Goodbye Guludo
In my 15+ years as a travel writer, one hotel has stood out above all others for its positive impact on the local community. On the south coast of Mozambique, Guludo trained and employed local people, operated without electricity and minimised water usage with the use of bucket showers and long drop toilets (a necessity in an area where clean water is at a premium). None of this detracted from the utter privilege of staying there. If you believe travel is about discovery (as I firmly do), this place topped the lot – set in a world so far removed from our every day that people could not visualise London, or flying by plane. I learned a lot at Guludo where, despite the hard-to-ignore issues of schooling, medicine and transport, the children in surrounding villages had a freedom ours could only dream of and minds seemed so much more open than closer to home!
When I heard that the lodge and surrounding communities had been destroyed by Cyclone Kenneth, I was heartbroken. How can 36,000 people losing their homes barely make it onto the international news? On the ground, the schools and water projects that Guludo’s NGO, Nema, had set up were destroyed along with the villages where they were based. Failing large-scale NGOs had been a topic of conversation while I was staying at the lodge (and one I’d tried to pitch to a national newspaper, who had told me it was no good without a celebrity angle); now their failures were all too apparent with no food or aid reaching the area until Nema intervened and hired a boat.
Was the cyclone a freak accident? As the strongest tropical cyclone to reach land since records began, scientists believe it could have been intensified by climate change. There is so much injustice in the destruction of the homes of people who live without electricity, cars, heating or any of things that may have contributed to this magnification. At the moment, Guludo’s founders are unsure whether they will ever rebuild the hotel, and there is still much to be done on the ground for the area to recover from its devastation. I can’t imagine what the previous staff and surrounding communities are going through.
Despite being an excellent model for responsible tourism, I’m yet to visit anywhere like Guludo – but I hope that, in these times of crisis, I soon will.