More Mauritius: Philately, Pamplemousses, 2007...

Departing Mahebourg, we made the slow, jerky bus ride to Port Louis, Mauritius's capital city. We stayed 4 nights there with our Servas hosts Mineswar and Rambah. (As well as our final night (Jan. 3) in Mauritius, having had to return to collect our Indian visa: they were generous enough to host us despite the day falling smack in the middle of their exhausting-sounding New Year's social calendar, where they said everyone is visiting and inviting friends over from Dec. 31- Jan. 8!)

Mineswar works as the assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister; it was interesting to talk with him about the politics of Mauritius. He was very proud of the fact that Mauritians are literate, well-educated people, and told us the story of how, after gaining independence in 1968, Mauritius introduced free and compulsory education in 1977, which he attributed to causing the grip that a mere 7 families held on the economy of Mauritius to be peacefully broken in 1982. To me, Mauritius has an interesting in-between feel: there are still some very visible examples of poverty (shacks, things being older/broken, litter), while also having a good amount of wealthier tourist infrastructure and a high standard of living for the local population.

Our first full day in Port Louis, we headed for the tourist-friendly waterfront, recently renovated into shops and restaurants. We visited the Blue Penny museum, where we learned the meaning of the word "philately" (stamp collecting) in reference to the museum's name, as it houses the "world-famous" 1 and 2 penny red and blue stamps from the 1850s: aside from the ones in the museum, there are only a few others in existence, a pair of which recently sold for $5 million! More interesting to us than the stamps and postal history exhibit of Mauritius were the rooms of old maps (including the first globe, circa 1493?) and model ships, and the colonial history both of the country and the city of Port Louis.

Having acquired a bit of a taste for Bollywood movies after watching "Bunty and Bably" at Henrik's apartment in Cairo (a song from which was playing on the radio at our Servas family's house; they said it was the "song of the year" for 2006), we prepared ourselves for another 3 hours worth, seeing "Bhagam Bhag" in a waterfront cinema. We were surprised that it didn't seem to feature as many song and dance numbers, but still enjoyed the antics of a story that had an Indian dance troupe performing in London searching to replace its heroine.

The next day we set out for the nearby town of Pamplemousses, visting first a sugar museum and then the botanical gardens. Entitled "the Sugar Adventure," the museum was housed in a sugar producing factory that closed in 1999. Across the landscape of Mauritius you see old stone towers, which we learned there were smokestacks for sugar factories: like cheese factories in Monroe, WI, a landscape that used to be dotted with factories has seen their number dwindle with increased consolidation and "efficiency." We learned more about the history of Mauritius, and quickly walked through the exhibits of the science of sugar making to the tasting of 8 special kinds of sugar (the molasses sugar was our favorite) and 2 kinds of rum at the end. The gardens were lovely, a 65-acre area of shade filled with palms of all types, some of them exceedingly skinny and reaching to the sky, others short and bottle-shaped, others in the shape of massive Japanese fans. There were also a variety of kinds of water lilies, including some in the center of the garden that had diameters of 2 feet or more-- a funny-colored duck walking from one to the other looked very small in comparison.

Our final full day in Port Louis we visited the nearby Eureka mansion, a beautiful 19th century home with a "natural air-conditioning" architecture, including 109 doors! It also had a "Chinese room", which the guide there said was de rigour for a wealthy family of the time "to show how rich they were." In the afternoon we followed our travel guide's suggested walking tour for Port Louis, and enjoyed seeing the variety of architecture and cultural influences in the city. We trekked up the hillside to the Citadel for a view of the city, and walked by the stunning white-sand castle with green accents Jummah mosque (a good example of the city's mix of diverse cultures, the mosque is located right next to the Chinatown gate).

The following day we left Port Louis for Grand Baie, our third location in Mauritius and where we planned to spend most of our time on the beach (with the weather mostly cooperating despite a few spatterings of rain). We were pleasantly surprised at the atmosphere of the beach: while more touristy than the beach in Mahebourg, there were often a majority of Mauritians on the beach. Our pre-conception (especially based on the look that people gave us when we told them we were going there!) of tourism in Mauritius was that it was a much richer and ritzier atmosphere; we're sure some of that exists also but everywhere we've been has been pretty laid back.

On New Year's Eve we went out to a super-rich meal (which included lobster bisque, foie-gras, heart of palm, and veal) and then watched the fireworks on the beach. There were more fireworks in one place than I've ever seen: lots of big ones in the sky but also small ones (some incredibly loud) being set off by people all around us. The next day there were big piles of red firecracker wrappers so thick in the streets that looked like piles of leaves in the fall! And of course the holidays means a time to watch football: while we wanted to watch the Wisconsin Badgers in the Capital One Bowl on Jan. 1, unfortunately the closest we could come was watching an English "football" game between Manchester United and Newcastle.

Our last full day in Grand Baie, I (Rachel) had my first adventure of the new year: parasailing! The parachute was, at times, up as high as 60 or 70 meters above the water-- with the wind buffeting me around, the rope holding me to the boat looked pretty wavery, and I had to close my eyes to not think about snapping off and flying away, or crashing down into the water (and also just not to get sick). But it was also exhilarating and beatiful; looking out (which I did when the wind was quieter or I was lower down), I could see all the gradations in color and texture in the water, and the green of the sugarcane fields stretching inland. We also savored the finer side of beachfront fast food: small pineapples held by the stem and carved so they looked a little like a lolly-pop (see photo), roti/dhal puri (Indian tortillas filled with beans and hot pepper sauce), and delicious homemade ice-cream pops with flavors like coconut-vanilla and almond-pistachio. Back in Port Louis, we picked up our passports from the Indian High Commission, happily replete with Indian visas, and got ready to fly east to Australia.