Mauritius was an unplanned stop thanks to the pirates that forced the cancellation of our Kenya trip, so the three days in Mauritius were all about food, friends, beach, and sleep for us. We found a taxi driver to take us to a beach and to find a hotel. We were wanting to go to the southeast part of the island because we heard that's where the best diving is, but the driver convinced us to go up north to Grand Bay because it was quieter and it had more of the type of accommodations we were looking for. The southeast mainly has large resorts with nothing else to do.
Grand Bay was about an hour away. Our driver promised that we wouldn't have to pay until he found us accommodations that we liked. It took several tries, he kept taking us to places that were much more expensive than we were going for, and they weren't even that nice. Finally when we got to the 6th or 7th place we hit the jackpot. The place we found was about a block from the beach. They had apartments that were pretty big and each slept 4. We got 2 apartments; each had a kitchenette, living room/dining room and nice porch with a table. We decided to use the bottom apartment as the hangout apartment. We got all of this for only $19/person/night.
Since it was Sunday we had to quickly find a market to get supplies for the next few days before it closed. There wasn't much in the way of food at the market, but we got some crackers and a plethora of drink back before heading out again for lunch. I found a sparkling pear drink called Pearona that I've only seen in Mauritius. It was very yummy.
Meals take about as long in Mauritius as they do in South Africa. We have to wait forever to order, then for our food to come, then for the dessert, and more waiting for the bill. English is an official language in Mauritius, but French is more commonly spoken. Most of the people speak Creole. After a 2 hour lunch, we were itching to get out to the beach for some good quality sun and relaxation. We had a very fun several hours on the beach. I brought my iPod, but never needed it because we had Byron - our own personal DJ. He brought portable speakers and his iPod and set them up in his backpack, so we had tunes for our walk to the beach and the entire afternoon on the beach. We'd planned to sleep all day, but instead pretty much just played around on the beach and in the water. There were a couple boats driving around taking people bumper tubing, so Chris, Jason, Jason, Byron, and I decided to go. All 5 of us went at the same time, we had 3 single tubes and Chris and I shared a double tube. They told us to sit in the tubes instead of lay on them like we do at camp. It was fun! We decided to all hold onto each other (at least we tried - we were fairly successful). It started out slow, but then the driver got going and turning and at my prompting got going pretty fast. He was no Ariana, but it was still an exhilarating ride. We were out there for about 20 minutes, and at the end I tried to go with no hands, Chris followed my lead and in no time we had flown off the tube. We stayed at the beach until sunset - a beautiful sunset. Chris got into photographer mode and took pictures of Rico flipping, running, and jumping on the beach. He got a really cool photo of Rico backlit jumping along the beach and you can see the sunset under Rico's legs, it's beautiful.
Most of the group then walked down the road to an Italian restaurant "PizzanPasta." We haven't quite figured out which side of the road to walk on with the traffic driving on the left, but we managed not to get hit while walking along the road in the dark. The restaurant was cool. It was an open restaurant, so even though we were technically inside it felt like we were outside. There was what looked like an herb garden around and bunnies in the back. They had cameras looking in on the kitchen, so you could see your meal being prepared on a TV screen over the bar.
Back at the apartment we bonded and played cards late into the night.
Monday was a lazy morning. I thought Rico and I were going to get up to go scuba diving at 8:30, but he decided to put that off until tomorrow and he and Chris went to rent scooters to ride around the island for the day. Jason V. headed off on his own to explore, which left Beth, Jason L., Byron, and I to hang out on the beach together. I saw someone out on the ocean waterskiing and had a new mission of the day - finding someone to take me waterskiing.
In search of waterskiing, Byron and I had to walk about a mile and finally did find waterskiing, but the way most water activities in Mauritius work is through all-inclusive hotel packages. These hotels on the beach are more expensive than where we were staying for sure, but they include all meals and all activities like scuba, skiing, sailing, paddle boats, beach games, whatever. We finally found a hotel that would take us skiing, it was pretty expensive, but the experience was worth it.
This was my first time skiing on the ocean, it looked pretty calm for ocean. We got in a little whaler, and I was kinda worried that they were going to try to ski us behind a whaler, but fortunately they laughed when we asked if this was the boat. The whaler was just to take us out to a little square dock (which they called a jetty) where we started from. We got onto the dock and Byron and I thumb wrestled to decide who would go first – I won. This was no long lake, and the boat was no Mastercraft, but I was out skiing, so I couldn't complain. It was really cool skiing on the ocean. The visibility was very good that day and as I was skiing along, I could see the coral down below.
