Maputo - more than you'd expect

The seafood market in Maputo. Buy here and have it cooked next door.

To date, Mozambique's capital city is the most enticingly exciting African city I've visited. Totally foreign and yet English is widely spoken and our money is good. The appeal must be from the steamy weather: Sub-tropical in the south to tropical in the north. The summer months are from October to April where the mercury hovers between 26 and 30 C. This is also the rainy season with December and January the wettest. Between May and September temperatures plunge to a comfortable 20 degrees but it is dry and bright.

Life's a beach - all 2600km of it

The other great appeal is its 2600km coastline of sandy beaches and prawn-rich deposits. I found the people I met intoxicating in the way they embodied Africa and Europe. Years after Portuguese rule which ended in 1975 you will still find a perfect Portuguese coffee and pastis de nata next to vibrant African fabrics and crafts at the market. At the seafood market, baskets of still writhing prawns are waiting for their chilli and tomato peri-peri basting.

Not a church but the Natural History Museum.

Perhaps because Maputo shows all of herself, it is easier to embrace her. Examples of European architecture are everywhere - in some cases well preserved and, in others, flaking and crumbling from neglect. Equally there are Communist buildings that people are proud of while others are littered and graffiti covered. There are memorials to deaths in civil war and to deaths from overthrowing colonizers.

Womb with a view

In the Natural History Museum, which is absolutely worth a visit, there is a grim tableau of elephant foetuses showing different stages of development in the womb. Everywhere there is music and there is art and people celebrating life at restaurants, sidewalk cafes and beach bars.

Take a Dana Tours full or half-day tour to experience the sights in air-conditioned comfort. I loved the Railway station building (the peak of which was designed by Eiffel) and there's a fabulous jazzy café there which buzzes at night and is famous for its caiprininha cocktails. Eiffel also designed the governor's residence in iron at the end of the 19th century. The Casa de Ferro is worth seeing if only to remind us how ridiculous architecture can be when it doesn't take its environment into account.

And all that jazz

Casa de Ferro: Eiffel designed a building in iron for a tropical climate!

There is commemorative brass relief at the Fortaleza that traps passion and grief of war into the walls of the fort - difficult to see but also beautiful. There was a photographic exhibition of black-and-white jazz images in the gallery space during our visit.

You will see the iconic Senhora da Conceicao Cathedral completed in 1943 near the station and in the oldest part of the city the municipal market which is a fascinating experience.

Visit Maputo www.danatours.net or call Natalie Tenzer-Silva on Tel: + 258 21 497483 or email ten.sruotanad@ofni. Also see www.visit-mozambique.com/. 1Time airline flies from OR Tambo to Maputo and has a Sunday evening return flight, which allows you to spend a full day in Maputo.