Mauritius
We've got a little problem.
Somewhere along the way we've misplaced the
entire file containing our daily entries from
Singapore through Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Dan regularly backs up our journal on diskettes
and we send them home whenever we've accumulated
enough extraneous junk for a parcel. Hopefully
we'll find our Indian Ocean Journal when we get
home in August.
So for now . . . pages for
Mauritius and the Seychelles will contain just
photos and fairly cryptic captions:
This jolly old scoundrel is
Michel Noel. Dan and Kaaren met him while taking
a dawn walk along the beach at Pointe D'Esny,
south of Mahebourg on the island of Mauritius. He
took us back to his beachfront house, and wife
Peggy fixed us coffee and rusks.
Bernard and dear Mme. DeFelbert.
She took us in when we couldn't find any decent
accommodation 'pied dans l'eau' (means 'feet in
the water' or beachfront). A wonderfully kind,
sophisticated lady who has lived her whole life
on Mauritius. The next day she spent the whole
morning searching until she found us a perfect
little bungalow with steps leading right down
into the water.
We visited an old plantation high
up on the slopes of one of Mauritius' several
extinct volcanoes. Sweeping views down the
mountain to the seacoast, and the air is redolent
with the scent of vanilla. Tyler found a perfect
little blue egg under a tree, but we never
figured out who left it there. Ty sent it home.
K. and T. with Jafar, Mm.
DeFelbert's personal taxi driver. She gave him to
us for the length of our stay on Mauritius. He
was at our beck and call for a week, drove us
everywhere, and introduced us to the many
multi-ethnic flavors of the island.
The Sunday Market in Mahebourg,
where open-air vendors sell everything from
clothespins to black pearls. Again, items are
never priced, and one has to dicker for
everything, be it a piece of fruit or a can of
Fanta. Every purchase is hassle, and we'll never
learn to like the process.
Ty found a great little buddy in
this terrier pup that lived in the bungalow next
door. His owner was a profoundly deaf 16 year-old
girl. The three of them spent hours playing on
the beach, swimming, building sand forts, digging
for crabs.
A two-hour drive to the west,
through cane fields and over volcanoes, is the
capital city of Port Louis. It's a bustling,
multi-ethnic community, populated by peoples from
India, Africa, China and Indonesia. The majority
are descendants of Indians originally imported to
work the cane fields. They are evenly split
between Hindu and Muslim, and though there exists
great suspicion between the two groups, and
absolutely no intermarriage, they get along on a
day-to-day basis. In the marketplace Ty found a
man selling budgerigars and rare forest birds. He
wanted to buy them all and let them go.
Climbing aboard Air Madagascar
for a four-hour flight to the Seychelles. The
Indian Ocean was so dead calm that even from
30,000 feet every cloud made a perfect reflection
off the mirrored surface of the sea below.
Next page is the Seychelles
. . .
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