Our mooring in Caudan Marina is situated amid a plush shopping mall overlooking the harbour. It has the usual range of over-priced tourist shops, expensive boutiques and pleasant eateries of a thriving tropical island. It feels more like France than a developing country and is in stark contrast to the small island feel of Rodrigues which forms part of this country.

Two minutes from the boat

We spent the first few days preparing to leave the boat while we return to the UK.  Mauritius is better for this than Reunion which is more expensive for flights and moorings but where it is also difficult to find a berth. The idea of arriving in Reunion to find that we could not be accommodated and having to beat back to Mauritius left us cold! The only issue in Mauritius is that one needs special permission form the immigration department to leave the boat, this involves reams of paperwork and the appointment of a qualified skipper as guardian to look after the boat. For the record and any boats following in our footsteps, the procedure is to get a letter from the official guardian saying they will be responsible for the boat, together with copies of the skipper’s passport, the boat registration, the contract with the marina and the flight bookings.  These then have to be presented to the Immigration Office and he then prepares a letter that needs to be shown at the airport both on leaving and returning. Thankfully we can vouch that the system works.

Once we had all this in place we could relax. We had an enjoyable few hours visiting the botanical gardens with an excellent guide who spoke about 7 different languages. In our small group there were Italians, French and us and he switched seamlessly between our respective languages. Here he is demonstrating the waterproofing abilities of lillies.

These are the type that have the edible root that we much enjoyed in China.

There were also some colourful blooms.

The garden was home to some giant tortoises but they were fenced off so one could not make friends with them as we had in Rodrigues!

We also had a quick tour of some of the sights on the rest of the island which has some flat plateaus punctuating some stunning mountain scenery.