Travel

A love letter to Mauritius.

Every photo I took, sentence I wrote, and piece of Mauritian food I’ve made since being back home has been a love letter from me, back to this gorgeous country.

I visited twice in my youth, once when I was about 7 and once again at around 9 or 10 years old. My senses, even back then, were captured, tantalised and switched on to the magic of a place, its people and its way of life. Before I had the words to describe it, I was taken with the rhythm and particular hum of a place, and some things have simply stayed embedded in me since. So when we had a small opportunity to go to some far corner of the world, all my childlike wonder and matured wanderlust pulled me back in the direction of Mauritius.

Nothing could have prepared me for going back and having every sense cracked wide open again in my adulthood. My memories, which had stayed with me, had of course grown blurrier. I laid down all expectation going into this, opened myself up for an entirely new experience altogether, and boy, did Mauritius deliver.

Two weeks spent travelling first around the south of the island, and the rest spent venturing up north along the coast. There wasn’t a minute that went by without curiosity — the history of the island and its people, how that history is lived today, how you taste it in the island’s food, and what stories are told in the way the locals move. It is a patchwork of countries, cultures and histories that have been woven together so richly, into a country so unique, magical and special in its being.

The more I learnt, the more I realised that this patchwork isn’t some neat celebration of multiculturalism. It is the result of centuries of people arriving, leaving, being brought here, building lives here, being displaced, mixing, surviving and making something new. Dutch, French and British colonial histories sit alongside the histories of enslaved Africans, Indian indentured labourers and Chinese migrants, among others. Languages, religions, food, music and family traditions have all travelled through those histories and somehow found a home together on this tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

You can feel it in the food especially. A dish can seem to contain several histories at once; ingredients and techniques travelling across oceans and generations, changing hands and changing shape, until they become completely Mauritian. It made me question how culture survives, not always something preserved perfectly in a museum, but as something people keep making, eating, singing, speaking and passing to one another until it becomes part of them too.

And then there is the land itself... At Ebony Forest, in the south-west of the island, The forest that exists there today is also in part an act of remembering. Much of Mauritius’ lowland forest disappeared over the last few centuries, cleared for agriculture and fuel, with the majority of its original quality native forest now gone. Ebony Forest is working to restore some of what was lost - planting native and endemic species, removing invasive plants and creating space again for the wildlife that evolved here and nowhere else by expanding their land ownership and in turn, protecting it for the first time in it's recent history.

Walking through it felt strangely poignant. Mauritius is famous for the dodo,  its beaches with turquoise waters and impossible-looking mountains, but there is so much more to the island than the postcard version of it. There are species here that exist NOWHERE else on Earth, some of them hanging on by a thread. The Pink Pigeon,  Mauritius Kestrel, and the Echo Parakeet to name just a few. An entire natural world that evolved in isolation, was profoundly disrupted, and is now being painstakingly given another chance.

It felt fitting somehow, everywhere I went, Mauritius seemed to be telling me the same thing in different languages: things can be lost without disappearing completely, and things can be returned by and to us from almost nothing.

I visited a friend of a friend in his house that is more like a living piece of artwork than a house, and their friends - drinking alouda, singing in the golden-pink setting sun, taking photos and exchanging pieces of ourselves - and it truly felt like the entire world stopped for the first time in a very long time.

That is what I keep coming back to when I think about Mauritius. Not one particular beach, or view, or photograph, but this feeling of being completely switched on to being alive. Of being somewhere with so much history beneath the surface that even an ordinary afternoon feels like it has a story attached to it.

I think that is what seven-year-old me felt too. I just have more words for it now.