Welcome to Mauritius. The country is closed.

We were lucky that we were able to fly out of Réunion as the approach of tropical cyclone Garance forced the cancellation of all later flights and the closure of both the Réunion and Mauritius airports in the middle of the afternoon. Our flight at 12:05 was the last one to Mauritius. The airport was busy, but not as hectic as I thought it might be, as people scrambled to get on the last remaining flights out. I knew our Air Mauritius plane would be full, as any remaining seats would have been taken by those whose later flights ended up being cancelled. The flight lasted all of 26 minutes. The flight attendants handed out juice boxes before takeoff and that was it before we started our descent.

Mark had done some research beforehand and found out that we needed to take two buses to get from the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Airport to the capital, Port Louis. We didn’t see any signs to guide us to the bus stop nor any other passengers who looked as if they were trying to find it. How could we be the only ones looking to take public transit out of the airport? Mark had to ask where the bus stop was.

On the way to the stop a cab driver walked past and yelled “Class three!” and said that the buses weren’t running. We thought that he was just fishing for customers and ignored him. We found the bus stop, which was an unmarked shelter with no signs indicating what routes stopped there. After a while a bus showed up, which had no markings on it to indicate its route or even its transport company. Compared to the nice buses we had in Réunion, this bus looked primitive. I asked the guy sitting up front collecting fares if the bus went to Plaine Magnien, our transfer point. He said it didn’t, but in hindsight I believe this had to be the right bus. It didn’t matter, as neither Mark nor I had any Mauritian money and after talking with some airport employees who were also at the bus stop, we discovered we couldn’t use euros as fare, and had to pay in rupees. Mark went back to the airport terminal to buy Rs1000 ( = almost $32 CDN).

A vicious rain pelted us yet the shelter couldn’t protect us unless we stood on the bench. Finally after 2½ hours another bus showed up. It was by then 3:50. We had decided that if a bus hadn’t come by 4:00, we would take a cab to Port Louis. The bus was going to Plaine Magnien and we paid the guy sitting up front by the driver. A steep and narrow staircase led to the seating area and we had to lift our suitcases up and balance them precariously on the seats to avoid blocking the aisle. This definitely wasn’t a bus for passengers with luggage.

We were soon in Plaine Magnien yet had no idea where to go to get the bus to Port Louis. Mauritius has only one airport and it’s fifty km away from the capital, so it was going to be a long ride on another Flintstones bus. Who knew how long it was going to take before that one came. Cab drivers were honking at us, noticing our suitcases, yelling “Class three!”, and stopped to tell us that it was also a national holiday and no buses were running. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that February 26 was Maha Shivaratree, a public holiday for the Hindu population. Again and again we heard the chant of “Class three!”. In retrospect I realized that cyclones must be so common here that no one needed to clarify further what a class three was for.

I stayed with the luggage as Mark walked up and down the streets looking for the stop to get a bus to Port Louis. The cab drivers were persistent buggers trying to pick us up. Their rates to take us to the capital city varied, from Rs1500 to Rs1200. After we paid our bus fare we only had about Rs950 left. One driver didn’t take no for an answer and stopped to talk with Mark. Since we only had about Rs900, Mark offered him Rs800, then negotiated a fare of Rs900 to take us into town. We couldn’t offer any more since we didn’t have the money, yet the driver, Nizam, in his negotiations with us, didn’t seem to believe us.

The rain started to fall again while he drove like a maniac to the capital city. Nizam was a multitasker, talking to his wife and then later with his daughter on the phone. He wasn’t having a simple phone chat with them, however. He held the phone up to his face so he could look and chat with them as he drove. And he was smoking as well as combing his beard, all while driving at 130 km/h! I had never felt more afraid to be in a moving vehicle. He was the king of the road, honking at other drivers to move out of the way because he sure as hell wasn’t going to slow down. He stopped at a gas station to pick up something to eat and drink and also a new pack of cigarettes. I hoped he wouldn’t open it yet he did, puffing away for the entire length of our road race to Port Louis.

We couldn’t offer Nizam any more money than we did, yet during the drive he said, now, that he would drive us straight to our hotel if we paid him Rs100 more. For the Rs900 we had negotiated he would take us to the main bus station instead. I had thought that the Rs900 was what he had agreed upon to take us to our hotel, but no, he had changed his mind. Obviously Nizam wanted more money out of us and thought that with a class three cyclone warning and a rainstorm we’d naturally cave in and give him the extra money. He wasn’t going to get it because we didn’t have it.

