Tag Archives: mauritius

Going Home

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So here we are back at Mauritius International airport to start our return flight to blighty after two weeks splendid vacation in the (first time for us) southern hemisphere. During this time we did the following.

Organized tours

1 Went on a tour of the south part of the island

2 Went on a catamaran cruise.

3 Turtle watching boat trip

Our own exploration

1 To Port Louis waterfront

2 To Port Louis town

3 To Poudre d’Or

4 To Pamplemousses

5 To Souillac.

6 To Choisy

7 To Triolet

We visited the following museums:

1 International Slavery museum

2 Aapanasi Ghat

3 Postal museum

4 Blue Penny museum

5 Photographic museum

6 Robert Edward Hart Museum

We ate at the following places

1 Casuarina

2 Choisy (Kingfisher)

3 Souillac (Bonne Bouffe)

4 Poudre d’Or

This is, of course, in addition to relaxing in the sea, sun and sand for which the island is famous.

What do we wish we had done but didn’t?

1 More star-gazing, considering that it was the first time we’d seen the night-sky of the southern hemisphere

2 A closer look at the former capital of the island Mahebourg.

3 More time for hiking up the weird volcanic mountains of the Moka range.

Ah well we can’t do everything on one short holiday. But will we come back? Returning to the airport we met a couple who’d already stayed here five times! Not really for us though. Life is too short to keep on returning to the same places. No ‘boarding house at Bognor’ mentality here.

And the future of the island? Considering its smallish size and beauty we happily noted that in most of the places we visited the dreaded tourist was hardly encountered. In almost all cases we were the only ‘westerners’ on the local buses and the lovely places we encountered seemed to belong to us alone.

Hyper-tourism is becoming an increasing threat in many parts of the world and authorities there are attempting to combat it. Venice, for example, is now charging admission to tourists. The city of Vivaldi and Palladio is ever being reduced to a Disneyland theme park, it seems.

Will Mauritius become such a theme park? A friend tells me that her husband was brought up at Cure-pipe on the island where his father, after service in the King’s Rifles in Africa found employment managing a sugar plantation. She referred to the very bad roads on which carts trundled with their loads and the calm and clarity of the lagoon waters surrounding the beaches protected by coral reefs.

Today the island is traversed by six-lane highways, and there’s a metro system from Port Louis to Cure-pipe. The waters look still clear but increasingly plastic is being identified in the fish which swim in them. Moreover, areas which once were clearly country are bring built on. At least two major shopping centres have sprung up and a ‘cyber-city’ is being developed. However, picturesque fishing villages such as the ones at Poudre d’Or and Souillac still survive and much of the plateau region is a well protected national park.

So who knows? One thing is certain: the multicultural milieu of Mauritius where Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists continue to respect each others’ beliefs serves as an excellent example of the tolerance and co-existence prevalent in Mauritius, increasingly rare in a world ever being divided by bloody factionalism and extremism.

Our last Mauritian sunset?

Golden Dust

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Thanks to an excellent privately developed local site at


https://www.mauritius-buses.com/


we have been able to make more sense of Mauritius’ dense bus network.


Yesterday we decided to visit a place near the aptly named Cape Malheureux commemorating a shipwreck which inspired enlightenment writer Bernardin De Saint Pierre to write his immortal ‘Paul et Virginie’.


The first part of our bus journey was on an express bus which meant that for over thirty minutes we were holding on for dear life as a somewhat clapped out Leyland rushed at break neck speed through a countryside of sugar cane plantations and papaya trees.


We reached the town of Goodlands, a very busy shopping centre with a colourful Hindu temple.

Transferring to a more leisurely vehicle we arrived at our destination, the quiet fishing village of Poudre d’Or.


At the end of a promontory stands the monument to one of the most famous shipwrecks in literature.


The ‘Saint Geran’, a ship belonging to the French East India company, was launched in 1736. Her first sailings were from Pondicherry under the command of captain Laurent Dupleyssis. In 1744 with a cargo of food for Mauritius, which was suffering from a terrible drought, she was shipwrecked off the island’s northern coast. Just nine out of her crew of 149 survived.

It was this event that inspired Jaques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, a French civil engineer and botanist living on the island, to write a novel which for many marked the new sensibilities of the romantic movement. In Bernardin’s story the heroine meets her fate by drowning when the ship she is returning on from France is wrecked on the lethal reefs of Mauritius. Could anyone have saved Virginie? The fact is that she could have saved herself if only she had taken off the cumbersome eighteenth century clothes she was wearing but which she kept on out of a sense of modesty. Ah well!


After our visit to the monument’s site, which also holds a much more recent memorial to another drowning, we walked to Poudre d’Or’s local eatery where we tucked into an appetising biryani, just one dish characteristic of an island which, true to its nature as an oceanic crossroad, invites cuisine from Africa, India, China and Europe into a deliciously assorted melting pot of flavours.

Leaving the beach at sunset

we concluded our evening by attending a rumbustious session of the island’s traditional music form, the Sega which incorporates elements from both Africa and India. For long despised by more prudish authorities this lively dance has encapsulated the spirit of the island in much the same way as reggae has done for the West Indies.

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A Multicoloured Island

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A week has passed since we arrived in Mauritius. We are lucky to be here since we were the last ones to fly out through the raging storm afflicting Dubai when a year’s rainfall fell in less than 24 hours. Flights have resumed now but they remain far from normal and our new worry is how to get back.


Heavy rain has now fallen on Mauritius and our friend Rama today warned us to postpone our planned visit to Port Louis, the island’s capital, because of severe flooding. The tik-tok video he sent us of the Caudan waterfront was indeed frightening with spontaneous waterfalls appearing all over the area and cars and buses submerged. No dead registered so far fortunately.


Which leads me to consider the negative side of life in this otherwise idyllic island. Hurricanes do not hit this part of the world with the destruction wreaked in areas like the West Indies but they do occur. This year, for example, cyclone Belal brought death and widespread flooding to the area of the Mascarene islands of which Mauritius forms a part.


However, (fingers crossed) tsunamis have not yet affected this lovely but vulnerable island.


Going from natural to man-made calamities (although increasingly so-called natural ones are increasingly man-caused) Mauritius has had a remarkably placid recent political history.


The era before independence in 1968 did, however, produce riots and protest movements with subsequent deaths. These arose from issues regarding labour relations and racial tensions. The UK’s army was even called in to quell the disturbances.

Since those days Mauritius has had an enviable political record, especially when it is part of Africa. Let’s consider the countries who have governed it in succession from the Portuguese to the Dutch to the French and to to the English.

Let’s also consider the populace’s terms of employment from African slaves to indentured Indian workers after slavery was abolished in the UK empire by the likes of Wilberforce in 1835 to the influx of Chinese workers and now the growing number of westerners choosing thr island to work or just to retire in.


However, in an increasingly uncertain world there could arise a situation where locals arise against over-tourism in the manner of the current canary islanders. Tourism as a negative force? Sadly it’s near to that in many parts of the world including Italy.


Where issues of species extinction – sadly the Dodo is not the only animal to have been wiped out on this island witness the species of rails and pigeons – slavery, indentured labour, forced migration, imperialist dogma, racism, local mafia and international corruption have touched Mauritius it’s great that the island has retained its humanity and consistency still welcoming visitors on the way it has done us. Long may it continue in this truly democratic and multicultural fashion so well emblemized in its national flag.