Among the Indian Ocean’s tried-and-tested destinations lies Comoros, a little-visited nation on the cusp of a sustainable tourism revolution.
Here in Comoros, the rich scent of clove rises from the Nioumachoua roadside, where the village’s women, with their expert fingers, pick out unwanted immature green flower buds in favour of desirable hot pink ones. These they lay out on blankets in the sun to dry into the aromatic spice that is worth its weight in gold.
READ: Five Spectacular Locations to Witness the Northern Lights
Nearby, wild robusta coffee beans turn plum purple as they ripen alongside cinnamon and cacao, black pepper, pineapple, avocado, banana, blossoming ylang-ylang trees (the scent of their long-petalled flowers recognisable to anyone who has ever dabbed Chanel No. 5 behind an ear) and the tendrils of vanilla vines climbing the forest’s hardwood trees. No wonder that a millennium before the buyers of Chanel came knocking, Omani sailors who reached the trio of islands which today make up Comoros – Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Mohéli (Mwali) and Anjouan (Ndzwani) – took to calling them ‘the perfume isles.’
However, with the prices paid for crops such as vanilla and ylang-ylang – which form an estimated 30 per cent of the country’s export earnings – fluctuating more than the waves between the islands on a stormy day, Comorans are seeking alternative employment.
READ: SLS is Making a Splash in Barcelona
“I’m doing this because I’ve got nothing else to do; I won’t make any money from it,” says a farmer hand-pollinating vanilla flowers when I encounter him on a guided forest walk. Many like him are turning to the country’s nascent tourism industry, which is putting responsible, sustainable travel at the forefront of its plans to offer an alternative to better-known Indian Ocean idylls.
Although tourists are still novel enough to turn heads, I’m far from being the first to experience beaches that can rival the nearby Seychelles, wildlife tours that run a close second to those in Madagascar and cultural insights as rich as those anywhere in the world given a thousand years of influence from Arabia, Africa, Asia and Europe, especially France, the former colonial power. Local legend has it that none other than King Solomon and his bride, the Queen of Sheba, also paid the islands a visit.
READ: A New Era for Portofino’s Splendido
Magnificent Moheli
What Comoros lacks in experience – and cocktails by the pool – it makes up for in exclusivity. The number of hotel beds on the islands has never topped 1,100, just a fraction (one-twelfth to be exact) of those found on Seychelles.
Even the addition of 110 suites and rooms at the soon-to-reopen five-star Le Galawa Beach Hotel, on the outskirts of the capital Moroni, where ancient medina alleyways contrast with modern street art, won’t change that significantly. The focus remains on small-scale stays to prevent the overtourism seen everywhere from Boracay to Barcelona.
The current exemplar is Nioumachoua’s Laka Lodge, which is preparing to celebrate its twentieth birthday. Its 15 solar-powered semi-detached bungalows lie deep within a national park covering nearly 82 per cent of Mohéli, and on a private beach with a sea temperature never dropping below 25°C.
READ: Banwa Private Island is Paradise Found
Over its two decades, Laka Lodge has been an advocate for sustainability – a hard ask on small islands with restricted agricultural and livestock sectors – by limiting imports and obtaining as much as possible from Mohéli itself. I eat locally caught fish with pesto made from basil grown on the lodge grounds, although I’m unable to try the national dish, langouste à la vanille, because Nioumachoua’s lobster pots remain obstinately empty during my stay.
The lodge has also financially supported a waste management facility serving the village’s 4,000 residents. “You’ve seen there is less garbage here than Grande Comore,” points out Issa, the main guide on my eight-day Intrepid Travel tour. “There is no deforestation, no one taking the white sand to build houses, no one coming from Anjouan for turtle eggs [where they are a culinary delicacy].”
It has ultimately led to Mohéli’s designation as a Hope Spot – one of just 140 globally – by international marine conservation nonprofit Mission Blue, alongside its UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status and induction as a national park.
READ: Chile’s Torres del Paine is at the Forefront of Sustainable Tourism
Here Be Monsters
A biodiversity hotspot, Mohéli’s waters are home to all manner of denizens of the deep. Snorkellers can encounter everything from giant clams and brain corals to sea turtles and manta rays, while spinner dolphins, and (between July and October) breaching humpbacks can be seen on dedicated tours departing from Laka’s beach on boats smaller than the average adult whale of the species.
Led by locals who have spent their entire lives alongside these animals, boats approach closely yet unobtrusively enough to observe with the naked eye, individual barnacles clamped to the whales’ skin – a single animal can carry almost half a ton – as well as the sunlight dancing off their elongated pectoral fins just below the water’s surface.
READ: A Day in Tokyo’s Coolest Suburb
Delve beyond the sunset-perfect beach into Mohéli’s stream-bisected forests, and its farmers-turned-guides like Doubou who take charge. “Welcome to the house of Tarzan,” he says as he directs me along a narrow path to a clearing for privileged sightings of one of the rarest creatures on the planet – Livingstone’s fruit bat. Known almost nowhere else, they have a wingspan wider than most men’s arm spans, hitting dimensions only one other bat species worldwide can best.
But it would be wrong to focus solely on Mohéli. Follow the road north from Le Galawa Beach Hotel on Grande Comore, and sights reveal themselves one after another: the Miraculous Mosque at Bangoi Kouni said to have been mysteriously constructed in just one night for villagers with nowhere else to pray; myth-laden Lac Salé; and the stunning, turquoise watered shallows at Trou du Prophète, the Prophet’s Cave.
Most impressive of all is the Dos du Dragon (Dragon’s Back) rock formation, whose bare rocks look exactly like the vertebrae of a giant mythological beast that failed to make it airborne in the depths of ancient times.
With manta rays, giant bats and even dragons to be found amid richly scented landscapes, the perfume isles have the feel of a lost world. For all involved, their discovery, like their cloves, is rightly worth its weight in gold.
For more Destination stories click here.
