Blogs from Mauritius, Africa - page 9

We slept in again, but to 1.00pm this time. We went to the hotel restaurant and paid for the all you can eat buffet. Carmen ate nasi goreng and I ate sheperds pie. We ordered an ice-cream sundae each for desert and we looked through some travel brochures for a beauty salon. When our ice-cream sundaes arrived it was almost 2.00pm. The sundaes were very big and even made us sick after we ate them. Carmen and I were both sick after lunch from eating too much so we just stayed in our room for the rest of the day. We just lay on the beds and watched Glee all day. We spent more time talking about Glee than actually watching it. Somebody knocked at the door so I got up too see who it was. ... read more

Carmen and I got off of the plane at 10.45am, I had never felt so hot in my life. The sun was so bright and i could feel my skin sizzling straight away. We walked through security and the guard gave Carmen a frisk search. She was clear and we made our way. Wed tried to hail a cab but other passengers from the flight took all them. We were waiting for 20 minutes for the taxi company to send one out, so we just walked. On the way to our hotel we saw a lot of the beautiful features of the islands capital. The locals were very friendly and welcoming to us and showed us around and even walked us to the hotel. When we arrived we said good bye and then gave them all ... read more

Another week has passed and seen as last week was a long weekend the time has seemed to go very quickly these past few days! I’m increasingly brown (for me!) but it’s difficult to tell if this is tan, sunburn of just grime that won’t be scrubbed off. I was told earlier today that mosquitoes are attracted to sweat. All I can say that is if this is true, I have no hope during the working week. This week I was working with the Olive White Eyes, which are similar to the Fodys but have a slightly more intensive feeding routine and fewer birds on the island. On the whole they have quite defined territories that they maintain to an extent throughout the year, so this week was some territory searches and nest watching. We also ... read more

For a small island Mauritius punches well above its weight for two things – long, slow queues at the airport immigration counter and beautiful red Indian Ocean sunsets. Actually, Mauritius no doubt has many other beautiful and worthwhile attractions, but having come to the end of our Africa visit we decided to just enjoy the beach and the pool and leave the rest. If there is a world-renowned shopping mall, or an escalator direct to the Lost City of Atlantis, we apologise and will be back to look at it one day, but for this trip if we were 50 paces from the pool it was too far. The Sofitel, on the west coast of the island near a place rather quaintly named Flic en Flac, takes its French heritage quite seriously, and is populated mostly ... read more

Mauritius is the biggest of the Mascarene Isles, Reunion and Rodrigues being the other ones. Although first discovered by the Portuguese, the Dutch were first to settle there. It became however French territory before becoming a British possession. As a consequence we have today a very unique and rather complex linguistic situation. I think Belgium could take some lessons here. The official language is English, it is mainly used for administrative purposes. French is mainly used for business while creole is really the 'local' language. As 70% of the population is from Indian origin, Indian languages are also spoken and so is Chinese by the 3% Chinese minority. We could speak English or French with any person we met, whatever his/her ethnic background, what a dream... Most of the places have French names such as 'Grande ... read more