Mauritius’s past enhances its beauty

I was walking with two lion cubs through Mauritius’s Casela nature reserve, a wilderness evocative of Africa. The feral creatures were trotting along beside me, completely free, turning around every now and then to snap or whipping their heads back if I touched them too close to their necks.

“You’ve got to be vigilant,” whispered Ben, their young Zimbabwean manager. “You’ve got to give them respect. You can’t do anything unexpected.” Three other visitors also kept their distance from the cubs as we walked for an hour through the wild.

Not many minutes later, a cheetah was running his rough tongue up and down my palm while three others were languidly stretched out beside him.

“You see that?” said Ben, suddenly pulling back his hand. “I took my mind off him for a second – and he bit me!

“It’s affectionate,” he went on, not really reassuring me at all. “But cheetahs’ coats are very tough. Our skin is a millimetre thick if you’re lucky. So they don’t bleed the way we do.”

Indeed not. And yet to meet the big cats within an hour or so of all the plush resorts that line the western beaches of Mauritius, seemed to speak for the many ways in which this island in the Indian Ocean is not just a pretty face.

Travelling across Mauritius, there were many moments that felt like that memorable walk with the eight-month-old cubs. Brought over from Africa, they were as engaging and as domestic-seeming as their names, Kimba and Kiara. But I knew things could turn at any moment. As you drive around the small country roads of the placid-seeming island, under billowing cotton-candy clouds and over rolling grassy hills, you see Ali Coiffeur give way to Chan Tek Keng Store (“So delicious, so Mauritius”), then a scrappy shack offering “Samoussa” and “Gateaux”. The Trinidad of the Indian Ocean, in fact, takes its name from a Dutch prince, has a capital city (Port Louis) that was rechristened by the British after a French monarch, and features a population that is mainly of Indian Hindu descent, though most towns have some Chinese as well. The billboards along the island’s single highway offer slogans in French, with additional sentences in English.

As soon as you land in Mauritius – a friendly dodo is stamped into your passport – you catch glimpses of the blue-green waters and palmy beaches that must have captured almost every newcomer sailing in from Europe. The sharp green hills that rise up between the empty white-sand strips and over the high sugar cane fields make you wonder whether you’ve in fact arrived in Rio, though Rio shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. Vivid cardinals dart down on to your table to pick at papayas, and mynahs sing from the trees. The faces are Indian, but the voices sound like Catherine Deneuve after a spell in Jamaica, and the Creole they utter is a melange of several different tongues.

So Mauritius quickly becomes much more interesting and textured than its parasailing options and luxury massage oils. It first appeared on Europe’s map in 1507 through the Portuguese but they soon moved on from an uninhabited place that the Arabs had called the “Isle of Desolation”. The Dutch landed in 1598, after three of their ships were blown off course, to find birds so tame you could catch them (hence the end of the poor, too-trusting dodo) and turtles so aged it was said they could carry 10 men on their backs. The Dutch brought in slaves, Javanese deer and sugar cane but they too were driven away – by cyclones in the early 18th century – so the French came in, followed by pirates. When the British took over in 1810, during the Napoleonic wars, they allowed the locals to retain their land, their language and their legal code, with the result that green British road signs now point to Flic en Flac and Domaine de l’Etoile. They also brought in Indians and Chinese to replace the slaves.

Mauritius gained independence in 1968 but, like any mestizo place, it has never quite decided who or what it is (this was a source of fascination for VS Naipaul, who found in it “a shifting about of leaderless groups of the conquered peoples”). The brochures proudly tell you that it’s the home of seggae music, the fusion of sega and reggae, and in the upmarket hotels you can hear sitars and tablas accompanied by rhythm guitars. But the headlines tell you that in 1999 the island was paralysed by four days of rioting after Kaya, the Creole inventor of seggae and an outspoken champion of Creole rights, was found dead in his prison cell. A statue of Queen Victoria stands near the thriving street market in Port Louis but on one bus stand someone has scribbled, in black, “No racism” and on another, in blood-red, “Vive Palestine”.

I had expected, when I arrived at the Oberoi resort near Turtle Bay, to find myself surrounded by hedge fund managers (it takes six and a half hours to fly to Mauritius even from Dubai, and the island is expensive). Yet I found myself in a luxury resort made for people unaccustomed to luxury (like, in fact, myself). Brawny Russians sauntered through the lush gardens, taking pictures of their platinum-card molls under every tree. A pair of slightly dotty, imperial Brits swam silently through a pool with snorkels on. Hip Indian couples from London circled the business centre computers at dawn – and, in an entire week on the island, for the first time in my life I heard not a single American or Japanese voice.

You can walk with the lions in Mauritius or stroll along the ocean floor; you can kayak or waterski or pad around colonial houses such as Eureka, the mansion owned by a direct ancestor of the most recent Nobel laureate in literature, JMG Le Clézio, who has called the island, site of some of his stories, his “little fatherland”. You can eat bat curry and visit the small museum in Port Louis that shows off the island’s most famous possession, the Mauritius “Blue Penny” stamp. Yet at the same time you’re advised not to walk around Port Louis after dark and told not to swim at some of the most lyrical beaches. In January, the hotels were so deserted that their security guards were letting locals pour in, filling the immaculate lawns with baubles and teenage cries of “Allez, allez!”

Mauritius seemed to me a place where nothing, delightfully, is certain or unmixed. And if its sights are often just its faces, its most remarkable events seem to be its skies. Never have I been to a place with heavens so large that they seem to be made for triptychs. Over and over in Turtle Bay, I’d look to the left and see a grey-black sky angry with storm clouds. To the right was the depthless blue calm of a sunlit day in midsummer. Three or four times a day, the sky broke and the water came down in torrents, stopping as abruptly as it had begun. To walk down the beach was to step from April to November. And then into April again.

Mauritians will point out with excitement their gleaming new high-rises bearing the names of companies such as HSBC, Accenture, Ernst & Young, and the call centres and “Cyber City” that are beginning to loom over the sign for “Hare Krishna Land” and the Birla Institute of Technology.

Yet for a typical visitor from the city, its most stunning sight may be the island’s botanical gardens, in a little town whose name, Pamplemousses, means grapefruit. You can see cashew nut trees and royal palms from Cuba and 35 kinds of mango there. You can eat lotus seeds (not as good as they sound), smell cashews in the raw, watch 200-year-old turtles and African carp. There are 80 kinds of palm on its grounds, nutmeg plants, torch ginger and Bodhi trees.

“Mauritius is the Garden of Eden,” announced Premanand Parmessur, a spirited, irresistible guide who likes to entertain visitors around the elephant-foot palms. “But the only difference is, there are no snakes. No dangerous animals at all. Nothing poisonous.” Then, almost inevitably, he cited Mark Twain’s celebrated report on the island: “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”

That sounds like a sparkling endorsement, from one of the least impressionable satirists around. But what is often left out in Mauritian accounts is that Twain was not recording his own observations but, rather, those of the local boosters who told him that Mauritius was the greatest place around (for those who had never been off the island).

Just as I was thinking this, the palm trees began shuddering so violently that it sounded like rain, and then indeed the rain crashed down again, so heavily that I had to wade through water up to my ankles just to get back to the Oberoi. Cyclones sweep through Mauritius every summer, some of them wiping out entire sugar cane plantations in a day. The Garden of Eden, I recalled, is the place you leave – only to be confronted, so the old books say, by the Flood.

Pico Iyer’s most recent book, ‘The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama’, is out in paperback from Bloomsbury in the UK and Vintage in the US