Wednesday–Thursday, Days 74

Although India certainly sets one up for appreciating the obvious contrast with our next port of call, Mauritius is the clearest example I have ever experienced of the evident difference that intelligent, inspired leadership can make to a country. True, it has great natural beauty and it has abundant water—the second the element you really begin to value as you travel through parched, densely populated countries, no matter how wondrous their historical sites. But it is also almost immediately apparent that this island has a rich heritage of cultures and people who get along and go along. If India is one large village, Mauritius is one large family. Everyone seems to work for a family member. French, African, Indian, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu—all live in a stew of participatory, parliamentary democracy and many generations of intermarriage, culture, and language. In prototypical fashion, striking Creole women in Indian dress speak lyrical French while both the stirring native seggae (a mélange of the country’s own séga music and dance with reggae) and Western popular music play in the background.

Before we arrive at Port Louis, during the sail from India, I work with a hotel/tourism management student from Mauritius who had been flown to Kochin to join the ship. We give a seminar pre-port about why French language, culture and influence have endured so strongly on the island, despite the fact that the British captured it from the French at the time of the Napoleonic wars over 150 years ago. It’s a complicated story but suffice it to say that the British never really settled the island in any significant numbers and they specifically agreed to allow French language and culture to continue. Thus, while the official language is English, most mass media is in French and the Franco (descended from French colonizers and sugar cane plantation owners) and Afro (descended from slaves imported to work in those sugar cane plantations) peoples speak a French Creole at home. Mostly Hindus, Indians from previous labor migrations following the abolition of slavery now constitute a large percentage of the population (45%) and they speak many different dialects—as well as, of course, French and English. Thus, the island’s many visitors from Europe—most of whom stay for weeks at a time—feel easily at home on Mauritius. The Euro is almost as widely accepted for currency as Mauritian rupees.

The port and city downtown areas are bustling with commerce; they’re also alive with people, all of whom seem to know each other. The boulevards feel almost European, despite the crush of traffic on all sides. Statues in the parks are not to warriors or rulers but to scientists, artists, civic leaders and social workers. Inscriptions on public art and monuments are in at least three languages. The hard-pressed edge of frantic activity that we’ve experienced so vividly in Asian countries is gone. The litter that has been a virtual carpet since leaving Japan is gone. Real ceramic cups, tableware, silverware and stainless steel trays take the place of paper and plastics in the shops and restaurants, all of whom charge if you want paper or plastic for takeaway. Since I want a good cup of coffee—I don’t care for the shipboard coffee to such an extent that I only try coffee when I get to ports—a real cuppa in a real cafe is the first thing I encounter off the water taxi from the ship. It’s not only good, it’s marvelous.

Mauritius has a reputation for attracting very wealthy visitors to its stunningly beautiful beaches protected inside lagoons with coral reefs almost completely encircling the island. But in our travel on the island—most of it in parts of the country much further out in the countryside than the usual tourist haunts—several friends and I see only fleeting glimpses of resort enclaves. Mauritians don’t live on the sandy beaches but mostly in cooler mountain residences from which they commute to work in the urban and resort areas—they leave the beaches to the tourists. Since the south and the mountains are also where we go, we experience Mauritians as a fully employed, friendly people of modest means with a genuine joie de vivre. No one passes us without a greeting of “Bon jour” or “Bon soir.” There are many school children and many local schools in each and every village. Every child we see is in school, in dramatic contrast to India, where so many are on the streets. We see absolutely no one homeless. (In fact, many Mauritian homes and buildings take advantage of the coral quarries on the interior of the island to build small homes of very substantial, solid, rock and poured concrete.) Children walk to and from school, many with their parents, before and after work. There is excellent bus service (on buses that use biogas from the sugar cane bagasse) to every nook and cranny of the island and the vast majority of the population makes its way daily to work by bus. Health care is free, with clinics mandated to be available and no more than three kilometers in distance from every citizen.

Of course, an island presents a different set of challenges than many of the immense, far-flung republics we’ve visited, but Mauritius has also had to deal with a difficult past of slavery and colonialism as well as its melting pot of cultural diversity: a multiethnic and multilingual population (they appear to address that by intermarrying and speaking at least three languages); a limited resource base (approached with education, health care, and measures encouraging population control—as well as attention to conservation and sustainable growth); and global issues such as trade and climate change. The Mauritius government is an international leader in initiatives for communications, responsible tourism, and global warming.

All is not sweetness and light. Although commitment to social democracy is clear, there is lively debate among the many parties and shifting alliances in the parliamentary government. There is an environmental police force (Yes!) There are very strict corruption, crime and drug controls. In a diplomatic briefing, the US consul tells us that an American citizen has recently been tried for drug running on the island and is expected to get 30 years. Hanging is still on the books. The society has elements of male machismo in it that means the lot of women in the older, more traditional families can be difficult. Women’s groups on the island are many in number and they are active in working for a wide range of domestic issues.

Sugar cane was at one time the only crop and major export. Even today fields come right up to even the main roads. But the island’s leaders have worked hard to diversify the economy: textiles, Phoenix beer (a very good local beer), rum (a good local rum), and tea (a not so good Bois Chéri tea). Mauritius is such a stable, thriving country—pretty much the most successful in all of Africa—that foreign investment is always knocking at the door. The big concern among all parts of the society is that any capital be directed not only to profiteers but also to the benefit of Mauritians at all levels of the society.

