I woke this morning wondering if I’d even have enough today to write my first blog post of this trip. We arrived late the night before had an amazing dinner at the guesthouse before retiring to our rooms to try and get some much needed sleep and fight off the jet lag. The sleep was interrupted by a rooster that is faulty and doesn’t know when dawn is. The rooster seemed to want to remind us another hour had passed during the night rather than let us know just when the sun rose.
Then news filtered through our flight departing Madagascar was cancelled. I’m of course extending my trip after Madgascar, but was onn the same flight, so the morning was spent trying to work out alternatives. I think I have a plan but still going to lose some time I had planned for the island of Reunion. The bright side is it hasn’t ruined the start of the Madgascan trip, but trying to arrange new plans and losing some money on non refundable bookings is a pain. To balance out the annoyances I also had a taste of homemade Mauritian rum at 9:30am in the morning. Absolutely smooth and delicious, great after breakfast drink!
Everything after this moment turned to Mauritian magic, not that the rum tasting was bad (some people would disagree though). We walked along the side of the road in a meandering way taking photos along the shore of the island and the streets of Trou d’Eau Douce. The bus stopped and the ticket collector asked if we were heading into the main town of Flacq, which we were plannign to do so we jumped on. The bus was just so fun, we listened music that is best decscribed as bollywood with some island flair to it. It drove through the cane fields and people said hello and were generally quite friendly. More people got on as we got closer to town, certainly worth the ticket of 40 Mauritian rupees which is about a dollar.
Everyone is friendly in Mauritius, everyone has been helpful, everyone has done their best to accomodate some of the questions we’ve had. The food definately has ties to indian cuisine, but also malay and Africa. We wandered through the town had some lunch, and opted for a taxi to get back to the guesthouse.
In the afternoon we went for a walk around Trou d’Eau Douce, to home our street photography skills. I’m not much of a people photographer where as Lynn (our photographic guide) chases poor unsuspecting people for an amazing photo. I did get a few good photos out of the walk which ended at the villages social bocceball game. Even there the offer to play a game was made clear but I turned it down and we chatted with the people, took photos and bid them thanks.
The day could have started off being boring, it could have been awful but travel has a way of just taking you in a direction and you just need to trust it and enjoy the ride. I will have more time in Mauritius right at the end of my trip, but tomorrow we head to the land of King Julian and the lemurs, Madagascar.