We might all say we want to travel ethically, and to go somewhere remote, and unspoilt, with a pristine ecosystem and unmolested wildlife, where the indigenous people are helped, not barred from the beaches, their water supply stolen. But, having travelled to Cambodia and India, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Morocco, I have become increasingly jaded with the term "eco tourism". In Jamaica, basking on white beaches drinking freshly squeezed pineapple juice, I wondered at the security guards for my compound.
In Udaipur, I have swum in infinity pools and taken power showers while the lake in which the hotel was sitting became a dust bowl. In Marrakech, I was encouraged to ride across the desert on a beautiful grey Arab horse, while I saw mules outside the medina, tongues hanging from their mouths for want of a drink of clean water. Even in Nova Scotia, the fishermen who ferry wide-eyed, organic wine drinking, Waitrose-shopping tourists to marvel at the grey seal population are the very same men who will return later in the year to club the seal pups to death. How can we be certain we are not being seduced by a mere clever marketing tool into parting with more money while in reality doing more harm than good?
Well, I have discovered one such destination, a tiny island so remote you will feel you are never going to arrive, credentials as pristine as its white beaches, and teeming with wildlife as curious to see you as you are to see it. Vamizi, all 12km by 1.5km of it, sits in the Indian Ocean just 4km from the mainland of Mozambique.
To get there, you have to get a big plane, then a smaller plane, then a much smaller plane (you have to wear goggles and bring your own sandwich), before landing on an airstrip the size of a hanky. You are then driven in an open jeep through the jungle (it is the only vehicle on the island). Sometimes, though, the jeep doesn't have petrol (the island has to import everything by boat from the mainland) and so you might be transferred to a boat, as we were, having first waded through mud and a carpet of hermit crabs, strange creatures I at first identified, much to the amusement of our lovely guide, Stacey, as lobster. When you finally arrive at the lodge your hair will resemble Bridget Jones's after her open-top car drive to a mini break, but trust me, the journey will be worth it. You will truly have arrived in paradise.
This part of East Africa, the Muluane region, had been almost destroyed by 30 years of civil war. Almost 50 per cent of the population had been displaced, and the wildlife population exterminated. But in 1998, an enterprising couple - Christopher Cox, a businessman, and his wife, Dr Julie Garnier, a wildlife veterinarian - started to explore an area 2,500km from the capital of Maputo, a wilderness that had been cut off by the conflict and largely forgotten. They discovered places on the coast with populations of elephant, buffalo and large predators, and a necklace of islands, of which Vamizi is one (the other two islands are Rongui and Macaloe), that had not been visited in living memory. They also found small pockets of villagers who were the poorest people on the planet: isolated, and scratching a living from the earth and the sea. Under the guidance of the Zoological Society of London, the couple organised a number of surveys using the expertise of marine biologists, botanists and ecologists, and unearthed the area's exceptional biodiversity. The coral reefs surrounding the islands are home to more than 350 species of fish.
