Since the workers from Vale, Brazil's giant mining company, started to drink at his bar, fortune has favoured Mario Sálimo. With business growing week by week, the 47-year-old has opened extra rooms, added a restaurant and installed a dance floor.

At weekends Mario's Bar, near the clogged and dusty centre of Tete, is open until five or six o'clock in the morning. And the bar is not the only thing booming in this remote Mozambican town, which grew up as a trading post on the Zambezi river.

Tete sits directly above one of the world's largest reserves of high-quality coal, and investment is pouring in, with Brazilian, Australian, Indian and other interests committing hundreds of millions of dollars to mining projects. As with Angolan, Nigerian or Sudanese oil, the industrial growth of China and India is driving demand.