Comment: Why I don't go to Mozambique

It is five years since I was last in Mozambique and I am still in no hurry to go back. For someone who has been to that beautiful country 17 times, that is a terrible thing to say.

I've travelled all over Mozambique on all kinds of transport, from ramshackle steam trains and creaky rural buses to private turboprop aeroplanes.

I have slept rough on beaches and lived it up at luxury island resorts, seeing Mozambique in all its moods. Despair in the floods of 2000. Delight on a remote beach on Lago Niassa as we dragged our kayaks ashore and bought fresh chambo from an astonished fisherman.

I've inhaled magnificent coffee milkshakes on the terrace of the Polana Hotel and eaten fried chicken at Piri-Piri on Avenida 24 de Julho. I hope Piri-Piri is still my favourite restaurant in the world but I wouldn't know. Five years is a long time.

Money flows into Mozambique like water. Some of the biggest natural gas fields in the world lie off its coast. The coal mines at Moatize are back in business. Logs, sugar, prawns and tourism are making some people very rich. Yet the povo live in poverty that really is grinding. Last year, an anti-poaching team in the Kruger caught a rhino poacher whose family were eating grass to stay alive.

It is no surprise that there is a bottomless supply of men willing to earn a few hundred dollars to kill rhinos. Nor that the police are as bent as Quasimodo.

On my last trip, two cops tried to extort R1000 from me for turning left at an intersection in a car with SA plates. We sat on the kerb for an hour until they got bored and left. Minutes later, the same pair pulled me over again, this time for driving straight down a straight road. Another hour wasted.

The cops have, of course, learnt bad habits from the convoys of aggressive South Africans in gleaming 4x4s the size of a Maputo apartment, who roll in like conquering armies, push the locals around and who will sommer just pay bribes because they are in too much of a hurry to beat the police at their own game.

Between the cops and our loud countrymen, Mozambique has lost its sparkle, for me and many others. Every week travellers return with more stories of corruption and mayhem.

There is a lesson here for us all: it takes years of patient, careful effort to build a tourism business, and no time at all to break it.

I would love to sit at Piri-Piri again, drinking Laurentina Preto and watching Maputo go about its day. Then I think about the border, the driving, the cops . and the feeling goes away.

• Ash is the deputy editor of Travel Weekly