another beautiful island full of old Portuguese buildings falling to ruins with plants and trees claiming back their home, growing in and around the crumbling stone. There were also no end of flowering prickly pear plants, a crumbling graveyard still in current use, seemingly random yet popular and regular clothes auctions by the market (which had a small number of people selling bread/cake things or a few tomatoes on the floor in an open square), and a white star shaped fort. Oh, and there was a botanical garden, but it was more just a open space with a few trees in it than what you might imagine a botanical garden to be like. You could have a look around the fort, which we did, but there wasn't any information about it's history there at all. In almost all of the little rooms inside were people selling craft type things they had made. A lot of the people designed and made really pretty jewelry out of silver which we were told came either from South Africa or India. Walking around the roof of the fort were views out to sea and at the particular moment we were there, there was a view of someone doing exactly what the sign above was instructing them not to do - crapping in the fish's mouth!

A very elderly and knowledgeable man lived near the fort. He couldn't speak English but my traveling companions spoke amazing Portuguese and so we were able to learn that years ago the fort was used as a prison where many people were killed. Their bodies were dumped in a mass grave and this went on until the people of the island began to complain about the smell. Then all the bodies were moved to Metemo Island - an island a little further north - which we also hoped to visit.

Whilst exploring Ibo we found two other very little forts. One was locked but the other we were able to let ourselves into and then extremely carefully look around. The carefulness was necessary as it turned out that people don't only use the fish's mouth when they need to go. Avoidance was successful and I even found a conveniently placed ladder and was able to get up onto the roof. It is so hot here though, that we'd been dashing from one patch of shade to another as we walked around the island, to try and avoid the sun and so my stay on the roof was only very brief.

Another past time whilst on Ibo was checking out the posh lodges there. We had cocktails and smoked shisha in one place which was situated behind the two hugest Mango trees (in the last picture here the two trees on the right hand side are the mango ones and the lodge is behind them, although you can't really see it). Here there were dorms which you might not expect in an upmarket place, but looking through the window we saw that the beds in these dorms were wooden double bunk beds and each bed had it's own table a bedside lamp and looked very cool indeed. Equally cool were the swings the size of beds out in the gardens!