By the time Nizam dropped us off at a gas station near the bus station it had stopped raining. We got our luggage then he went back into the cab. Was our interaction with him over? No! Out he came and tried to convince us to go with him directly to the hotel–for Rs100 more of course. I could tell from the map we had that the hotel wasn’t that far a walk, yet Nizam wouldn’t have it. “Your map is wrong!” he yelled. Mark had a good laugh at that one.

We arrived at Le Champ de Mars B&B and checked in. Although it was called a B & B, the place was a multistorey hotel. The second B in the name referred to their only meal service as they did not serve lunch or dinner. We had a spacious family room with three beds at the end of the hall on the fourth floor. The gentleman at the front desk, Clyde, was most helpful to us. In fact, he saved us from starving and going broke for our first two nights there. He explained that the cyclone class three warning meant that businesses, bus service, grocery stores and restaurants all had to close and people even had to stay inside. That explained why every storefront we saw on the walk over from the gas station had its metal curtain drawn down in front of it. Nothing in Port Louis was open. Nothing.

Le Champ de Mars B&B, taken from the other side of the Champ de Mars Racecourse.

The view from our hotel window overlooking the racecourse

We had bought a box of cereal in Saint-Denis to eat for our breakfast in Port Louis, but after we settled in and changed, couldn’t find a store to buy milk. Clyde came to our rescue when he sold us some rupees as we needed money yet no banks were open and even the sole ATM I saw was, for some mysterious reason, covered up. I knew it wasn’t permanently out of commission because when the city opened up again on our third and final day there, the encasement had been removed. I suppose it was hoarded up in the first place to deter people from walking outside.

It was now the dinner hour and we had had no luck finding any grocery stores or restaurants that were open. We asked Clyde if there were any stores nearby and he gave us directions to one of them. When we got there we saw that customers could not browse and pick out things for themselves. The whole place was caged off and we had to ask the guys there to fetch what we wanted. This kind of a store was completely alien to us, however when we asked around we discovered that this style of shopping was usual in India and the guys working in the place did look as if they came from the Indian subcontinent. We had to wait our turn in sweltering heat to be served only to find out that they didn’t stock milk. We didn’t buy anything. When we returned to the hotel, Clyde said that we could eat breakfast there (they were, after all, a B & B) so Mark and I were guaranteed food at least for tomorrow morning. But what to do about now, for dinner?

Pizza was a universal delivery food and I asked Clyde if he knew of any pizza joints that could deliver to the hotel. He didn’t think so, but once again he came to our rescue. He knew of an Indian restaurant that might be able to do a delivery. The hotel kept a stack of take-out menus for a place called Khana Khazana at the front desk and Clyde handed us one. Not a second later he called the place and, from what it sounded to me, he persuaded them not to close up yet and keep the kitchen open for a pair of starving Canadians. This conversation didn’t last long and right away Clyde asked for our orders. Without ample time to look at the entire menu I selected a couple dishes and Mark picked out one, plus a salad each. Clyde said they would drop it off within 45 minutes, and he would add the cost to our tab. We returned to our room and Clyde called us when the food arrived. Fortunately we wouldn’t starve for dinner or breakfast the next day, but it did look dicey the next day when still the whole city was shut down.

On our second day we had breakfast at the hotel and saved our buns and bread to make sandwiches for lunch. We took a walk around the racecourse and discovered enormous snails, which we ended up seeing all over Mauritius:

On our trip to La Vallée des Couleurs Nature Park I found an empty shell and brought it home.

Overlooking the racecourse. Our hotel is the grey building in the middle of the photo to the right.

As we walked around the main marketplace the following day we found a very small grocery. A swarm of flies was buzzing around a stack of dried smelly fish outside and I had to constantly brush them away from my face as I asked the owner if he sold milk. I was surprised that he did, and bought some. It was like the milk we got in Réunion, the long-life UHF stuff (like the milk for sale on Tristan) so it didn’t matter if we had to walk around with it for a while. I am sure that the streets around the Port Louis marketplace were usually bustling but it felt eerie to walk along and see no one there. The garbage, left outside yet with no one around to pick it up, was strewn all over and dogs and birds were pecking at it.

