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Anvil Bay — a coastal refuge where nature and conservation meet

Anvil Bay — a coastal refuge where nature and conservation meet
Januario Dambane, Anvil Bay front of house manager. Began his hospitality journey by assisting to build the camp over ten years ago.
Angus Begg
By Angus Begg
31 Oct 2024
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In Mozambique’s Anvil Bay, this eco-lodge blends comfort with a respect for the surrounding landscape.

When Paul Bell passed away this year due to health complications, he left a legacy as bright as the beach of his childhood fishing haunt in southern Mozambique.

I met Paul on that beach in Anvil Bay, the month before he was taken by the neurological affliction that stole my father before his time too. In the manner permitted by said affliction, he had the odd laugh and moved okay. He also appeared a little moody. I like to think, ignoring the way of such degenerative diseases, that it was because he knew what he would be leaving behind here at Anvil Bay, in the coastal forest at the edge of the beach, in the home of his heart.

He was leaving behind the beach camp he had once dreamed of, and finally built.

His wife Ricky told me that as a young boy Paul had fished with his godfather on this very beach in Anvil Bay, a tradition they had continued, making the arduous, regular holiday trek from Richards Bay until 2009. 

The chance to bid for a concession on the local community’s land came up, and they put forward a low-impact, high-end proposal, as opposed to the 120-bed hotel that was “on the table”. 

The result was what he and Ricky call a barefoot beach eco-lodge, fulfilling his dream to conserve the local environment in what is today the Maputo National Park, some way north, as the turtle swims, from the diving mecca of Ponta d’Ouro. 

“Not a tree was pulled out,” says Ricky, explaining how her passion-fuelled husband had set about constructing Anvil Bay lodge. 

Anvil Bay offers the promise of an empty beach. Not literally, but we never saw another soul apart from our fellow camp inhabitants. (Photo: Angus Begg)



This barge washed ashore at Anvil Bay a few years ago. (Photo: Angus Begg)



Anvil Bay (Photo: Angus Begg)


Utterly natural


It is the woodshed behind the camp that best captures the essence of Anvil Bay. I gleaned from my few chats with Paul that he felt it his duty – as with the reefs on the other side of the surf – to conserve this delicate dune-forest vegetation. 

A landscape so typical of the Maputaland coastline that sings summer cicada-style past Ponta d’Ouro and over the border into South Africa’s Kosi Bay and the surrounding network of lakes.

To achieve that aim Paul ensured that all the structures here are natural. The casinha (little home) floors and decking and loungers are carved in the workshop behind the camp of simbiri, aka black ironwood. The tables, chairs and cupboards – anything requiring broad “slabs” – are fashioned from wild mango (mutondo). 

Outside the boardwalks bend their way, suspended above the sandy forest floor, further protecting the myriad smaller creatures that call it home. 

Each casinha has a private deck, lights, a shower, minibar, plug points and giant beds draped in luxurious linen. You don’t know you are actually in a tent, where the canvas sides can be rolled up, essentially leaving the bed on a platform among the trees (we were there in early December, and didn’t feel the need).  

Sustainability, one of the global travel industry’s key buzzwords today, has found a home here in the coastal forest. I cannot think of many places, if any, where the word “sustainability” plays out truer than here. 

There is no glass or concrete (beyond the glass shower door in the first casinha; a learning-curve error, says Ricky, pointing out that there are no Crabtree & Evelyn plastic bottles of shampoo greeting you at eye level in the hand-crafted showers (inside and out). 

A dhow ferries lodge guests consuming sundowner snacks. (Photo: Angus Begg)


All paths lead to the beach


With staff accessing the casinhas via the forest-facing back door, the “front door” is really the boardwalk entrance to the beach, where life happens, barefoot. 

In the large, sand-coloured canvas “tent” that flaps a little when the onshore breeze blows, I met a few of the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) board members (the organisation that has played such a significant role in getting the park back on its feet) seated around one of a few tables set in the sand. 

There isn’t much room or purpose, physically and metaphorically speaking, for footwear, so when the last PPF member to arrive – a prominent South African banker in collared shirt and trousers – emerged from his casinha the next morning, he looked more the part, in board shorts and sandals.

