Creature of the Shade

mauritius, day 2

After the drive described in the last post, I stayed the Saturday night in Mahébourg.  (Auberge Aquarella; I recommend it.)   Early the next morning, after chatting a bit with a bus driver at the local station, I wandered out to the beach and took one of my oddest photographs.

Dotted along the coast are a number of tiny shrines, often just on little ledges between the road and the sea.  Most are Hindu but this one is obviously Christian.  It's wonderfully sited on a little rock, so that it's an island at least at high tide.

Everyone who sees this photo wants to get closer.

Then they ask, wait, who's that inside?

I'm not sure.  An image of a man in a loincloth.  Jesus?  As with many things, I like this level of uncertainty.  And I love the idea that small rocks on the edge of the sea are the place for shrines.

Then I drove west across the island, trying to keep to back roads.

I stopped for an hour or so at a small farmstead that's been developed as a tourist attraction.  That is to say: they've set up an entry booth, and a shop, and they charge admission. Other than that, it looks like a farm, dedicated to research on sustainable agriculture -- in other words, something, anything, other than sugarcane. 

This enclosure had me wondering if they were appealing to children who knew the story of the tortoise and the hare.

I was headed generally for the Black River Gorges National Park in the southwest highlands of the island, but viewed from the road, the park was a disappointment.  It appeared to be a series of former plantations.  I'd drive through a patch of pure pine, then pure eucalyptus, then pure melaleuca.  But at one of the overlooks there was a chance to get down into more varied foliage.  My irreverent camera, bucking my better judgment, sought out the absurd.

But overall the view southwest looked like this.  The rock in the middle distance is on the coast ...

When I drove on down to the coast, the same rock looked like this.

The west coast is dry (sugarcane must be irrigated) and moderately touristed.  The volcanic landforms are especially obvious.

I made a brief stop at the Casela Bird Park, a small zoo over-laden with secondary attractions (Minature golf?).  No luck photographing birds, but I did find a small indigenous garden in a very remote corner of the place, as though it were tolerated as the hobby of an eccentric uncle.  It yielded just one photogenic Mauritius native, a Dombeya acutangula.   

I drove back east along the island's southern coast, one of the least touristed shores.  It was a pleasant Sunday late afternoon, and everyone seemed out in the strees and parks and beaches of the coastal towns.  And despite the lack of tourists, someone had taken the trouble to plant the highway with coconut palms.  (Planted rows of trees on rural highways are surprisingly common all over the island.) 

So that's what I can offer.  No great drama.  No great summing up.   Just a scrap of palm in the wind, and the sugarcane.

mauritius, a drive down the east coast

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.  

confronting vegetation: Victoria amazonica

Port Louis, Mauritius

It's remarkable that for all the tropical wandering I've done, I'd never seen this giant water lily before.  It's the biggest draw at the main botanical garden in Mauritius, but like most things on that small volcanic island, it's from far away.  

 

 

And if you think botanical names are just for geeks, go ahead and call this the Giant Water Lily.  Its real name, Victoria amazonica, almost qualifies as a short poem or demi-haiku about Britannia's masculine confidence in the service of a fighting queen.  The Brits didn't conquer the Amazon of course, but they were always on the lookout for spectacular tropical plants to extend the horticultural dimensions of empire. Wikipedia tells the story of the 19th century race to be the the first to cultivate the plant and bring it to flower in Britain, with nothing but coal-fired heating to protect it from England's winter.  

 

 

 

Water lilies are engaging mostly because they hide the machinery, thus satisfying the human craving for compelling illusions.  Unless you can really see into the water, each pad and each flower looks like a separate happening. The stalks that hold the plant together underwater are dark red, a little darker than the red of the outside pad wall.  You have to look closely to see them.  

 

 

Wikipedia says the flower is white the first day it appears, turning pink the second.   If that's true the flowers must be very fleeting, because here most of them were white.

 

 

New leaves look a little rougher as they unfurl.

