Ship Tease

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We didn’t have a whole lot of time in Mauritius, and I didn’t really feel like putting out the effort to do all the pretty parts and all the in-depth cultural parts in the 30 hours that we had, and I’ve been sort of exhausted from all the travel, so I decided to just chill out and do the pretty parts of Mauritius.  So I think I’m basically going to do this all in one post, and it won’t be too long.

Just some background on Mauritius and its culture and whatnot first.  It’s a very very small island about five hundred miles east of Madagascar and is considered part of Africa by geographers.  It’s about 60km from North to South and about 40km from West to East.  Port Louis in the Northwest is one of its nine provinces and while it’s the smallest, it’s also the capital, the most populated, and the most important.  It’s a very young island geologically, about half the age of Hawaii, and it’s one of the only islands on the planet that is completely ringed by a coral reef.  There are also some huge jagged mountains in the middle parts of the island which are visible everywhere, because it’s so damn small, there’s always a mountain in your line of view.

There are no native inhabitants of the island.  There’s no society that was beaten to death when colonizers came in, etc.  Some Arabs were the first people to show up, and that was sometime around 800.  I think sometime in the 1500s some Europeans rolled in and brought in the sugar plantations, and I think in about 1710 the French rolled in and called it Ile Maurice.  A while later Britain got pissed off at France for beating them somewhere else, and so they retaliated by taking over Mauritius in 1810 and renaming it.  It stayed under their control until 1968, when it became an independent democratic regime which has had only one “political scare” in its short history.  Basically, some sort of fringe group started causing trouble and scaring people and elections were put on hold for a year or something, but after they were taken care of, elections have taken place on time and freely with no intimidation since.

The government and people of Mauritius are incredibly receptive to the outside world in general and it does them quite well for the most part.  The island has a few main racial groups, the largest being of Indian descent, then next African, then Arab, European, and Chinese.  About 80% of the people speak Creole, but everyone understands “proper” French as well, and most of their media is in French.  English is their official language, though only about 1% of the population speaks it, and most people maintain their “mother tongue” as a third language to use in the home.

As for the government, they do a pretty good job in general.  Crime is pretty low, especially race-based crime, which is great considering that every group is a minority in Mauritius.  Education is provided for everyone, and they’ll help pay for university if you can’t.  Essentially no one is homeless or starving, and if they are, it’s typically because they don’t take advantage of government programs designed to help them.  When the government realized that sugar plantations needed less physical labor, they took action quickly and opened up a duty-free port in Port Louis, and it was so successful in creating jobs that the government actually had to go abroad and ask people to come in and fill positions.

So yeah, it’s a pretty cool, chill place.  Everyone fits in even though they’re all very different.  You can never tell a tourist from native unless they open their mouth and don’t speak Creole.  The culture is fairly progressive but not incredibly.  People are allowed to date and have premarital sex and there are billboards with scantily clad girls, but they’re still pretty afraid of homosexuals although hate crime is rare at the very least.  For fun they go to the beach or play pool or go to a bar or a casino or watch TV/movies, and there’s a pretty strong local culture of music/dance/fashion called sega which sometimes mixes with reggae into what they call seggae. 

Oh, and it’s also amazingly beautiful.  When we went snorkeling, I hardly even wanted to go in the water, I just wanted to sit on the boat and look at the coast and the mountain and the trees and just stare at the water and how blue and clear and beautiful it was.  I did go in for like 15 minutes or something but I honestly spent more time just admiring how beautiful the water was.