Tee Faircloth, owner of F.M. Allen, a safari outfitter on Manhattan's Upper East Side, plans bespoke travel excursions to Africa for a living. So when he gets excited about an undiscovered spot on the Dark Continent, you had best listen.
"The whole industry is abuzz," he says, before disclosing the location of his new secret haunt, knowing full well that part of its charm lies in its current obscurity. "It's a magical place. Only about 10 of us in the business have been."
He is talking about Ibo Island Lodge, which sits in the Quirimbas Archipelago off Mozambique, home to some of the best virgin diving on the planet. Like much of Africa's east coast, Ibo is a strange patchwork of cultures, melded together by a turbulent history. Conquered by the Arabs a thousand years ago, the island was recolonized under Portuguese rule from 1498 well into the 20th century, and for a time, it served as a sizable slave-trading hub. The haunting evidence of this regrettable past is said to still exist in old warehouses along the water, where piles of documents have been left to disintegrate in the open air.
A little over a decade ago, safari operators Kevin and Fiona Record of South Africa heard word of a hidden Eden in the Indian Ocean, hopped a boat to Ibo, and bought a few crumbling buildings on sight. They restored the former governor's mansion to its original grandeur, using local labor they trained themselves, and opened the Ibo Island Lodge (iboisland.com) as a resort hotel in December 2006. Rooms are appointed with Indian antiques along with locally crafted furniture and, of course, mosquito netting. Meals can be vegetables harvested from the garden, mackerel or reef fish caught that day, and fluffy, freshly baked breads. A Frenchman who lives in the ruin next door organizes scuba safaris throughout the archipelago: The Quirimbas Islands drop vertically as much as 200 to 400 meters into the deep, making for dramatic underwater cave exploring.
"Lately, in the luxury travel business, there's been this trend to go really over the top," says Faircloth, who is now booking trips to Ibo out of F.M. Allen. "That's not why you go to Africa. You can do luxury much better in Paris. This gets back to the essence of why you travel to Africa. It's simple by choice, and not by necessity."
