What to Read in Paradise

I spent my New Year's Eve (and a few days surrounding it) at Nkwichi Lodge on the shores of Lake Niassa in Mozambique. If you click the Accommodation tag you can see my room. Nice, eh? It was a stunning place, completely peaceful and isolated on the perfect, private, deserted ivory-sand beach you see above, with clean, clear fresh water to swim and snorkel in every day (though not between dusk and dawn because that's when the crocodiles come out...)

I say "isolated". From our start point in Pemba - a coastal city in Northern Mozambique - we had to drive six hours, fly one hour, drive a further four hours largely over unpaved roads, and then take a boat for an hour to get there. On our first night we were pretty tired and I was the first to get to sundowner drinks on the beach. The only other people there were the hotel's owner, his parents, and the hotel manager, a young Kenyan. I introduced myself and we chatted for a while about what I do in the UK before moving on to other topics (such as how the mirror-like lake water can turn to a North Atlantic storm with 3-metre-high waves in a heartbeat: visitors be warned, you can't get there any way other than by boat...)

The next morning, the hotel manager came over and said that he'd finished the book that he'd been reading (Alexander McCall Smith's Tears of the Giraffe) and had started a new one. Oh yes, I said. He opened his bag and pulled out... Gods Behaving Badly. His sister in Kenya had sent him a copy for Christmas.

It's official, GBB is like cockroaches, it gets EVERYWHERE.