Mark and I had originally booked our tour of Mauritius for Thursday, February 27, yet understandably it was cancelled on account of tropical cyclone Garance. We were able to take the tour on Saturday. It was just the two of us and our guide picked us up at our hotel. I didn’t find this tour as interesting as the one we had in Réunion, since the places we visited seemed dull and, frankly, not all of them even worth writing about in a travelogue. Our first stop was the Trou aux Cerfs, an extinct volcano now overgrown with forest. The caldera is 350 m in diameter and 80 m deep:
Our next stop was at Grand Bassin, where there are a temple and shrines dedicated to Lord Shiva. Since Mauritius celebrated the festival of Maha Shivaratree only three days prior to our visit, this place was recently overrun with worshippers. That explained why the road suddenly broadened into widths of airport runway proportions as we approached the site. The statue below is 33 m high:
I was more interested in the smaller sign than in any of the towering Shiva statues:
By far the most interesting place we visited was La Vallée des Couleurs Nature Park. We walked along trails that identified all the plant species and I liked these intricately detailed ferns:
We saw wild goyavier growing in Réunion as well as in the nature park. I recall that the Igloo glacerie in Saint-Denis even served goyavier gelato. Here is a goyavier bush, yet the fruits were just starting to turn red. Mark picked a few and ate them as we walked:
At the end of the hike we could walk among the tortoises. We saw at least five. They were either eating or sleeping yet the other two…?
Gris Gris Beach at the southernmost point of Mauritius:
Our tour included lunch at Escale des Iles restaurant. We enjoyed a large serving of dorado (fish) and fries:
I kept the accurate date and time on my camera and I see that the last picture I took in Souillac, the southern town where Escale des Iles restaurant is located, was at 1:32. We had to return to Port Louis, check out of the hotel and catch a cab, which we booked at 4:30, to take us to the cruise terminal. Today was boarding day for our cruise. We had met a man at the hotel, a Canadian from Richmond Hill named Larry, who informed us that practically all the guests staying there were cruise passengers. He is an experienced cruiser, and had a feeling–later proved correct–that because of the tropical cyclone the cruise would delay its departure for one day, in order to allow all the passengers whose flights to Mauritius were cancelled to arrive for boarding. Even though departure was delayed a day, we still had to check in on the boat today. That meant we would lose a day of the planned itinerary, and it wasn’t hard to figure out that the Réunion stop was cancelled. Thank goodness Mark and I decided to see that island first. We were lucky to see it for four days, versus merely part of a day if it was one of our ports of call.