MAURITIUS: Beach, please
Paul Ash wonders why it took him so long to sink into this island bliss
IT was something of an office joke that in all my years as a travel writer — a polite term for a dilettante journalist — I had never been to Mauritius. It was true. Somehow this scattering of islands that Lawrence Green called “a little fragment of 18th-century France far out in the Indian Ocean” had escaped me. There was always somewhere else to go, places that seemed more exotic. Until the day I ran out of excuses and bumped down at Plaisance Airport, then walked off the plane into a velvet night that smelt of frangipani blossom. Something gripped me around the heart and made me think: why didn’t you do this earlier?
Yves, my driver, whisked me up the island and, with a faint French accent, told me stories of his country and his vaguely complicated domestic life. Green was right: the flavour of France never seems to depart from any land once colonised by the French.
My brief was simple: I was to spend a week split between two Beachcomber resorts, Victoria on the northwest coast, and Paradis, which sprawls splendidly among the palms and between emerald-green golf links and a fine strip of beach on the island’s southwestern tip.
“What activities shall we arrange for you,” my hosts wondered?
“Nothing,” I said. Like the actress, I just vonted to be left alone. So they did.
Victoria feels like it could be a resort hotel in Mozambique in 1970 (a good thing), with long passageways open to the tropical air and stands of casuarina trees dug into the sand. I had a rambling suite at the very end of the resort, with a view of the beach and palm trees, where hotel staff were busy chopping off the coconuts lest they fall and brain an unfortunate guest. I slept with the doors open, listening to the wavelets lapping on the shore — thanks to the protective embrace of a coral reef, there are few surf-pounded beaches in Mauritius — and watched fruit bats flit across the moon.
switch holidaymaker,If I hadoff my any devices and pretend to be athese were soothed by the worries about my ability to secondrays crept day. acrossI would sleep until the first the plain behind us and have coffee on my balcony, feeling like a Russian oligarch. I would amble to breakfast — always in the lofty dining room, where fans whirred overhead and birds flitted hopefully between tables.
A honeymoon couple gazed distractedly at the British hen party, who came to breakfast hung over and broiled like lobsters on the first morning and were gone by the second. Kids roamed between the pancake bar and the pool while their parents stared out at the thread of white where the surf broke on the reef. Time slowed. The days grew long and my eyelids heavy. The effusive staff at the front desk wondered if I would like to go touring. To the magnificent botanical gardens at Pamplemousses, perhaps? Or to Port Louis, which Green called “a sweltering Eastern city”? How about a hike to the Chamarel Falls? I demurred — to leave Victoria would break the spell. I would, I told them gently, much rather kick back on a lounger under a thatch umbrella and hear the wind rustling in the palm trees. Which I did until the frozen hours of the year seeped out of my toes and fingertips and even the drama off the news of The Donald’s triumph — delivered to me on the breeze — could not shake my inordinate sense of wellbeing.
On the third day, Yves arrived to drive me south to Paradis. “You’ll like it there,” he said. “It is my favourite.”
We took a slow tour of the island, Yves naming the mountains and rivers and telling me little stories about life here. The French called it Ile de France until the British finally wrested it from their grasp in 1810 with a surprise attack from Cap Malheureux (Cape Misfortune) in the north. Although the new rulers changed the name to the old Dutch name of Maurice, Robert Farquhar, the first British governor, allowed the
inhabitants to keep their customs and language which, in the end, ensured that the island remained “a place where the culture and lazy aristocracy are French”, as Green so tartly put it a century later.
Soon the lofty bulk of Le Morne Brabant reared into the sky. The mountain was for years a refuge for runaway slaves, who hid in the forests on its steep slopes. But there’s a sting in the tale: when slavery was abolished in 1835, emissaries were sent up to tell the runaways the news. Thinking it was a trap to lure them back into slavery, many threw themselves off the mountain.
Le Morne is the dramatic backdrop to Paradis. Yves was right: I liked it as soon as I opened the door of my villa. This was a place where one might seek refuge from all manner of trouble and never leave. More formal than Victoria — you must make a reservation for dinner — it is a place to sit and contemplate the sea and the changing colour of the sky in utter peace.
In an effort to at least see something of the island, I went on a day-long bike tour — on an electric bike, of course, because why ruin the holiday by sweating in the heat? Our guide, Cedric Jules, led us on winding roads along the coast, through little villages with names like Bel Ombre, Beau Champ and St Felix, to Souillac on the island’s southern tip.
“It’s a small adventure with some big things,” said Cedric as we sheltered from the sun — and then a few minutes later, the rain — under a vast strangler fig. The biggest “thing”, though, was to have lunch in Meera’s house in Surinam. Meera made us the freshest samosas I’ve ever had, then brought dhal and potato and chilli and sweet, fragrant vegetable curries that we spooned into fresh naan breads the size of flags and ate and ate.
“Good thing you can ride the lunch off,” said Cedric. “Good thing the bikes are electric,” we replied as one.
Back at Paradis, I resolved to spend the rest of my days doing nothing. Easy enough in a place like that, where loungers face the sea and attentive staff are on hand to satisfy your whims. Soon I was just like one of Green’s lazy aristocracy. Nothing wrong with that. — Ash was a guest of Beachcomber