Port Louis, Mauritius

This island nation is the most peaceful and most well-to-do country of Africa. It was a new port for us.

A lovely sky just before sunrise.

There were dozens of Chinese fishing boats rafted in groups in the harbor. Note the small green dinghy in the foreground.

 
Here is a telephoto of that dinghy and a closer look at some of the fishing boats. The captain said later that they were from Taiwan.

A look back at our ship from the other side of the harbor where the ship's shuttle bus dropped us off.

This island is where the Dodo birds lived and went extinct with the arrival of humans. They are remembered fondly. These dodos were in a shopping mall. We were looking for an ATM to get some local money so we could take a bus. The ATMs and the banks would not deal with us, so we ended up at a money changer with a long line of locals, but we were escorted to the head of the line.

This colorful umbrella-covered square was particularly attractive in the early morning light.

 
A stone mosaic baobab tree in a shopping mall. Now that we had local currancy, we took a local bus to the gardens.

 
We watched the honeycreepers on this orange geiger tree.

Something knocked over all these coconut palms years ago. They all grew more or less vertically from then on, which makes quite a statement as to their resiliency.

The lotuses were lovely.

There were a dozen of this aldabra giant tortoise (Aaldabrachelys gigantea) in an enclosure. There used to be other giant tortoises on Mauritius, but like the dodo, they did not survive the arrival of human settlers. Here's link with more information on those tortoises.

Several deer were also in an enclosure near the tortoises.

 
We've seen lots of screw pines (Pandanus spp.) in our travels with their iconic aerial roots that brace the plants, but we'd not seen the flower before. Also, here is their iconic fruit.

 
We were struck by size of these fern-covered palms. Compared to other palms, not only were they tall, they had huge fronds and thick trunks. But the most striking feature was the massive inflorescence.

They are talipot palms (Corypha umbraculifera), which are native to India and have an unusual life cycle. They bloom only once when they reach 80 years old or so, and then they die. Their flowering structures are the largest of any flowering plant, with a million or more florets.

We stopped in a shelter in the garden for our lunch and since there are no rules for bring food ashore like in New Zealand and Australia, we'd made sandwiches from the offerings at breakfast.

The garden had the huge and seemingly obligatory Amazon water lilies (Victoria amazonica).

A striated heron (Butorides striata) is also known as mangrove heron, little green heron or green-backed heron and has a wide distribution including African and Asian coastal regions.

A lovely folkloric dance on the dock was our send off.

An overall view of Port Lewis, the largest city on Mauritius.

With a telephoto of the hill behind the city and to the upper left of the above photo.

What was interesting to us was how much this city and this island reminded us of India--the population with so many of Indian descent, the high volume of Hindu temples, and just the overall "feel" of the city. The next day, we visited our next island port, La Possession on Reunion Island.

La Possession, Reunion Island, a French possession

We'd been to this port in 2018, so go to that page to see what we did that time.

For the first time on this cruise, we took a HAL shore excursion. It was an 8-hour tour to view waterfalls in a huge caldera in the center of the island, to visit a vanilla plantation, to have lunch, and to stop at a craft market and shopping area. Bertrand, our guide spoke French as his first language, but did a good job of keeping up a running commentary for the whole bus trip with Reunion history and his personal history.

A Hindu temple through the bus window.

The first stop was the vanilla plantation, where most of their vanilla plants, which are orchid vines, are grown in screen houses like this one. Vanilla planifolia is a species of vanilla orchid, which is native to Mexico and Belize. In its native region, it's pollinated be several species of bees, but when it's grown in the islands in the Indian Ocean, those bees are not present, so all of the flowers must hand pollinated in order to produce fruit, which is not a bean since it's not in the bean family.

A worker on the vanilla plantation described the process in French.

 
Bertrand translated the French for us. The vanilla bean-shaped fruit takes about 5 months to mature.

The leaves are used as mulch.

There were two buses at the plantation at one time. That's a lot of presenting to get through all the material.

We were shown the more natural and sustainable shade-grown vanilla method where it was growing on Dracaena trunks. (Dracaena is a widely-grown tropical house plant with narrow, variegated leaves.)

 
Also in the shade-grown section, we found this pretty white flower and a small papaya tree growing in the understory.

It was interesting to see the papaya flowers.

A coffee urn was in the covered alcove of this yellow building. The coffee was labeled vanilla coffee and was quite good, but when they added creamy rum to the coffee, it was much better.

Inside that yellow building were a few stations where people explained further aspects of the harvest and how the fruit needed to age for two years before the curing or fermenting could begin. Finally, the insides could then be scraped from the fruit and mixed with alcohol and other fluids to create the extract. This is why pure vanilla extract is so expensive.

 
Also, in the gardens around this site were coffee shrubs and orchid trees which are not related to the vanilla orchid.

Taking photos of the many waterfalls through the bus windows was problematic because of the motion and the many wires in the way. There were many switchbacks and hairpin turns on this part of the excursion.

We stopped at a scenic overlook.

 
Angel trumpet tree and heliconias also decorate the overlook area.

 
Then were were dropped off in a tourist spot where you could buy souvenirs.

We opted to walk to the outskirts of the village.

We found a yards-long spider colony. This photo does not begin to capture the extent of all the spiders there.

 
Back in the village, we talked with some locals while we waited for the bus.

 
We stopped at another overlook which featured many waterfalls.

 
There is a trail to the main waterfall behind us in this photo. We were envious of the guy with the red shirt who had hiked out there. Bertrand said that there is a swimming hole at the base of the waterfall.

Then we went to the mountain village where we had lunch.

 
The restaurant was set up to accommodate two busloads of tourists. There was a sign at the front door apologizing to their regular local customers that they would be full for today's lunch. Our bus arrived first, so we got the outside tables, while a second bus from our ship got the inside tables. We were happy to have the breeze.

It was a lovely lunch beginning with a pastry filled with a chaote (a type of green squash) paste. The delicious main dishes were fish and pineapple stew and chicken and pineapple stew. Served with a pink fruit smoothie with optional strong alcholic beverage added. Followed by a nice pastry dessert.

 
We waited for the bus in the village square.

Inside that church...

Odd street art from the bus...

A church in the distance from the drop-off point for our final 45-minute stop at a craft market and shopping area.

The French words above this mural are some type of salutation to a queen alluding to dark shadows and stars.

This was the entrance to the craft market, but we walked on by on our way to a garden that was not too far away.

 
On the way, we stopped to take a photo of this woman. Her son translated our request. She wanted to know why we were interested. Dean said because you're beautiful, which after translation made her smile.

We passed a few museums in this neighborhood, which sometimes included black and white cutouts showing the original families.

After our 10-minute fast walk, we reached the garden.

Just inside the garden gates, a pigeon guru.

He asked Dean if he spoke English. He liked seeing the photos that Dean took and said that they were beautiful.

The garden was only a few acres, but it included a water lily pond.

And there was a museum in the garden housed in a building that was a replica of the White House in Washington, DC. Unlike that white house, this one had no fence and all the windows were wide open.

There were groups of kids in the garden apparently with their teachers for supervised games.

 
A lovely little family where the mom wore a leopard skin top and cat make-up was having lunch in the gardens. We walked quickly back to the craft market so we could make the bus back to the ship, but we had a bit of extra time so we made a quick tour of the craft market. In the end the whole tour was about eight and a half hours and we saw much more than we would have on our own.

Our next scheduled port was to have been Tolanaro on the south end of Madagascar, but it was canceled for several reasons, but mostly because of a tropical cyclone called Freddy. Bummer. So, it was four sea days until our first stop on the actual African continent, Maputo, Mozambique.