A TONIC FOR BODY & SOUL
The Mauritius resort that works its reviving magic
Not every beach resort has a yoga instructress who once was Miss Paris. ‘Hear the birds and feel the breeze on your skin,’ says Isabelle Lamant. It’s 8.15am at the Constance Prince Maurice hotel on Mauritius’s east coast, and a British trio is responding to Isabelle’s Gallic-accented directions with varying success. one is curving flawlessly into position — while two of us exhibit the flexibility of flagpoles caught in a gale.
But what a gorgeous start to the day — the sponginess of the broad-bladed grass beneath our feet, the sun already hot.
thirty yards away, amid banyan trees, palms, cinnamon and hibiscus, the hotel’s Doric columns rise upwards, supporting a roof thatched with reeds of sugar cane. Another 50 yards and white sand is washed by the warm water of a lagoon, which opens onto the Indian ocean. twin terraces encase an infinity pool. Althoughthe airport, just throughan hour’s fields driveof from cane and villages speckled with stalls of vanilla and spices, the hotel’s 60 acres, carved from a former sugar plantation, are entirely insulated from reality. By day two, it seems normal to be on the beach ordering Madagascar crab, followed by a chocolate fondant. It’s an appropriate reward, surely, for a dip during which a pickhandle barracuda has been identified, along with four saddle grouper, threadfin butterflyfish, scissortail sergeant and convict surgeonfish — the latter’s silver flanks scored with black lines like the bars of a prison cell. this sudden piscatorial expertise is the
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Yet even that is eclipsed in the spa, where I submit my feet to Franck for a pedicure. He flicks on an instrument whose howl suggests impending amputation.
But no, it’s a nail machine. An hour and a gallon of Sisley products later, and Franck announces: ‘New feet.’
Good enough, even, to be paraded at open-air yoga.