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Mauritius

I don't know what the airline industry in America is doing wrong, but perhaps they could take a few cues from some of the airlines we've flown this year. Bangkok Airways was one of them, but on our long haul flight to Mauritius, the gold star goes to Emirates Air. To start, every seat has a personal entertainment system with a choice of actually recent movies from different countries, video games and a bunch of other great time wasting ideas. We know that they're on every seat, because from Dubai to Mauritius we were in the last row of the plane. It didn't sound so good to begin with, but there was still plenty of leg room and the back galley was right behind us which turned into an impromptu bar since all drinks, including alcoholic, were free. It wasn't just cheap beer either. Andrea had a Baileys on the rocks to help her sleep, while I preferred my Stoli neat. The flight attendants were, hold on now, actually FRIENDLY, but who wouldn't be when everybody was drinking and having a great time. The gold embossed menu they handed us read the following:

Appetizers:
Sesame marinated roast duck, served on an Asian vegetable salad

Salad:
Seasonal

Main Course:
Pan fried red snapper fillet, topped with chinese style three flavored sauce, accompanied with egg fried rice and stir fried vegetables, or
Chicken parmigiana; pan fried chicken breast coated with parmesan cheese, fresh herbs, tomato salsa, served with pan fried zucchini and tagliatelle noodles

Desert:
Brioche bread and butter pudding, served with apricot coulis

Bread and Cheese

Beverages and Chocolates

We've come a long way since our fire engine special on the flight to Irkutsk, we actually broke our golden rule and ordered the snapper. It was a fine flight, and we celebrated our first crossing of the equator by testing the claim that whirlpools spin the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere. We couldn't really tell on the plane, but perhaps it was because we were twirling the swizzle sticks in our drinks. Nevertheless, we were still testing when we landed on the tiny island of Mauritius early in the morning and made our way to the immigration counter.

You'd think we'd have learned by now that there's a clear distinction between our perception of how we'd like to do something, and the reality of how it actually gets done. To give you a little insight of how we have gone about planning our travels, it usually starts with a simple, perfect idea, such as, "Let's stop by Mauritius for a couple of days on the way to Madagascar." Since we'd prefer to be flexible about how long we actually stay at a place, we usually think about our onward travel once we get bored of where we're at. Such is the life of an itinerant.

Mauritius, unlike much of Asia, is definitely marketed as a tourist destination, with plush beach resorts along white sand beaches dotted with palm trees, along with, curiously, plenty of plastic surgery clinics. As we learned, it is not the sort of place you just show up to. At the immigration counter we were asked for our itinerary and onward tickets, of which we had none. We explained that we'd be staying for a few days and buying tickets to Madagascar here in Mauritius. You'd think this had happened before at least once in this country, but by the completely flummoxed look in the immigration officer's eyes, we were his first. The conversation spiraled downhill from there, a Catch-22 logic seemingly being adopted by our hosts in the following manner:

Immigration officer: "We can't let you in without onward tickets."
Us: "Yes, but we can't buy onward tickets unless you let us in."
Immigration officer: "But we can't let you in without onward tickets."
Us: "Therefore, you should let us in so we can buy onward tickets."
Immigration officer: "But we can't let you in without onward tickets."

Repeat.

In a valiant attempt to move the record needle over one groove, we tried another tack:

Us: "Perhaps you could find us a travel agent."

Immigration officer: (Pause, the sound of brain cogs desperately churning). "Go sit over there."

We sat, the terminal now empty. An hour went by, and after much hand waving and shouting in the distance, we were waved over to the immigration window. It was explained to us that this was a highly unusual situation, which we were inclined to believe, and that someone had actually made an airline reservation for us at a local travel agent, and we were to go and pay for them as soon as we left the terminal. The immigration officer was clearly distressed at this breach in the rules because they were supposed to be actual tickets, but someone must have said it was ok, and we slipped through and grabbed our bags before he changed his mind. Outside the terminal, we promptly disregarded the reservation and left the airport in a hurry, enjoying our new status as reservation fugitives in a tropical paradise. We wanted to make ourselves scarce lest the Immigration Police sent out a posse, so we hopped on a bus headed for the capital city of Port Louis clear on the other side of the country. Not too difficult since across the country takes an hour and a half on a bus, and that's with stops, but in theory it sounded good.

From what we saw on our cross-country trip, Mauritius is a veritable bouillabaisse of cultures. The place has a kind of Caribbean Island feel to it, clean and tropical, although it's populated primarily by people of Asian, Indian and African descent, with none of them appearing particularly dominant. Maybe it's because the island is so small that everyone has to get along, but it was nice not to see any clear signs of segregation. A perfect example of this was the Hotel Bourbon we stayed at in Port Louis, owned by a man who had a Chinese mother, and Indian father and spoke French, the primary language used on the island.

Port Louis is a nice enough place as far as capital cities go. We made it down to a beautiful, recently remodeled waterfront area, where in a prime real estate spot was another immaculate, nay, actually fancy looking Pizza Hut. We've written about one of these we saw in Harbin, China at the beginning of our travels, and we didn't mention the even nicer one we saw in Beijing, and now this. Someone has to say something to the world and it might as well be us. So world, listen up: Pizza Hut is a dump. It doesn't matter if the floors aren't sticky with spilled pitchers of Coke and half chewed mouthfuls left by screaming toddlers, it's not a place you go for good food. It's a place you go when there's nowhere else to go. I hope that helps and Pizza Hut withdraws from fancy waterfront areas and goes back to its roots of teenage shopping malls in Nowhereville, USA where it belongs.

But I digress.

Anyway, after having seen pretty much the entire island in a day and having had plenty of white beaches in the Thai islands, we made it over to a travel agent and booked a flight on to Madagascar for a couple of days later. We thought we'd check out one town before we left named Mahebourg, which our guidebook said was nice, so back on the bus we went the next morning for another grueling cross-country trip to the east coast. Actually about the most grueling part about it was that people kept tripping over our backpacks which we had to put in the aisle. That and like every other bus we've ever taken outside of the U.S., no one has any grasp of the term "personal space," but by now we're used to that.

Mahebourg is a pleasant town of about 16,000 people with a real French-colonial feel to it and not a single chain restaurant. We didn't do much other than walk the streets, watch fishermen surf-cast for dinner, and as evening approached and the stars came out, look up at a very different sky. Perhaps appropriately, we spent our eighth anniversary at a little French cafe watching the world go by at a much slower pace than we're used to, in a much different place than we're used to, on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

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