Mauritius—Pirate Pair-a-Dice

Always a wake, that small burial at sea, the chance to mourn what's left behind. Some turbulence where we turned the corner on Good Hope, and entered the Indian Ocean. We stayed close to the beautiful, rolling hills of the eastern coast of South Africa:



Forested hills streamed down to sandy beaches. We were eventually across from Kwazu-Natal, the game park a bit inland. Then along Xhosa (pronounced Koza) land, the enormous "rez" where apartheid wanted to shove all Africans. Few outsiders are here, and nobody seems to swim, or even eat fish, which are apparently seen as "snakes." Maybe just as well, as folks in Durban generally surf only inside the shark nets.

Up ahead a memory of Brazil's meeting of the waters. A stream of brown water was reaching deep into the blue sea:







The brown water made it easier to see large schools of black dolphins jumping in unison. Further ahead, we could see the cleft in the cliffs where the flooding river lived:





Then I rolled up my window shade the next morning and Mauritius had arrived:



Water taxis waited for our diplomatic briefing to be over, ready to carry students here and there:



In the harbor, old ships waited, hoping to be wooed by pirates, who have always found these waters:



This beautiful, volcanic island is the poor, illegitimate twin of the evanescent Fernando da Naronha off Brazil. Most folks live along the shore, with high, green mountains and waterfalls inland. There are a few samples of Branjolina invasion, and a couple mock-Mughal mc mansions, which I couldn't bring myself to photograph. This island was passed around like a back-room whore by the French, English and, especially, the Dutch, who brought slaves to work the sugar cane, which is still in abundance here—sugar plantations that throw the eye for miles, up against the mountains.

So there are Africans, Indonesians, Indians and even the Chinese here. French is spoken readily, but mostly with a twisted creole accent and vocab, which drives froggies mad, no doubt. And Port Louie will never be the mini-Paris the French always want any colony to develop. There is the kind of ridiculous fossil-fuel gridlock here that makes no more sense than Oahu, with its pork-barrel freeways instead of the light-rail proposal that should have been built. This place ought to run on solar, with small installations. [Are you listening, mi sobrino?: most of the world is ready for small-scale solar and wind, and we should be seeing to it!]

I was trip leader for another episode of American Pie, taking students on a cata-moron to snorkel. There were a hundred of us, and the binge alchies headed for more than their share of the beer. Soon there was the obligatory chorus line of the bikini brigade on deck. I worked on my sunburn, drinking a beer or two against my thoughts of the always-leaky face-mask and snorkel.

Forced myself into the water with a snorkel, and managed, as Astie will one day, too, to get the Darth Vader breathing going through the mouth, with the help of a mask made for pre-schoolers, which made breathing through my nose impossible. Were there fish? Oui, mon amie, there were some teeny, irredescent blue ones, some yellow and grey ones, with black spots and a whole school of off-white fish maybe a foot and a half long, that looked like barracudas, but without such scary dentures.

Thinking of the film, Open Water, I just grabbed the float trailing 100 feet off the boat, so I wouldn't drift toward India, and kicked my fins (made for someone Jack Black's size), driving myself around the big chunks of rubble and re-bar. The 20-something Mauritians had clearly not brought us to the best reef, which we could see breaking in the distance, but perhaps that preserved it. But they did barbeque some chicken and provide a hearty lunch without running out of beer. And it's hard to beat the sound of the sail on a catamaran...

We had to be back on the ship by dinner time, as we had sucked enough bunk fuel to be on our way. This meant I didn't get my alcohol supply replenished, and had no chance of finding the one bar with a pool table that the diplomats had told me about.

I had dinner by myself on the back deck, watching the sunset in the harbor:





After the monster-swells of the Atlantic, the Indian ocean was a welcome relief, with a trance-luscent surface that was hard to turn away from:



Here's a new screen-saver version for y'all:





What is the horizon, that circle spun around whatever moves? :



The day before India, I opened my broken curtin in my cabin and there were around twenty dwarf spinner dolphins (four-footers) leaping a meter out of the water and belly-flopping. I'm sure scientists believe it's to remove some parasite or remora, but I'm convinced they were showing me how to play again. All their energy at least got my tired carcass back to the gym. Hi ho, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.

I'll let you get a little shut-eye, gauchos, before I describe India, where the senses max out, and where "sultry" is more than the secret word for Throw Momma From the Train...

[my inner Mr. Gupta is already beginning to chatter!]