Island Moments

I've just returned from a trip to my island home.

I'm managing my post-goodbye blues by jotting down odd moments, memories and snapshots before they fade.

When you travel to Mauritius from Australia, planes fly across the lower half of the island to the west coast, turn around and then come in for landing to airport. As we descended, we flew over the island, through clouds, grey and moody. As we reached the west coast, the clouds cleared briefly and we were treated to a dazzling setting sun colours warming up the clouds in gold and red. There was also a mountain peak, lit up in gold, that looked slightly (unnervingly) closer than it should have been. Then we turned, headed back into grey and landed in dark grey. 

We arrived just before Divali. The airport had a display.

I dusted off my rusty Creole and successfully got through Customs with a) the Customs officer understanding my Creole and b) me not having to resort to too much English. I'm calling that a win.

I discovered there are LED diya lights 🪔 powered by water. These were magical!

There were traditional diyas too.

When jet lag works in your favour and you can get in some 6am beach walks.

Some of the things we saw on the early morning sands.

L-R  clockwise: sea urchin, crab hole with wee crab prints, sand ants!!, careless coral garden, pretty coral find.

I ate my body weight in samosas, gulab jamuns and lalo (okra). As you do.

There are geckos. Making beautiful colour choices.

We saw lots of amazing flowers. Also making excellent colour choices.

There were amazing trees too.

I re-met a very grown up, moss-bedecked mango tree that was a mere sapling when I was a kid. It's produced a handful of mangos in its lifetime.

There was a crazy French show on the TV about Smurfs. Here's a clip I found on YouTube: T'as le bonjour du Schtroumpfs. There were multiple choices questions where the person who got the answer correct got to smear blue paint onto their opponent. There was yelling, protests, more yelling and punch-ups. Very un-French. I'm sorry for sharing, I really am.

There were some head-turning brand names.

There was frog song ASMR.

There were also a couple of road trips with big personal meanings. 

To Trou aux Cerfs, an extinct (very dormant) volcano that was a local walk away when I was a kid. It was nice to show this to LittleOne. It's changed a bit (a lot more houses!) but it was nice to see and remember bits of it which haven't changed. Here's a pic of the Moka Range in the distance.

This is my best attempt at a photo of the actual crater. The green-lawn-looking patch in the middle is not the base, however much it looks like it. The green is some overgrown weed stuff that's halfway down. 

We visited my mum's childhood village, where part of the childhood home's garden wall was found still standing strong.

A grandmother neem tree who witnessed my mum's and her siblings' childhood from across the road, is also still standing strong and wise. As is the Hindi school standing next to it.  

Moments of hearts and roots and routes and all things fragile and intangible and forever.

There were a few hours here and there by the beach. 

A French family of mum, dad and toddler on the beach asked me to take some photos. I hope my photos were less clumsy than my French words.

LittleOne got a delightful light suntan tickled across the nose and cheeks. Meanwhile, I got sunburnt on half of the back of my calves. Yep, just half. Of the back of the calves. I can still hear the sun sniggering from here.

I also saw a little fish in the clear shallows. It was the same colour as the sand and had cute black eyes and 4 wee vertical black stripes along its body. It was casually swimming about the shallows, its little shadow on the sand faithfully mirroring its darting path. I do not remember ever seeing fish in the lagoon during my childhood trips to the beach. So I was more excited about seeing this fishie than LittleOne. No photos. But it looked a bit like this.

Here's a beach taster.

I don't like goodbyes. I took photos of the skies in the car to the airport.

It rained after we left. I'll pretend the skies were crying too.