Mauritius 2; a day at the races
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Tue 27 Oct 2015 21:15
| Mauritius plays few sports. The population follow English football but their real passion, astonishingly, is for horse racing. Port Louis boasts the oldest race track in the Southern Hemisphere, and I think the third oldest in the world after London and Dublin. Racing was introduced by the British Army but has now become an island-wide obsession. There are full day meets every Saturday all through the season. Horses are imported at the rate of 40-60 a year; breeding on-island has been tried but is not successful for reasons that we could not make clear. Lots of people turn up for race day, and we got invited into the grandstand, a British concrete monstrosity dating from the 1930s, still going strong. In the first picture we see Anglo-Australian fellow cruisers Mike and Nicki Reynolds dressed up to the nines for the event; next to them are the great and good of Mauritius eying up the horseflesh in the paddock, while on the right the multitudes throng the public area in the grandstand, kept nice and cool by the gigantic fig tree:    The track is in the Champs de Mars, a natural amphitheatre, with the starting gate just under our private box (sounds grand doesn’t it?). On the right you can see VS’s horse coming in last, again. Our selection came last or next to every one of the eight races. We sure can pick’em.    A good day out, with losses sensibly contained. Fun once, but every weekend? No thank you. |