“Class three” means the streets and marketplace were shut down, with no one to be seen

Where was everyone? The city was completely deserted. I suppose that people were heeding the warnings that with a class three cyclone approaching, people should stay inside.

During our walk we saw a man who had a small shopping bag full of groceries. That meant a shop must be close by. We didn’t stop him to ask where he had been and figured out we’d come across the store soon enough. While on the way we spotted some carnage in the road:

We were fortunate to stumble across not one but two small groceries. One was a sweltering family-run enterprise that allowed its customers to roam the aisles while the second was another of those “cage” stores where you had to ask for what you wanted to buy. We got a few things at the former yet only stepped in, and then out, of the latter.

My favourite place, the post office, but closed. I would head there the next day to send one postcard.

The waterfront area was blocked off as the two highway underpasses were closed. We saw people there and they were cut off from the rest of the city. The only way to get there was to cross the road, which might have been dangerous at any other time but during a class three warning there weren’t any cars zipping by so we joined a few others and hopped over barriers to take us across.

We enjoyed our lunch at the waterfront adjacent to the Labourdonnais Waterfront Hotel. We noticed a complete lack of activity around the place so after we ate we went inside to check the place out and use the washroom. I noticed a stack of games for guests to play with and Scrabble was among them, but it was a bilingual edition that I had never seen before. The folding board had English on one side and French on the other. I wondered about the tiles, and while I didn’t have time to analyze the bag in detail, it appeared heavier, indicating that it contained more than the usual one hundred tiles. I noticed that some of the letters had English values and French values. I didn’t think the bag contained two hundred tiles, that is, two complete sets of English and French letters, but rather a composite of the two languages with overlapping tiles that were worth the same values. That still didn’t make separating them any easier, as one would have to be careful to fish out the two four-point W’s for English play and not mistakenly add a ten-point French W. English Scrabble plays with twelve one-point E’s while French plays with fifteen of them, so one would have to count them and not simply dump all the E’s into the bag if playing in English.

And so I finally get to the question of language: what language did I use in Mauritius? Often people would approach us and ask if we spoke English or French. They were pleased to discover that I spoke French, as I believe that is the preferred language of the population, at least when dealing with tourists. Our demon of a cab driver Nizam spoke kreol morisien with his wife and daughter and I could sometimes make out what he was saying but he was talking at a faster clip than what the speedometer was registering.

When we asked Clyde about dinner that night, we found out that Khana Khazana was closed so we had nowhere to go or call. We decided to head for those two small groceries we had stumbled across earlier that afternoon. We headed in the direction that brought us to the cage grocery first. They were just about to close so we made some hasty purchases: four packages of ramen noodles, a tin of diced mango and a tin of peach slices. We decided that we had all we needed and didn’t bother to try and find the other store, and returned to the hotel.

On February 28 the class three warning was lifted and the country reopened for business. What a relief to go outside and see people on the streets. We could visit the stores and have a decent dinner. We ate that night at Sanara Foods, which served Thai, Chinese and Mauritian food.

The marketplace was crowded

We walked through China Town

When we tried to return to the waterfront, however, the underpasses were still closed off. Why wouldn’t they be opened already? We had to be very careful and wait for no traffic as we crossed the M2 Trunk Road. The place was flooded and we had to tiptoe across narrow curbs to keep our feet dry. Fortunately one underpass had reopened when we returned to the hotel.

Unfortunately the flooding brought to shore some fish who didn’t stand a chance of returning home. They were washed inland as far as the metro station tracks:

When we returned to the area around Labourdonnais Waterfront Hotel, tropical cyclone Garance let us know she wasn’t over yet:

This area was taped off and we ate our lunch at a table just out of shot of those waves. I could see the area where we had eaten lunch yesterday and waves were drenching the spot. I knew that the Caudan Waterfront mall would be open today yet wondered if the bookstore, Bookcourt, would be since its storefront was in the line of fire of the waves. I took a look inside and the store seemed dark so I thought it was closed, but people were milling about so I entered and looked through the long shelf of books on Mauritius.

Strolling through les Jardins de la Compagnie

As we walked to our hotel from the bus station I noticed that the Sterling House apartment building was infested with a swarm of air conditioners. I wanted to get a picture of them all.

Obligatory Mauritian licence plate photos. I am sure the first two are custom:

The following day we embarked on a tour of the island and that travelogue will follow. We rode in the car above, that Mark is standing next to.