Six days, one island, and three Mallyas
Every family holiday in our house starts the same way. Wifey shortlists, dotty vetoes, and I look for the hotel where the girls won’t complain. Mauritius survived all three rounds (10+ iterations, ditching Seychelles, Fiji, Andaman, and Lakshadweep). It had the right climate for our travel dates, beaches for dotty, sightseeing & photos for Wifey, and a VISA on arrival for a man who is tired of paperwork before booking vacations.
This is the day-by-day: what we did, what it cost us in dignity, and what I would tell a friend planning the same trip.
The trip at a glance
| Day | Plan | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 15 | Fly BLR → MRU, check in | That sunset |
| Fri 16 | North tour: Port Louis | Daal puri, Fort Adelaide, Le Caudan |
| Sat 17 | Day at leisure | Doing absolutely nothing, professionally |
| Sun 18 | East: Belle Mare, Ile aux Cerfs | Parasailing, GRSE waterfall |
| Mon 19 | South: Vallée des Couleurs, Grand Bassin | Zipline, Nepalese bridge |
| Tue 20 | Fly MRU → BLR | One last sunrise |
A 04:15 flight and a sunset that made up for it
Any flight that departs at 04:15 is not a flight. It is a hostage situation with a seatbelt sign. IndiGo’s non-stop out of Bengaluru Terminal 2 takes about five hours and forty-five minutes, and Mauritius is ninety minutes behind IST, so you land at 08:30 local time feeling like you’ve gained a morning and lost a soul.
The meet-and-greet was waiting at the arrival gate, we piled into a shared transfer and headed to Le Méridien Ile Maurice at Pointe aux Piments on the north-west coast. The day was officially “leisure at the hotel,” which in practice meant a nap, lunch, swim, and an evening on the beach waiting for the sun to do its thing.
It did its thing.
Tip
The west and north-west coast faces the sunset; the east coast gets the sunrise. If golden hour matters to you, pick your hotel by which way it faces.
Port Louis: a fort, a flatbread and a lot of wind
Jet lag has exactly one perk: you are wide awake at 05:50 when the resort looks like this.
After breakfast the shared coach took us into Port Louis, the capital. The French named the harbour in the 1720s, the British took over a century later, and today it is a busy port city where you will hear Creole, French, English, Hindi and Bhojpuri within a few streets of each other. A large share of Mauritians trace their roots to India, many through the indentured labourers who arrived in the 1800s. As a Bengaluru family, we kept meeting signs of home in unexpected places.
The daal puri stop
Every serious city tour should include food, and this one included daal puri, Mauritius’ most famous street snack. Think of a soft, thin flatbread with ground yellow split-peas cooked into it, rolled around a ladle of butter-bean curry, tomato sauce, chutney and pickle. It costs very little, it is gone in about ninety seconds, and you will immediately want a second one. Have the second one.
Fort Adelaide: views, walls and weather
Fort Adelaide, locally called the Citadel, was built by the British in the 1830s on a hill overlooking the city. It never fought a battle, which makes it the most successful piece of defensive architecture I’ve ever seen: built to spec, never stress-tested, still standing. What it does do brilliantly is views. You get all of Port Louis, the harbour, the mountains behind, and the Champ de Mars, a horse-racing track dating to 1812 and one of the oldest in the southern hemisphere.
Le Caudan Waterfront
Next came free time at Le Caudan Waterfront, the harbour-side mall-and-promenade that opened in 1996 and is celebrating its thirtieth birthday this year, which is why there is a giant “30” sign everywhere. Highlights: the umbrella-covered lane that every visitor photographs (we are every visitor), a superyacht parked like someone’s Sunday car, and shade.
The afternoon on the itinerary was more refined: a tea tasting at Kuan Fu, and the Château de Labourdonnais, a colonial mansion from 1859 set in orchards, finishing with fruit juices and a rum tasting. The rum tasting was way better than the tea tasting.
Tip
Shared tours run to a schedule but start late when someone else on the coach is late. Plan Port Louis as a half-day of things you actually want and treat the rest as a bonus.
The REST Day
The itinerary describes this day in three words: “Day at leisure.” I would like to describe it in zero. We walked, swam, snorkeled, ate, and napped, and I didn’t open outlook.
Some systems need scheduled maintenance window. The “Mallya’s” needed one too.
Water day: tubes, parachutes and a waterfall
After breakfast we drove across the island to the east coast. The first stop was Belle Mare beach, where the water sports (parasailing, tube rides, undersea walks) are optional and paid separately. “Optional,” for the record, is not a word Dotty recognizes.
The tube ride
The concept is simple: two adults and a kid (who counts as a third adult whenever adventure is involved) sit in an inflatable sofa, and a speedboat drags it across the lagoon at a speed specifically calibrated to make middle-aged men question their choices.
