MAURITIUS 2007 - SORT OF A BLOG

Although this time there was no real Blog on Mauritius I would like to share some of my experiences.

Mauritus’ sea is stunningly turquoise, blue and after the white riffs azure blue. A light breeze makes you feel very comfortable. Everybody speaks a mixture between Creole, French and English which comes in handy if you do not remember all essential French vocabulary. And they talk a bit the Indian way, shaking their heads while talking with a nice accent.

My favorite village is called Pampelmousses, The best thing about it is not only its wonderful name (grapefruits), but mainly the Viennese coffee shop that has the best Sacher cake I ever had outside of Austria. This was a real delight - besides of course testing eight or more different sugars in the nearby “Sugar Adventure”, a sugar factory and museum. They also offer rum testing, which can be said is a special and very strong form of sugar cane syrup.

Talking about sugar cane, that is the permanent scenery there. As soon as there is no sea in sight all you see is basically sugar cane and sugar cane and then again sugar cane. Sometimes, but not very often, there are also workers in the sugar cane fields, or oil barrels for watering whatever, maybe not sugar cane.

Other villages are called Les Deux Freres or Les Quatre Cocos. A sight in itself are the policemen in Poudre d’Or which has surprisingly enough not a very nice beach with gold powder sand as you would expect from the specific and special name. I presume as the skin of the local policemen is stunning and shiny as powdered with some golden powder, probably a very talented and/or romantic mind came to the idea to call the town accordingly. Who knows?
I think this is in general one of the most charming things in Mauritius: the Police is omnipresent and very good looking. Policemen are not only friendly but stunningly well dressed. The average patrol of say investigating a 200m long street is about 5 to 10 policemen. A sub-section of the police, the tourist police, has a shield of their own which reads Mauritian Police – We Care and shows three palm trees.

I will remember Plaine de Papayas not specifically for their Papayas as there were none, but because of the amazing Hindu procession I saw there. Priests and locals were in trance, wearing pins through their cheeks, tongues and foreheads. Two men were decorated with limes. In a certain sense they were a personified cocktail wearing about 12 or 16 limes pinned to their bodies with thin fishing-hooks. The music was amazing and so where the children that were dancing ritual dances with their mothers slugging wooden rots in specific rhythms against each other. Little girls were dressed like little princesses.
There was a priest or a helping hand to the priest that seemed to have nothing to do but to cut coconuts offered as donations together with various fruits. The whole procession – accompanied by at least 50 policemen – went towards a nice huge temple where the local priest had already prepared a field for the ritual fire walk. The temple garden filled up with people quickly. After a very short time the place was overcrowded and the glooming hot ashes were barely visible.
To my surprise it was not only the priests and people in deep trance but also elderly people, women and children who walked over the fire. An amazing picture. Only one little girl started to cry, all the others did not seem to hurt at all.
And everywhere around there were beautiful faces and women dressed in colorful saris. Only watching them was a delight!

Back to Shots 2007 overview.