Julio, the chef at Anvil Bay. (Photo: Angus Begg)



The dunes, a five-minute walk around the headland, are high. That’s a person down there. (Photo: Angus Begg)



When the wind isn’t blowing, the side-shades for beach dining are up, revealing the blue of the bay and the hilly coastal forest on the other side, in the direction of the Machangulo peninsula and Inhaca Island. 

Which has allowed tourism to feature once again, in a relatively substantial manner, providing income and employment to local communities that reduces the need for what I call poverty poaching, when people are left with no choice. Beyond the exclusive offering at Anvil Bay there is a larger, mainstream hotel further south at Ponta Membene, and a couple of very decent national parks camps.

For the people, by the people


Everything here is utterly real, made for – quite literally – and by the people. Showing me archive images from the camp’s construction between 2012 and 2015, Ricky points out some of the characters who have been here since the start, including Jonito Timbane from Mabuluco village. 

The Anvil Bay manager for the past five years, Jonito sold vegetables in Maputo after leaving school. As he told me seated over an early morning coffee, outside the signature living area on the beach, when he learnt of the Bells’ plans in 2010 he started as a camp attendant, “learning plumbing and electrician work on the job in the camp”. 

He said skills training was given to the other members of staff, with groups of them then sent to the SA College of Tourism in the historic Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet “so we could transition to hospitality”. Like Percina Mungwane from Tsolombane village, who works as a massage therapist and housekeeper, and front-of-house manager Januario Dimbane, also from Mabuluco. 

I gathered from my chat with Jonito that if there were any complaints, they should be directed, clearly tongue-in-cheek, to the town’s Drostdy Hof hotel, where they did their practical training. Although, from my experience, with guests evidently being front and centre of this rural community’s thinking, I cannot imagine there would be many grumbles. 

The elephants that survived Mozambique’s civil war probably never left. (Photo: Angus Begg)



A casinha (little home) in the southern Mozambique coastal forest. (Photo: Angus Begg)



It’s not the “four staff to one guest” ratio with the associated attention to detail that made places like the iconic Mala Mala game reserve the talk of the greater Kruger Park for so long, but rather the type of hospitality a warm family would offer to a stranger blown in on a stormy night. Because the land, after all, does belong to them, and they want guests to enjoy it. 

The coastal forest 


Away from the lodge, the coastal forest is thick with the sounds of cicadas and birdlife. Hippos snort in the lake as the dhow ferrying lodge guests consuming sundowner snacks glides by in a gust. Reedbuck stand to attention in the floodplain, with a herd of elephants feeding beyond.

Mozambique has always seemed like an interminably long stage play running parallel to my life. 

With a history in the country dating back to 1991 – flown by a Cuban pilot to Xai-Xai as a young reporter with friends in search of a little adrenalin and exotic sunshine in the last years of the civil war – I have longed for the country to succeed. I attended the reopening of Maputo’s Polana hotel and, as the years flew by, covered in some depth the storied and magnificent resurrection of Gorongosa National Park. 

Persinia Mungwane has worked as a massage therapist and housekeeper at Anvil Bay since 2018. She used to catch mangrove crabs and sell them to help the family make ends meet. (Photo: Angus Begg)



Januario Dimbane, the Anvil Bay front-of-house manager, began his hospitality journey by helping to build the camp more than 10 years ago. (Photo: Angus Begg)



Seeing for myself this next resurrection chapter, of a park accessed by a dirt road mostly impassable to regular traffic, makes my heart full. So when Ricky told me Anvil Bay had its official opening in 2017, on 30 October, my birthday, I had to smile. 

Covid striking down the fledgling destination in 2020 was especially cruel, but with direct helicopter flights from Maputo and the slick new (Chinese-built) bridge and road linking the capital to the South African border, passing the turn-off to Anvil Bay en route, this family destination is open for business. 

“Our guests also see for themselves that we are a community-owned and operated five-star eco-lodge,” says Ricky, adding that they are out of the cyclone belt. “And the park has elephants too.” 

I reckon Paul must have been happy that he spent his last weeks here, at his heart home, among his people. DM

For more information about Anvil Bay click here.

Angus Begg is a safari expert and keynote speaker who designs and leads special-interest safaris informed by two decades of conservation journalism and photography.

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