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All posts for the month July, 2018

The beach and the water by our resort was pretty wonderful

This was mostly a lazy stop. Mauritius is a little island nation a bit east of Réunion, still off the southeast coast of Africa. Formerly a colony of the Dutch, French, and – until independence in 1968 – the British, today it is multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual. Moreover, unlike so much of Africa it as a highly stable country with the highest Human Development Index in the entire continent. The thing I was most struck with reading about the country is that when Arab explorers discovered Mauritius, they literally discovered it. Unlike Columbus “discovering” the New World – where lots of people lived and presumably knew they were there – there were no humans at all on Mauritius when the first Arabs happened along in the Middle Ages. And until the Dutch settled it in the late 16th century.

I’ll skip over that whole colonial period – first Dutch, then French, until the British took the islands during the Napoleonic wars – but for one little tidbit. Mauritius was the only known home of the famous flightless dodo bird. Having evolved over eons in relative isolation they had no fear of humans when we started arriving and were easy prey. By the last half of the 17th century, just a few decades after the Dutch started settling the island, they were gone.

That big rock was just behind our hotel and apparently is a World Heritage Site. Not sure why, though, and we didn’t climb it. But it made a nice backdrop for pictures.

We had five nights at a beautiful St. Regis resort and, because of that whole Starwood status thing, they upgraded us to a great suite. Made for a very pleasant stay. The one downside of a place like that is that you’re we’re always struggling to find good food that passes our low-carb threshold. And that isn’t crazy expensive. The best way to do that of course is to leave the resort and we did that for lunch a few times, going to a great little place called Mapalapaw maybe 30 minutes away. Other than that … we didn’t do much. Sat on the beach. Swam. Read. A little time at the gym. More time at the beach.

We were on the leeward side of the island, but maybe 300 yards up the coast you turned a bend and the wind was brutal. Not great for lying on the beach up there but there were a ton of kite surfers.

I could learn to like being here. I noticed, by the way, that there were all these pictures of me. I guess I’ve just fallen down on the “taking pictures” front; I’ll try to do better and get a little bit of Mark in here.

Pretty low tide just there

There were a couple very nice pools but for me, at least, pools are for looking at. The ocean is for swimming in.

Same view, not such great weather

The view on a cloudy day from our balcony.

The view from breakfast one morning

You could get some fancy food there

Nice flowers!

On top of the world, or at least that’s how it felt atop Piton de la Fournaise

From Madagascar we made a quick trip to the European Union. Who knew you could go from southeastern Africa to the EU so quickly?

Réunion, you see, just a little east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is an “overseas region” of France so it’s really a part of France. The official language is French, they use the euro, and, driving around, it feels as though you’re in France. On arrival at the airport outside Saint-Denis, the capital and major city, we drove to a shopping mall to get SIM cards for our phones. We were just blown away by how different it was from Madagascar. The latter, of course, is one of the poorest countries on earth while there we were in Saint-Denis with big grocery stores, fully stocked with anything you might need. Plenty of shopping to be done, nice cars, people nicely dressed. The difference was almost unbelievable and certainly unexpected.

Our beach resort felt a lot more like Europe than Africa

SIM cards purchased and installed we headed around to the western coast of the island to our resort a little south of Saint Gilles. As we settled into our five-night stay at the LUX* (that’s the name, asterisk and all) resort one of the first things we noticed was that while Réunion felt more France than Africa, the restaurants also don’t have prices like Madagascar. Sticker shock! Not that it was all terribly expensive but definitely EU prices, not Madagascar prices.

What is there to do in Réunion? From our perspective there were two things about the island that stood out. One, Piton de la Fournaise (Peak of the Furnace) is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, with the most recent eruption just last year. A major tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage Site, you can hike up to the rim of the volcano if there is no risk of eruption.

Near the start of the hike you can see a little vegetation but it is gone not long at all after starting

So off we went. One of the remarkable parts of the hike was the drive up there; climbing up the mountain from the coast was just stunningly beautiful; I don’t know if the cows we saw grazing away appreciated the views they had but they sure should have. The hike itself wasn’t so beautiful, to be honest. The hike consisted of a long stretch across the empty, lava-crusted caldera, and then a long climb up, up, and further up to the rim of the volcano. No greenery or living creature to this amateur eye. Once we finally made it to the top I was figuring we’d see bubbling lava or at least smoke or something, but no, just a big open dry pit. The views from way up there were nice, but it’s not something one absolutely needs to do in life.

Mark at the top of the volcano. In the U.S., of course, they would have big chain fences or stone walls around the perimeter but here it’s just a painted white line suggesting it’s not safe to go beyond. Of course, lots of people did go beyond.

We didn’t learn the other important thing about Réunion – that it has a remarkable concentration of sharks in the water – until near the end of our stay. Possibly something useful to have known earlier, particularly when you’re staying at a beach resort and spending lots of time in the water. In just five years, between 2011 and 2015, there were 17 shark attacks recorded on the island’s beaches, seven of them fatal. That’s a lot! As a result swimming is banned on over half the beaches in Réunion. Fortunately, though, we were staying on the most popular and safest beach in the country so they didn’t bother us.

