Mauritius, Madagascar and Mozambique – how exotic they sound! And after eight days of prolonged pampering at sea, we were itching to go ashore at Port Louis.

#1 Port Louis, Mauritius

It’s only a four-hour flight to Mauritius from Durban, so it may be surprising that this was my first visit to this African island.

I was looking forward to its cultural diversity – nearly 70 percent of the population is Indian, brought in from the 1860s as indentured labour for the sugar plantations. The same sort of migration happened in my home town, Durban. But Mauritius was colonised by both the English and the French, and I couldn’t wait to hear Indian islanders speaking French, and the Mauritian Creole spoken by 90 percent of the 1.2 million people.

Mauritius is most famous for its beaches, and the majority of tourists go directly to one of the many luxury resorts.

You don’t see that side of the island when you dock at the capital Port Louis for less than a day, perhaps disappointing for those who, like us, who had opted for the included tour of the city. (Viking offers a free tour at each port, plus several other shore excursions that you pay for.)

(Luckily, Roy and I will be back here in October. We’re flying Air Mauritius from Paris on our way back to Durban, with a week’s layover in Mauritius, so this quick drop-in was just fine.)

The scenic tour drove us through the city streets, past Government House, and made a quick stop at the city market – just enough time to buy a traditional rattan basket sporting the essential dodo motif.

Botanic Garden

It is fair to say that Roy is not an instinctive fan of nature; we pretend to joke that he finds it vastly overrated.

What’s more, he detests any sort of long outdoor traipse, and yet even he found something to love about the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanic Garden (SSRBG), also known as the Pamplemousses Botanical Garden – its giant lily pads.

Passing showers lent a smug air to those who’d remembered their umbrellas, but in the tropical heat didn’t spoil things completely for those who hadn’t.

Spread over 62, 000 acres, SSRBG is in fact a splendid botanic garden with a lot to enjoy besides lily pads: from ebony trees and 80-plus varieties of palm to medicinal and spice gardens. It’s the oldest botanic garden in the southern hemisphere, and one of the  most highly regarded in the world.

#2 Fort Dauphin, Madagascar

Disturbing the slumber of Sir Roy before 9am is a risky business – “Arrhhhh nooo!… the light!… the light!” – but a sixth sense got me out of bed and on to our stateroom balcony just as the Viking Sun was nosing into Port D’Ehola.

I saw a pretty harbour on a gorgeous day, then the ship did some nifty manoeuvring to get alongside, effectively swinging itself 180 degrees around to reveal a stunning view of waves curling on to miles of pristine beach against a background of mountains. Madagascar!

D’Ehola is a fairly new port that was built by Rio Tinto for the export of mineral sands. It’s a fifteen-minute drive from the nearest town, Fort Dauphin (aka Taoloagnaro), in the south of the country – more than 1,000 kilometres from the capital, Antananarivo, which is located in the country’s Central Highlands.

Just to set the scene, Madagascar was a French colony and its people speak French. It’s the 8th poorest country in the world (Mozambique is the 6th poorest), the average person scraping by on under US$500 a year. Tourism is growing, however. It’s the country’s second biggest earner – and the Viking Sun is port Ehola’s first cruise ship of the “winter”* season.

(*The mercury was forecast to rise to 31 degrees Centigrade that day.)

Roy remembers flying to Antananarivo on business, some time before he met me: vague memories of a dirty city and a crummy office. But as this was my first visit to Madagascar – and quite possibly the last, judging by my beloved’s lack of enthusiasm – I could not wait to get ashore.

I can see the beach! Surely I can just walk there? No, they announce firmly over the ship PA system:  we’re not allowed to walk through the port alone.

On the Buses

Yesterday’s port talk had taken pains to prepare us for uncomfortable buses and poor facilities ashore. In fact, I thought this tour was one of the best yet, with toothless Jean at the wheel and erudite Bosco as our guide. For the first time, we used the QuietVox apparatus provided in every cabin; it does away with the need for sound system in the bus, and means you can easily hear your guide from a fair distance while touring the various sites.

Yet I liked the yellow vintage school buses hired for the tours; not having air conditioning made it easier to take photographs through the window.

