The Most Beautiful Place in the World

by Diane Baker Mason

There’s no doubt that Canada is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. To those lucky enough to travel, she offers everything from badlands to highlands, from forests to fjords. If it’s oceans you want, she has them to the east and west and north; if you’re into snow, she delivers vistas of twinkling white as far as the eye can see (don’t forget your snowgoggles, though – the beauty there is blinding). Her cities range from the colour-block quaintness of St. John’s, with its houses clinging along the hillsides; to the steel and glass and marble of its urban centres; to the English-country-garden atmosphere of Victoria, where people live year-round in houseboats and the city doesn’t even own a snowplow. There is so much beauty in Canada, it seems hard to credit another land with anything her equal.

On my last trip out of Canada, however, I really broke out of my comfort zone. I went to Mozambique, to ride horses on a beach. When I told friends about the planned trip, one of them said, “You can do that here, you know,” and of course she was right: I have ridden on Canadian beaches (and up Canadian mountains, through Canadian forests, and – as a teenager in suburban Toronto – up to a Canadian strip mall so I could buy a Popsicle). But the Mozambique beaches did indeed look more beautiful than anything in Canada – if such beauty could be measured, of course. It remained to be seen.

I arrived in Chibuene, Mozambique, to a lovely little hotel beside the ocean, flanked by – but not sealed off from – some pretty wretched poverty. It wasn’t a “resort” location, hermetic and pristine; I was in a cozy room close enough to the local barraca (all-night outdoor tavern) that I slept wearing earplugs on more than one night. The operators of the horse-riding establishment were ordinary folks, working 18-hour days to keep their guests and their horses happy and healthy (and succeeding at both). That first afternoon I went down to the ocean and thought, well this is just beautiful. But is it more beautiful than Canada? No, not really. We have beautiful oceans in Canada.

And then, all heaven broke loose. The tide went out. I had never seen anything like it. The beach spread, and spread, and spread some more, widening to a glistening wet desert of sand. The ocean exploded into colour, threading the mile-wide beach with strands of sand and channels of ever-shifting flow, in colours that defy description. Blue? Blue? There were blues, and greens, and aquamarines, and ceruleans, and turquoises, and if you looked away and looked back again it would all change. Across the surf an archipelago of desert islands bloomed, their dunes rising over oases and rough rocks of frozen ancient lava. I rode my horse beside it, and then, I rode her through it. We galloped down the beach for miles, her joy at being given her head a contagion. I could not help but think how much my horse back home in Canada would love this – to be able to run for miles, unstopped and unstoppable, on a deserted and windswept beach.

I recognize that I was a privileged foreigner, and that living in Mozambique is not the same as spending 10 days in a comfortable hotel room, dosed with malaria preventative. It’s possible that beauty was just in the eye of this beholder. But I doubt it. Within the gaze of that narrow lens – a Canadian’s view of that beach, and that ocean – it was the most beautiful place in the world.