Mauritius

Most people don’t know very much about Mauritius.  I know that I didn’t other than hearing that we were going there.  I now know that it was the home to the dodo bird.  The first day there Jen, Laura, Katherine, and I went to the Valley of Colours.  This is a natural occurring phenomenon where the volcanic soil oxidized leaving it different colors.  When some excavating was started they saw the different colors and stopped.  The Valley of Colours also had three waterfalls you could stop at on the way to the part where you could see the colored earth.  After that we went to Flic en Flac beach, the longest beach on Mauritius.  We ate a late lunch at a café and then went swimming as the sun went down.  There were pieces of coral everywhere so we had to be careful not to scrape up our feet walking on it.  We got back to the waterfront around 7o’clock and ate dinner at a cheap (but very tasty) Indian restaurant.  I got chicken taka which was very spicy but very tasty and bright pink in color. 

The next day I had a SAS trip called Volcano Island.  Our first stop was to a school where we were a half an hour early so had to wait a few minutes so they could get ready.  Mauritius is a very densely populated place which makes traffic around the island, especially on the small two lane roads, very congested so I think some extra travel time was allotted.  Anyway, at the school (or collage, I really don’t know) a lady talked to us and told us about the dodo bird, and the rainfall of the different regions, and about the volcano’s.  The mountains in Mauritius all look extra pointy because the volcanoes are dead and so the insides have caved in.  We stopped and saw one volcanic crater that had a lake in the middle of it.  We also stopped at a Hindu temple that had a man-made lake outside that was filled with water taken from the Ganges River in India.  My friend Tesia and I got the kohl put on our foreheads and paid a small tribute after standing during a ceremony.  I really don’t know what it was about because they didn’t really tell us but we did figure out that we were supposed to walk around this one alter 9 times, one for each planet (see Pluto is a planet).  We got back on the bus and went to an overlook where we could see the highest mountain on the island.  From there we could see a gorgeous water fall which later that day we went closer to (but still not next to).  It was amazing to see how different the flora was there, high in the mountains, compared to around the base of the mountains where there wasn’t as much rainfall.  We went and ate lunch at a really good restaurant which had an awesome view.  We bread, squash soup, chicken kabobs, and tiramisu.  It was all really good.  I was really full afterward.  I even liked the soup, which I almost never eat, but it was really good.  After lunch was when we went to the giant waterfall that we had seen earlier then we went to the 7 Coloured Earth.  The 7 Coloured Earth was like the place I had seen the day before but bigger and next to it was a giant tortoise pen with about 4 giant tortoises.  After leaving there we went to flic en flac beach for about 45 minutes.  I didn’t swim because I didn’t think it was worth it to get on swim suit and have to take it off again a few minutes later so I collected coral on the beach.  Back on the ship we had BBQ for dinner; it was really good after that long day.