Funny story: we learned about the sharks from Ted and Todd, a couple we’d met back in Madagascar; they were at Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park the same time we were and then drove back to Morondava and flew to Tana the same days as we did. They were the ones who told us about the attacks on the road out to the Park and thus explained the caravans we traveled in. Just as we were ready to start the hike on Piton de la Fournaise who do we run into but Ted and Todd again so we did the hike with them, during which they were amazed that we talked about swimming at our resort. They were staying on the other side of the island from us, explained there was no swimming anywhere around their place, and told us all about the sharks.

Here I am with Ted and Todd on our hike. Mark took a couple pictures but Ted always had his eyes closed.

We may need to spend more time with Ted and Todd if we want to stay safe.

Other than our one excursion to hike the volcano most of our time was spent hanging around the beach and searching out food. The meals at LUX* were pretty expensive so we sought out local places pretty successfully, including one Italian place that we kept going back to. And that was it. From here we fly a little further east to the island of Mauritius for more beach time. Life is rough.

An evening beach scene

We stayed right next to Hermitage Beach, the most popular (and shark-free) beach on the island. These are casuarina trees, beneath which the locals relax, play games, and have their barbecues.

Strange flora on the island

And long beautiful beaches

The vastness of the lava fields was impressive

As you climb the mountain there’s lots and lots of pretty much nothing up there

Selfie time!

Love the view from up here

This is near the very end of the hike (which would make it also the very start…). The greenery is interesting, but so are the clouds. They recommend that you start the hike early because clouds start rolling in pretty heavily around noon. Sure enough, by the time we got down the cloud layers were pretty heavy on the mountain. We saw lots of people just starting their hikes at this time and we could tell they would see nothing once they started climbing.

After roughing it for a few weeks, it’s always good to see palm trees and a shimmering pool

While planning our three-week trip to Madagascar I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Nosy Be. It’s Madagascar’s premier tourist destination, a tropical island off the north shore of the country with more tourist infrastructure than anywhere else. A handful of resorts here attract package holiday makers from (mostly) Europe. There are even two direct flights to Nosy Be each week from Rome. You could buy a week-long holiday package to come to a lovely beach here and hardly even know you’d been in Madagascar.

Our three weeks of travel in Madagascar up to this point have been something akin to “hardship duty.” It’s turned out to be a great three weeks, though it did involve more effort than usual — difficult planning, long drives on rough roads, more one-night stays than usual to break up the travel, some accommodations that were less than ideal, and plenty of long days of hiking. So we are good and ready for a bit of extra comfort and R&R.

And that works out well because our next few stops will be in exotic Indian Ocean island locales — nearly three weeks in Reunion, Mauritius, and the Seychelles. But I decided we’d stop for four days in Nosy Be first, sort of bridging the gap from Madagascar to Indian Ocean tropical beach resorts.

Researching lodging options here, a place called Andilana Beach Resort stood out. It looked like the nicest resort around, and the reviews were largely very positive. A number of reviewers, however, knocked the place for an over-emphasis on catering to Italian tourists. Apparently, the owners are Italian, the vast majority of the guests are Italian, and food, style, and entertainment are geared toward Italians, to the degree that some others felt left out.

Naturally, I wasn’t the least bit deterred by the overly Italian nature of the place. If anything, that means good food because of course that’s what Italians do best, and their standards are high. My own pro-Italian bias blinded me to what should have been the red flag about this place: It is an all-inclusive resort. I booked the place without worry, trusting that Italians wouldn’t settle for crappy food.

Wow, was I wrong. It turns out that even Italy has a market for mass tourism with a big emphasis on quantity over quality. Our room was actually very nice and the beach was beautiful. But the food situation was dreadful — mass quantities of mediocre food served all day in bins in buffet restaurants. Our idea of a disaster. Italy, you let us down!

It’s kind of ironic. As I planned the three weeks in Madagascar I was concerned that’d we’d sometimes have trouble finding great food. In fact we have been very pleasantly surprised by how good the food has been, almost universally — until we arrived at the most expensive destination of our trip, the one where the Italians were supposed to be taking care of us.

Somehow we survived the indignity of “all inclusive” and enjoyed our four days here. And now we’re excited to head on to other, better quality Indian Ocean adventures.

For the most of the day we could try to forget about the dreadful dining options on this beautiful stretch of beach

One night after “dinner” we did enjoy a fairly elaborate show, a fun tribute to Michael Jackson

A few times a day someone would steer a zebu-driven cart along the beach. It appeared to be staged to make the package tourists here feel like they’d been to Madagascar.

On a couple days we eschewed the “free” slop at the resort and had lunch at nearby Chez Loulou. Way better! Here is the friendly staff celebrating something.

Bad food, but beautiful beach. We’ll survive!