As a child I used to love creating splatter paint pictures. I would grab a thick paintbrush and cover it with paints of all colours, then bending my arm backwards would fling paint at a large sheet of paper pinned to the classroom wall. The colours would fall on the paper to create a wonderful mess of blues and greens and yellows. Flying over Mozambique you might imagine God had been having fun with a bit of splatter paint when he created this picturesque pocket of the world. The 32 islands of the Quirimbas Archipelago are mesmerising from 4000ft and the tiny white plane we travelled in from mainland Pemba to the historical island named Ibo allowed us a fantastical view of the knotted mangroves, sandy hoops of land skirted by coral reefs and the billowing sails of traditional fishing dhows below us.

We tend to think of colours in neat classifications; royal blue, baby blue, powder blue or sky blue. This part of Mozambique offered even those with the widest of vocabularies a challenge with too many shades of blue to possibly begin to categorise. The Indian Ocean quivered with colour. Sailing on an old fishing boat, the Joyce Merle (one of Ibo Island Lodge’s fleet), we moved from turquoise reefs glittering under the intense heat of the sun to deep indigo ocean swell that hides the rich diversity of marine life below. So in today’s blog post I offer you just a few of the many shades of blue…