After three days doing business in and around Port Louis, I used the weekend to drive the island. The first stop was the botanical garden, where I encountered the Victoria amazonica of the last post. It's a fine garden but few things are labelled, so it didn't serve the usual purpose of a botanical garden for me. But I got a few arresting photos, including the shot above of the fruit of a Lagerstroemia, the "crepe-myrtle," which nobody grows for the fruit. I also spent sometime watching a squirming, leafless liana -- the botanical equivalent of a knotted freeway network mandating pointless motion.
Then I set off northeast, toward the coast, though of course all directions are toward the coast.
Driving in Mauritius is surprisingly easy, nothing at all like the aggressive and riotous driving in India. Still, to be a motorist is to be removed from much of what goes on. Towns had a healthy knot of intense pedestrian activity at the centre, but nowhere to park, indeed nowhere to stop safely. (This is part of why I have so few photos of towns.) Over time, I figured out that in this situation, you just pull to the side of the road so that a bus can pass ...
... and half-block the road while you do your business. Roads in town are thus routinely reduced to one lane, but the Mauritians are mostly polite and relaxed about these obstructions It's one of the reasons motorists shouldn't be in a hurry here, and why the buses have trouble staying on schedule.
The north and east coast is studded with major resorts designed exclusively for foreign tourists. They feel very much like enclaves, with guarded entrances. I went into one of them and felt I'd exited Mauritius and arrived in a Platonic form of the high-end tropical resort -- over-the-top architecture, efficient local staff, and tight-faced Europeans bent on competitive leisure. The needs of these tourists dominate the east coast towns, yielding bizarre disjunctions such as a black block devoted to the fashion label Boss ...
... right across the street from a small Hindu temple ...
While the resorts take up a lot of the coast, there are plenty of public beaches, often with Casuarina equisetifolia trees, probably the second most iconic tree to signify the tropical beach, after coconut palms of course. Casuarina trees yield a feathery silhouette that meets many of the needs of tropical marketing.
Once I was beyond the resort towns, a fine mountains-meeting-sea landscape unfolded. And here, I could finally notice the sugarcane.
Like many tropical countries, Mauritius has found Saccharum to be the most effective cash crop, and has planted it just about everywhere. On mountains it covers the lower slopes leaving only the steep upper slopes for native vegetation. From a distance it looks like a wash of almost silvery green. Here it's the middle band between mangroves in the foreground and the upper slopes behind:
Sugarcane is in the background in many of my shots of Mauritius, one of those facts of life that's constant enough to disappear from the attention most of the time. Here it glows on a lower slope in the sidelight of late afternoon.
I stayed the night in Mahébourg at the southeast tip of the island. The next day's drive is the next post.
Mauritius is among the top holiday resorts in the world. It is situated in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar and the huge coastline that are protected by coral reefs. The breathtaking beauty of this island which is enriched with fauna and flora.
http://travels423.blogs.experienceproject.com/179064.html
Posted by: Robin Smith | 2009.09.24 at 09:40 PM