Africa-Press – Mozambique. The luxury travel magazine “Condé Nast Traveller” in its November issue announces that the Bazaruto Archipelago in southern Mozambique is the best island resort in Africa and the Indian Ocean.
The magazine surveyed hundreds of thousands of its readers before revealing the most popular destinations around the world. Seven different criteria were taken into consideration: rooms, service, food, design, location, activities/facilities, and value. Each of those was marked on a scale of one to five and standardised as a mark out of a hundred.
For Bazaruto, a score of 98.20 was awarded, bettering Zanzibar (95.19), Seychelles (94.71), Maldives (94.40), and Mauritius (94.25).
This is not the first time that Condé Nast Traveller has lauded Bazaruto. In 2016, it chose the “andBeyond” Benguerra Island resort, on the second largest island in the archipelago, as Africa’s best new hotel.
The Bazaruto Archipelago is a protected marine conservation area offering sandy beaches and unspoiled coral reefs. It is one of the few places where there is a population of the rare marine mammal, the dugong.
Whilst foreign travel has been seriously curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, restrictions have slowly been eased. On 11 October, the British government removed Mozambique from the red list of countries that have the highest level of Covid-19 travel restrictions. Under the previous restrictions, people coming from Mozambique were only allowed to enter the United Kingdom if they were either British or an Irish national or had residence rights in the UK. Even then, people entering the UK were required to quarantine in specified hotels at a cost of over two thousand pounds (about 175.000 meticais at current exchange rates).
These restrictions have been lifted and travellers from Mozambique who are fully vaccinated with an approved vaccine, and have a recognised certificate to prove it, can enter the country with the obligation to take a PCR test on day two after arrival to confirm that they are virus-free. Later in October, the restrictions will be further eased when passengers will be able to use a cheaper lateral flow test instead of a PCR test.
Passengers entering Mozambique will not need to enter into quarantine if they can present a PCR- Fit to fly certificate. Children up to the age of eleven are exempt from the test requirement.
