Mauritius
By Marianne Gray
Pictures by Mike Popham
Sunday newspapers, we felt
almost alone in paradise.
Mauritius’ capital is Port Louis,
a palm-lined port with a pretty
but modern waterfront. It
has a business
centre, quaint
old original
houses and the
general buzz of
a hot country
city.
M
auritius stands out, all
on its own in the Indian
Ocean, right of Madagascar,
a whisker inside the Tropic
of Capricorn, 1500 miles
from Africa with Seychelles
to the north and the
Antarctic below.
It has a dreamy beauty of
volcanic mountain peaks,
tropical shrubs, coral reefs,
flares of colours from
bougainvillaea, poinsettias,
azaleas, jacarandas and
hibiscus and 58 of the whitest,
cleanest beaches in the world.
It’s 40 miles by 30 miles and
was uninhabited until about
350 years ago when the dodo
ruled. Then colonisation
happened and trade boomed in
sugar, salt, rum and vanilla.
Charles Darwin visited the
island in the 1830s, Baudelaire
effectively jumped ship there in
1841, Joseph Conrad wrote
about it and the developing
sugar barons built
many elaborate estates,
‘domaines’, many of them still
standing and converted into
hotels or restaurants. The dodo
is long-since
extinct and the
main industry
now is tourism,
although you’d
never know it.
This
Commonwealth
island has a
population of
1,269,668,
friendly,
generous,
unaffected
Europeans, Indians, Chinese,
Africans and Creoles. Somehow
they’ve managed to keep
tourists in what the locals call
”gulags” where tourists stay at
wonderful spa resorts along the
coast and lie around in a state
of bliss. We found a glorious
strip of empty beach flanked
by casuarina trees between
two “gulags”. One was Russian
from where they were riding
along the shore on hired
horses; another seemed all
French with
everybody
wind-surfing
on the bay.
In our
deckchairs in
the balmy
breeze,
reading the
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In nearby
Pamplemousses
(means
‘grapefruit’),
between Port
Louis and
gorgeous Grand
Baie, is one of the
world’s finest botanical
gardens. Once an 18th Century
vegetable garden for a French
dignitary, it has plants to stun
as well as
creatures like the
giant Aldabra
tortoises, birds
like parrots and
the crimson-hued
fody flown over
from
Madagascar. It
also has tours on
the history of
sugar and rum-
tasting tours.
lagoon of crystal water with
watersports. The small volcanic
island of Rodgrigues is a
dependent and a short flight
away to the east.
But it’s the exotic lost-world
interior of Mauritius, between
the villages and towns, that
lures you in deeper with its
gorges, forests, lakes,
mountains, waterfalls and
emerald green valleys.
The romantic story of Paul
et Virginie, immortalised
worldwide in plays, music and
films, was born in
Pamplemousses and is still
remembered there.
Another centre is Curepipe.
Mark Twain said it always
rains in Curepipe. High up in
the Plaines it’s cool and
drizzly and dubbed the City
of Light because of the
strange glow about it.
Mahebourg is a town with
a working sugar
mill and a tiny
speck in the bay
called Iles aux
Aigrettes, filled
with ancient flora
and fauna. In
Anse la Raie
there’s a huge
It would be easy to let time slip
by in this Indian Ocean Eden…
eating seafood, drinking rum,
hanging out at the beach or in
the mountains. It’s just a pity
it’s all so far away!
THE LONDON & UK DATEBOOK
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