Just enough quiet and temptation in this paradise
● Seychelles has secluded coves, ancient forests and pristine beaches
Ever since the early 1980s, when Mike Hoare’s Ye Ancient Order of Froth Blowers were rumbled as coup-seeking mercenaries after one of them wound up in the “something to declare” queue, custom officials have been a tad twitchy.
One of our media contingent ticked “business” instead of “pleasure” on her entry form, and commotion ensued. Being in the business of pleasure she was technically correct, but it took a lot to convince border patrol that, technically, they were in the same business too.
A minor matter, really, but I do wonder why such boundaries are so difficult to police and, for me, the incident was weirdly prescient of some of the very real difficulties I was to encounter during my own brief week in “paradise”.
They started that very night, when I decided that the open bar tab was a stroke of genius.
The drinks are not free, of course, but part of the allinclusive package that Club Med offers. I thought them a bit “watered-down”, but I was wrong. Being on holiday, I grew to realise, is about not perpetually counting the cost of everything in the world you’re trying to escape to by going on holiday in the first place.
Being on holiday is an open bar tab, I can remember thinking, as I drifted off to sleep and thought very briefly about a girl on the dance floor in a shimmering dress.
Ah ... the business of pleasure. Club Med may well have shed its “sun, sex and sea” ethos in favour of a more wholesome family ethic, but it seemed a bit of a pity.
Oh Lord! Water aerobics at first light! Just one of the many curated activities for the busy at heart. I pick a lounger in the shade and watch happy endomorphs leap about the pool. Giant palm fronds stir overhead, and gentle waves lap at the beach. It’s Matthew Arnold’s “eternal note of sadness” but here transformed by a DJ who keeps overlaying it with Nirvana’s Come As You Are, which seems appropriate but a little ironic given that the Seychelles has the worst heroin problem in the world. But enough of that.
SECRET INGREDIENT
Time for a SeyBrew. When people say that beer is proof that God loves us, what he had in mind was a cold SeyBrew draught. Mine arrives in a frosted glass with a head of foam perspiring down its flanks. It is said that its secret ingredient, which has made it an award-winning beer around the world, is the fresh mountain water that the locals call DeloMamelles. It is a marvellous breakfast companion and the perfect precursor to the obligatory island tour.
Suffice it to say that there is a lot for kids to do, though not many kids doing it, brilliant views from private villas, if you can afford them, romantic coves and secluded picnic spots, if you are that way inclined, and, yes, the buggies do come on time.
This may seem like a detail, but buggies are big on Tripadvisor, and their whereabouts a constant source or ire or irie. You don’t want to waste precious time waiting to get from one little bit of heaven to the next. And we didn’t.
Creative napping is an obligatory holiday pursuit. It may not be what it was in those fabled days of yore, when an unlocked door was an open invitation, but the beds are lovely, wide and deep and the air conditioning doesn’t make you feel as if you’re trapped in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. The rooms are also scrupulously private. We had a honeymoon couple staying next door and we didn’t see them once. Anyway, naps are essential if your erstwhile intention is to storm the Nord in the afternoon.
It was one of those silly commitments strangers sometimes make under the influence of holiday bravado and then feel beholden to keep. On the way to our private island the previous evening, we’d spotted the “elusive” Nord, a megayacht owned by Russian oligarch Alexey Mordashov, happily hiding in the waters of paradise.
WAY OFF BASE
A plan was hatched, partly inspired by the waters of DeloMamelles, in which we’d learn archery in the morning, sailing in the afternoon, and then storm the Nord under the flag of who would ever have thought of it ... to what end now, I’m not quite sure.
But it is how I now found myself, a little bleary-eyed, having my first catamaran lesson with a new brother in arms and an instructor who spoke mostly French. It was terrifying before we got out on the water, but once the wind took us, it all began to make beautiful sense. We flew across the water like birds, and though we didn’t get nearly as close to the Nord as I think we thought we did, it was something neither of us had ever done before.
Club Med needs a dedicated barrister to police caffeine delivery to early morning adventurers. That aside, logistics were so slick (and this was true for the duration of our stay) that we only really woke up while swooping into the nearby island of Praslin, where we were to learn all about the secret life of trees. The Vallée de Mai is an ancient forest where huge palms have sex to produce a gigantic “double coconut” called the coco de mer. A better name derives from the archaic Greek lodoicea callipyge, which means “beautiful rump”. It’ sa very sexy place.
No-one quite knows how the trees do it, but some say that on certain nights when the tides take them, the “male trees uproot themselves to approach the female trees”. It’s forest porn at its finest. To British general Charles Gordon, in the early 1800s, the Vallée de Mai was the Garden of Eden and the coco de mer its forbidden fruit. Walking among its 1,000-year-old trees and deep silences made treehuggers of the worst of us.
Then it was on to La Digue, which is postcard-Insta perfect, with its cocaine white sand and crystal meth waters. I loved it. It’s a world-famous beach for a reason, with its iconic boulders and Sports Illustrated pretensions. But it’s so busy being La Digue you feel it might have lost a little of what made it La Digue in the first place.
THE ZEN POOL
On the ferry back, Paradise FM (is there a better name for a radio station?) played Brenda Fassie’s Vuli Ndlela as we surfed home into the sunset. A big catamaran passed us with a group of what looked to be young revellers dancing to their own music so as to not even notice us. I imagined a life island hopping for good times in the spirit of the pirates of old. I wished I was one of them.
The Zen pool is the antidote to any anxieties water aerobics might inspire. There is no music and there are rules about not making too much noise. An inadvertent splash or mindless ripple breaching the rim of the infinity pool will occasion an annoyed glance from the quiet at heart.
There are private loungers for secret smokers and the bar service is the best on the island. It’s a place to read, or think, or decide not to think. It’s very existential. Old French couples slip by in languid conversation with big Bacardi eyes. You can tell the honeymoon couples because they still put on each other’s sunblock. A tray of mojitos passes by and I hear soft laughter and faint reggae from the beach as I watch a chameleon climb slowly up the side of my cocktail glass.
Every holiday needs that hard-earned time of “no-time” when the rules of reality don’t apply. A great island host will provide a space where you can be alone with your own thoughts, if that’s what you really want, make best friends with people you hope you might see again but suspect you never will. And yet, also temper paradise with the faintest hint of the serpent, just to keep it real.
Walking back alone along the beach to supper that night, past giant bruises of cloud setting over the Nord, towards the best rib-eye I didn’t yet know I was about to have, I passed sitting alone on a pool lounger looking out to sea, the girl in the shimmering dress ...