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:
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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. |  |
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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. |  |
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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. |  |
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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. |  |
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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 . . .