We drove through the market – a  long road crammed either side with all sorts of stalls; later, I heard a couple of Americans marvelling that they’d never seen anything like it.

At Fort Dauphin town hall we were surrounded by vendors (many of them children) of tourist tat: postcards of lemurs (“one dollar”), sachets of vanilla or peppercorns (“five dollars”), traditional lamba sarongs (“ten dollars”, which rapidly dwindled to three dollars, so I bought one).

This kind of jostling can quickly become threatening, as we heard later through accounts of husbands and wives being separated, children’s fingers going into their pockets to look for money. Such desperate poverty is never pretty.

Lemme see Lemurs!

Despite my husband’s unequivocal reluctance to go back on shore after our morning tour, I was fully determined to see lemurs. To his credit, Roy would not let me go off alone to Nahampoana Reserve, just 7km inland from Fort Dauphin.

After getting off the shuttle bus in town, we were again surrounded and separated – this time by an insistent press of taxi drivers and guides – until Roy unilaterally settled the matter. He chose the proud owner of the oldest, crappiest and least roadworthy vehicle in the whole of Madagascar to convey us to the reserve along one of Africa’s most terrifyingly potholed roads.

The tiny 1960s Renault taxi was painted bright pink, with matching fabric swatches covering its decrepit seats. So utterly shot was the gearbox that we had to stop en route for the driver to get out, open the hood, and use a handy rock to knock the thing out of the gear in which it was stuck. Really!

It was shortly after this that the back seat succumbed to our combined weight and broke, emitting a horrible sort of death rattle – and Roy suddenly regained his sense of humour. It was impossible to sulk in such ridiculous circumstances.

So, in the end I got my Madagascan adventure, complete with white lemurs, ring-tailed lemurs, and even brown lemurs, plus a lovely little tenrec, a mammal that looks like a hedgehog but is unrelated to the hedgehog family. Big thanks to our guide Kally!

#3 Maputo, Mozambique

Roy knows Maputo fairly well. Back in the early eighties, he used to fly from Durban to Nelspruit and then drive to the Mozambican capital in the firm’s Datsun 120Y to do business at the port.

This was during the Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992) that followed the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal. At the border, Roy would pick up a Frelimo soldier or two – they, together with the distribution of a carton or so  of cigarettes, would garner the necessary goodwill to get him through the roadblocks in good time.

The country is still suffering the effects of the brutal conflict that killed over a million people and has been  described as a Pyrrhic victory for Frelimo, still the ruling party. Worse, trouble is brewing once again, with reports of government-led violence, not only against the so-called Renamo rebels in the northwest, but against civilians in central Mozambique. (Click here for more.)

As if that were not enough, disastrous cyclones continue to ravage this poor country. Cyclone Idai in March 2019 affected more than 1.5 million people; as I write this, Cyclone Kenneth continues to wreak havoc.

Bravo to the captain and crew of the Viking Sun, which put together a substantial donation – towels, bedding, provisions and more worth around US$50,000. From the deck, I watched the huge parcels being offloaded for collection by the Maputo branch of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

City Tour

One of the main sights of Maputo, says our guide, the iron house below was designed by the famous Frenchman Eiffel (or perhaps an associate, says Google) to be the governor’s residence. Literally clad in iron, it was totally unfit for purpose, being a refrigerator in winter and an oven in summer. Now, it’s the city’s tourism information centre.

Enough sight-seeing – it was time for a beer at the iconic Polana Serena Hotel, built in 1922. Roy recalls how sadly threadbare the hotel was when he used to stay there in the early eighties; even food was severely limited. But in 2010, the Grande Dame of Maputo was restored to its former glory.

We could not leave without visiting the bar and toasting the Polana with Mozambique’s most famous beer: Dos M (meaning 2Ms).

So long, Mozambique, but not goodbye! My next blog is all about driving up from Durban to southern Mozambique with Sally and Jon Chapman to spend a week at their fabulous beach cottage. Don’t miss it.

Speaking of missing, we’re already missing some of the great people we got to know during our month at sea, like Ingrid, below…

Mainly, though, I am missing these guys dreadfully. For a whole month, I never once had to worry about about what to cook for dinner!