 

 

 

I suspect the leaves are the real reason this species so captivated the British.  They can get to 3m (!) in diameter, but the ones in Mauritius are only about 1m across.  The wall around each leaf, about 10cm high, makes each seem a small stage. It's hard to resist the temptation to step on one, perhaps try to ride it somewhere. 

mauritius ... the big picture

Last month, I was abruptly invited to go to Mauritius for a week, to research a possible project for our firm.  I have many photos but the thoughts have come slowly.  It's hard to write about travel without judging, reducing, summing up, closing down. 

In my three weeks in India last year there was no danger of that.  India is vast in so many dimensions that no description will touch it; as my guidebook warned: "whatever you can say about India, the opposite is also true."  In India the conscious visitor feels far too small to matter, so it's easy to just start writing without worrying much about truth. 

To jet into tiny Mauritius, by contrast, is to feel too large.  Mauritius has a bit over a million people on an island so small you can drive across it in a couple of hours, so it was hard to feel as infinitesimal, as much a fly on the wall, as the traveling writer needs to be.  

The facts?  Mauritius is the penultimate in a chain of volcanoes resulting from the drift of continental plates over a stationary column of magma rising from the earth.  (A similar process on the Pacific Plate has dribbled out all the islands of Hawai'i; the magma column there is still under the Big Island, and still spewing.)  The magma column that spat out Mauritius is still at work on nearby Réunion. 

So here are all the classic features of the emergent volcanic island:  dramatic mountains, fertile black soils, and a small palette of native plants and animals.  These were limited to things that could get there oversea, and evolved only for local conditions, so of course many went extinct in the face of the human invasion.  The docile, flightless dodo is only the most famous of the vanished indigenes.

So today a collection of introduced plants, mostly from Asia and Africa, dominates the scene.  Parks are hymns to the European colonial vision of the tropics, with a focus on spectacular palms, strelitizias, and of course, figs:

People?  None at all until the 17th century, then a Dutch visit followed by a more through French settlement and colonization.  Later conquered by the British, and finally made independent late in the 20th century.  Ethnically the population is about half Indian, the rest mostly African with a few Arabs and Chinese; there's just a scattering of white faces, almost all from the top end of the economic ladder.  A developing world country, then, assembled by colonial powers but populated from elsewhere.

There is only one real city, Port Louis, with just a few hundred thousand people.  It's on the northwest coast.


It has many of the textures of a developing-world city, but also a striking collection of very modern tall buildings, rising above the old city like an alien implant.  Judging from their design, these are all quite recent, and the architectural standard is surprisingly high.



But the public street is still very developing-world.  Sidewalks are intermittent, rough, and entangled with the needs of monsoonal drainage.  As in India, people just walk in the street when they need to.


Mauritius manages its religious diversity well.  Islam and Hinduism are prominent, Christianity a little less so.



One of the most peculiar features about Mauritius is the interplay of the three main languages.  The government speaks English, business happens in French, and village life happens mostly in a French-based Mauritian Creole.  The English-French dichotomy is especially striking, because as near as I could tell, everyone is functional in both.

The result is strikingly unlike any other multilingual country I've visited.  In India, or eastern Canada, or parts of the US Southwest, you get used to signs whose text is repeated in two or three languages.  Mauritius has none of these signs; instead, signs just seem to be in whatever language someone felt like using, and you're expected to understand it.  Thus my hotel was on Rue St Georges. 

But the nearest cross-street was Mere Barthelemy Street.

I've seen plenty of streets, and plenty of rues, but I'd never seen a rue and a street intersect before.  This is nothing like bilingual Ottawa, in Canada, where every street is marked as both "St." and "rue": 

No, in Mauritius, this is just a street, and that's just a rue, and if you're going to get around, you're just going to learn both languages.

And so it goes.  The government website is strictly in English, with no mention of options for speakers of other languages, yet the sound of English is rare on the street and very rare in business.  Business signs are almost all French only, and staff will greet you in French, shifting to a stiff functional English only on request.   

Five of the seven days I was there, I was in and around Port Louis, enjoying it but wondering if there was anything I hadn't seen somewhere else.  Finally, of course, it was the most worn textures of the city that seemed more authentic, like the image above.  Even here there's nothing to tell me I'm not anywhere in the Francophone tropics, but at least I can know, intellectually, that spots of decay and weathering are as unique as snowflakes. 

Weathering also suggests a return of the natural, as though each door, as it welcomes the guest, is also welcoming time.