Parasailing: bounded autonomy, in the sky
I have written an entire blog series on bounded autonomy: let the agent act freely, but keep the controls in a layer it can’t override. I didn’t expect to experience it at 10:45 on a Sunday, strapped to a parachute. That is exactly what parasailing is. You fly as high as you like, enjoy the view, wave at strangers, and the whole time a rope ties you to a boat run by someone who decides when you come down.
Dotty and Wifey went up together. I went solo, mostly so nobody would hear me.
Ile aux Cerfs
Around 12:30, a shared speedboat took us across to Île aux Cerfs, the little island off the east coast that features in roughly every Mauritius postcard. The name is French for “Island of Deer” (île is island, cerfs is deer), and the story behind it goes back to the Dutch, who settled Mauritius from 1638 to 1710. Around 1639 they brought Javan rusa deer from their colony in Java as a ready source of fresh meat for settlers and passing ships. With no natural predators, the deer thrived and spread across the island’s forests. When the French took over in the 18th century, they named this islet after the deer that were found there in numbers. There are no deer on Île aux Cerfs today, though their descendants still roam the mainland, especially in hunting estates and around the Black River Gorges. The island is now known for its white-sand beaches, turquoise water, water sports and golf course. On our visit it had seaweed on the sand, clouds overhead and impossibly clear shallows, which is the most honest description of a postcard you will get.
GRSE waterfall
The bonus was a speedboat run up the Grand River South East, the island’s longest river, to the GRSE waterfall. The boat noses right up to the falls, everyone stands up at once, and the boatman develops a sudden interest in stability. It is loud and white and spectacular, and it’s included with the tour.
The south: 23-colour earth and adventure activities
The south of Mauritius is a different island. You climb onto the central plateau through Plaine Champagne, the coast drops away behind you, and the clouds come down to meet the car. It is greener, cooler and moodier than the beaches. Pack a light jacket.
Vallée des Couleurs Nature Park
The main event was the Vallée des Couleurs Nature Park (they now brand it simply as VALLÉ). It is a nature-and-adventure park on the hills of the south: waterfalls, forest trails, a famous patch of multi-coloured volcanic earth, and a menu of adrenaline activities priced separately.
The park’s signature is its “23-coloured earth”: bare volcanic soil weathered into bands of red, purple, ochre, brown and grey by the minerals in it. It does not look like a landscape so much as a heat-map someone forgot to label.
The signature zipline I signed up for
You are clipped into a harness lying face-down, Superman-style, and launched across the valley high above the trees. The first two seconds are pure regret. Every second after that is the best thing you did all week.
The Nepalese bridge
The Nepalese bridge is a long, narrow, swaying suspension bridge strung across the valley. It is perfectly safe and you are clipped in the whole way. Your legs are not told this.
Tip
The adventure activities (zipline, bridge, buggy, quads) are add-ons to the tour and paid at the park. The park’s own photographers shoot everything; their photos made up a big chunk of this blog. Worth it.
Grand Bassin
On the way back we stopped at Grand Bassin (Ganga Talao), a crater lake that is one of the most sacred Hindu sites on the island. It is guarded by the 108-foot Mangal Mahadev statue of Lord Shiva, which you see from far down the road. During Maha Shivaratri, pilgrims walk here from across Mauritius. Standing there, more than 4,000 km from home, with Shiva watching over a lake in the Indian Ocean, was one of the quieter and more moving moments of the trip.
The rest of the list was Curepipe’s colonial streets, the Trou aux Cerfs volcanic crater (only trees!), and a model-ship workshop where the replicas are handcrafted in astonishing detail (we bought a souvenier).
One last sunrise
The flight home was at 09:30, so we were up before 04:30. For once, nobody complained. We walked to the beach, looked at the pier one last time, and said very little.
More TIPS
We didn’t see all of Mauritius. We saw a fort, a few waterfalls, a lot of sea, and each other, for six days, without a laptop in the way.
- Paperwork first. Fill in the Mauritius All-in-One Travel digital form before you fly. Coming back, Indian immigration (due to Ebola) now wants the online e-Arrival card within 72 hours before landing. Do both at the hotel, not in the queue.
- Sharing transfers are good value but run on group time. Keep your expectations about pick-up times flexible.
- Leave a day empty. The leisure day was the best decision in the itinerary.
- East coast for water, south for drama, Port Louis for food. If you only have three tour days, that’s the right split.
- Budget for the add-ons. Parasailing, tube rides, the zipline and the buggy are all extra. They were also the things dotty talked about on the flight home. 2L INR.
- Eat the daal puri. Then eat another one.
- There is more. There is more wildlife: parks, whale-watching, dolphin-watching, swimming with the dolphins, etc. Book in advance. We could not get under-water submarine in-time.