Jason V. had decided to make us all dinner tonight. It was so nice to have a home made meal, Jason really outdid himself. He didn't let us help out at all; he really enjoys this type of thing apparently. We had yummy french bread and yummy cheeses for appetizers. Dinner was spaghetti with homemade sauce, and we had tartlets for dessert.
Since I mentioned sugar cane, now would be a good time to mention that unlike the Seychelles which is completely dependent on tourism to support their economy, Mauritius is self sustaining. They grow lots and lots of sugar cane and use just about every part of it. They burn it twice a year on a rotating basis probably to enrich the soil. I later heard that in some areas they have animals grazing on the sugar cane stalks and then use the manure to fertilize the crops. Either way, they produce a lot of sugar cane. Mauritius is also the Silicon Valley of the area (I'm not sure exactly how far out that area is, but they have a lot of technology on the island). Mauritius is made up of mostly Creole speaking Indians. There is a diversity of religions on the island, but about 66% are Hindu. Mauritius was colonized several times, first by the Portuguese, then the French, English, French again, and maybe some Dutch in there. There were no indigenous people on the island when it was first colonized by the Portuguese, just a bunch of dodo birds. The dodos were quickly extinct because they were an easy target and were quickly hunted to extinction. They now have a dodo museum on the island and at some point a skeleton was found, so they had some concrete evidence of its existence and what it looked like.
Our third and final day in Mauritius, Rico and I decided to go scuba diving in the morning, and then head to the southern part of the island to go hiking. There were rumored to be beautiful waterfalls and good hiking down there. Jason L. and Byron were going to sleep in and go hiking with Rico and me; the others went off on another island beach adventure.
Every time I went to this dive shop, the owner (also a dive master) was always just hanging out in a speedo. I can't imagine ever seeing some guy just wearing a speedo in his shop all day in the US. I really think that we need to introduce other cultures to swim trunks! The dive was not one of the more exciting dives I've had in my life, but this was our first dive in the Indian Ocean, and the marine life is much different here. I was distracted much of the time by my camera and equipment that worked differently than mine, so I wasn't as observant as I wish I would have been. Fortunately I didn't miss the highlight of the trip which was the 10 foot moray eel. I was too busy taking pictures to touch it, but Rico touched it and said it's the coolest feeling in the world. It's a silky slimy super soft feel. The divemaster has trained the eel and was calling it the entire dive until it came up to him. He handled it like a snake charmer, very cool.
We were done with the dive by 10:30, and off on our next adventure by noon. We hired a guy to drive us back to the ship and around the south of the island and back for $60. It was about an hour back to the ship where we had a quick turn around - only taking time to grab a few rolls and cheese from the lunch line for lunch, then we were off again. We told the driver we wanted to see the waterfalls and go hiking and he took it from there. We didn't exactly get what we were looking for, but he did take us to several places.
Our first trip was a temple (which we didn't go into) and then a little hike to the top of a hill which had a shrine and lots of wild monkeys that were very used to people. There were some people praying up there and feeding the monkeys bananas and other fruit. At one point a monkey ran into the shrine and grabbed a plum that I think was part of the offering. The people were very nice and offered us some type of little donut and coconut cookie snack. After lots of monkey pictures we headed back down to the taxi and were taken to our 2nd destination - another viewpoint. This view was of a valley and there were some waterfalls around but we couldn't really see them from where we were. Byron saw a trail and headed off to see where it went. We were all looking for a hike, so we followed. It didn't seem like it was going anywhere, we hiked through lots of mud for about 20 minutes when we finally made it to a river. The trail continued, but Rico had another plan. We followed the river downstream until all of a sudden it dropped off and we were standing at the edge of a very tall waterfall. We carefully crawled as far out as we dared and held our cameras over the edge to try to capture the incredible drop.
Next stop on our impromptu adventure was a place called 7 colors of the earth. We had to each pay a $2 entrance fee, but there were two stops. The first was a view of 3 tall waterfalls, and the second was the 7 colors of the earth which was a fenced off area of rolling dirt that was 7 different colors. There were also some very large tortoises in another walled off area. They had an incredible amount of weight to carry around and moved very very slowly if at all. We decided to head back towards the ship after this stop. The drive was as good as any of the stops. We never really knew where we were, but I'm pretty sure our driver took us all the way across the southern part of the island and back to the ship.
These three days definitely weren't the most educational of the voyage, but they provided a nice break close to the halfway point of our journey.