The country is one of the most active and articulate advocates of ecotourism—not in the superficial “green” ways that so many corporations dabble in, but in the genuine sense of “responsible travel that conserves the environment and improves the welfare of local people.” One of the most amazing documents is its Code of Conduct for Tourists which is worth quoting at length, translated from the French:

You are already most welcome in Mauritius. You’ll be even more so if you will readily appreciate that our island . . .

Considers its most important asset is its people. They are well worth meeting and enjoying a friendly chat with;
Possesses a rich capital of cultures, needs and values which it cherishes more than anything else;
Is ready to give you value for money, but is not prepared to sell its soul for it;
Has wealth of its own, which deserves to be preserved;
Treats all its visitors like VIPs, but does not take kindly to those who overact the part;
Is not all lagoon and languor, and boasts a host of many-splendored sights;
Considers, without being prudish, that nude when flaunted can be provocative and offensive;
Is not a faraway paradise of unlimited license;
Takes pride in serving you with a smile and would be grateful for a smile in return;
And will bare its soul willingly if you will handle it with care.

But enough with the general information—where do we go and what do we visit in paradise?

After much research and discussion on how to spend our paltry two days and one night in port (post-port evaluations hammer home the point that no one feels they have enough time to learn about this amazing, advanced society), a small group of six of us go to the southwest with the primary intent of hiking in a relatively new national park called the Black River Gorges. Because two also want to snorkel, we find a couple of places to stay within easy reach of both park and beach.

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Across from the public library in the little seaside village of La Gaulette, in a very affordable two-bedroom self catering apartment, Warner, Nancy and I enjoy the view from a wonderful back porch that looks out over the bay and across to the tiny Ile de Berthiers. There is no sand beach but the proprietor also offers guide services to boat out to the lagoon enclosed by coral reefs for snorkeling and watching dolphins. Warner and Nancy go off on their own to snorkel our first afternoon. I stay on the porch to read and get to hear bird song again. Only then do I realize I heard no birds during our six days in India. Cocks crow. Dogs bark every once in a while. I feel right at home because everyone on the block seems to be doing a bit of work on their houses. One man is doing masonry work on a driveway; another is building a shed with a power saw; others run welding equipment to repair a gate; a father comes home from work and takes his pre-school son out to work in the garden. There are fans going and we have the big apartment doors and windows wide open to the ocean breezes and there is mercifully no noise of air conditioning compressors. We eat a wonderful meal at a highly recommended Chinese-Creole restaurant down the street. The beds are draped with mosquito netting but we don’t see or feel any mosquitoes despite the fact there are no screens. We sleep very soundly.

Our three other friends—Amy, Richard and Mary—have been fortunate to reserve the last three places available in a mountain retreat, Lakaz Chamarel, a set of small villas with panoramic views of valleys and surrounded by gardens and birds. We can barely pry them loose of the place to go hiking. We finally do a good few hours of hiking and, of course, find another excellent place to sample the first-rate Mauritian cuisine—yet another stew and melting pot of flavors featuring particularly good seafood. The day is as clear as a bell and from the highest point during our walks we can see all the way across the mountains of the park to the southern shores and ocean.

All six of us travel in one rented car, with convolutions required to accommodate four in the back seat. Fortunately, we are all relatively small and lean. We walk most of the time with short trips in the car except for the final trip back to the port and ship when we encounter an accident entering the city and debate whether four of us shouldn’t just try to walk the remaining 10 kilometers. It is no laughing matter to be late for a ship because it will pull out on time. (Actually, we do wind up joking that it would not be such a bad thing to be stranded for a few days in Mauritius and just catch up to the ship in Capetown.) The accident is an overturned truck loaded with squid and prawns and we fear for the driver’s life when we finally see the accident scene. Once past the knot of traffic, we make the final mad dash to the ship and arrive with one minute to spare. (I am leaving out what we go through to actually get there in the nick of time.)

Although there are highly original local writers in French, Mauritius doesn’t have any giants of world literature. Its one romantic legend is a sappy tale of Victorian prudery—Paul et Virginie. Its saddest, true, tragic tale involves a mass suicide of runaway slaves leaping to their deaths from one of the precipitous mountain cliffs in the remote south when they mistook the intentions of a group of approaching soldiers. The party of soldiers from the capital was not coming to re-capture them but to tell them that slavery had been abolished and they were free.

In contrast, South Africa’s literature is deep, raw and wide with a rich, tragic history to draw from. I must confess I didn’t have time to read any literature of resident Indian authors before or during our time there. I am sure that that was a mistake. On the other hand, I’ve long admired many Indian authors and have read a great many of their works—but perhaps most of those live in the West and grapple less directly with the large scale of problems at home. South African literature struggles at a personal level with the societal issues of retribution and redistribution. With so many of the disadvantaged damaged so brutally by the rule of privilege, greed and denial, everyone knows that someone must pay for the sins of the father. Foreboding of one kind or another characterizes the several books I read by South African authors. In a strange way, it is as though I were reading what I would feel and think if I were to live as a Westerner in India, where the conditions of everyday life for those outside privileged ranks are much like those of people in Africa. The first book I read from a reviewed list I have of South African works—Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee—is hard to put down and impossible to forget.

When shipmates later discuss our far-too-short time in Mauritius, there is no disagreement: We all agree with what Mark Twain had to say about the island when he visited: “Mauritius was made first, and then Heaven, and that Heaven was copied after Mauritius.” We would have liked much more than the two partial days we had time for. Like a bridge over waters—troubled and otherwise—this island goes a long way to help us make the transition from India to South Africa. We have six days at sea to prepare for our arrival on the continent of Africa.