Ponta do Ouro is a small town in the South of Mozambique only 10km north of South African border. It has a nice white sand beach, great diving, surfing and fishing. Given proximity to the border Ponta is very popular with South Africans especially around holiday season. We did some really good diving, saw lots of rays, moray eels, large cods, turtles and excellent macro.
What to see
Most tourists arrive to Ponta do Ouro from South Africa, driving across the border. As of writing in early 2018, the new road connecting Maputo to the border is nearly finished but there is still a stretch requiring 4×4 to get to Ponta off the main road. We travelled to Ponta from Maputo. From the airport this meant a taxi to the ferry, ferry ride and a drive along the new almost finished road which took us about 4 hours door to door.
There is a large ferry that takes cars across the river, but it is slow and reportedly not fully reliable in term of schedule. We used a small passenger ferry of which there are several and they run every 15 minutes or so. Ferry crossing is an experience in itself as this is a regular public ferry used by all the residents on both sides of the river going to and from work, shopping and outing.
Figuring out how to get a ticket and where to line up for the right boat is not exactly straightforward and if we were not accompanied by our local guide it would take us awhile. Once you are on the boat the crossing takes only about 10 minutes. Soon though it should be possible to skip this hectic albeit very authentic experience of ferry crossing. There is a bridge under construction connecting to the new road to Ponta and then to South Africa. This will cut the journey time in half and undoubtedly will make the entire coast south of Maputo much busier than it is now. The word is that the bridge should be done within a year’s time or so.
Ponta do Ouro is a small town with a market and a few restaurants. There are several hotels on the beach and plenty of self-catering accommodation ranging from villas for rent to camp sites. We stayed at Ponta Beach Camps which has a number of rooms and a large camping area. There is a restaurant in the Camp and some around town. One can also cook own food at the public kitchen at the Camp. We bought some fresh seafood and had a braai – South African for barbeque. We visited around Christmas time and the place was filling up with tourists. Reportedly the beach gets absolutely packed for the new year.
We dove with the dive shop at Ponta Beach Camps which runs a well organized operation. Closer to the shore there are many dive sites with depth of less than 20 meters. We saw all kinds of large rays including round ribbon tail, honeycomb, blue spotted and eagle rays, variety of reef fish, and good macro. Further out there are 35-45m depth sites where reportedly one can see all kinds of sharks, tunas and other big stuff.
We saw a couple of devil rays on a safety stop on one of the deep sites but otherwise did not see much fish on the 3 deep dives we did. Reefs on deep sites look very impressive and visibility was excellent. The fish is definitely there too as we saw some jumping out and chased by birds – but did not see any under water on our deep but short dives. Given the depth bottom time is only about 10 minutes with long safety stops on the blue.
All in all Ponta diving was great and gave us a good sense of diversity of marine environment in Mozambique in combination with our diving in Tofo. In addition to diving, there is also surfing and kite boarding as well as fishing. Not too far from Ponta in the direction of Maputo is Maputo Elephants Reserve with elephants, giraffes, zebras and other animals. Humpback whales migrate between July and November. There is surely much more to explore.
