Chain reaction in Mauritius
|Published
Mauritius, from south to north, is not much longer in distance than Toti to Umdloti.
Travel around the island on the speedy local buses and it’s small; by bicycle it gets bigger; when the bicycle picks up faults and it becomes a wheelbarrow for the panniers and tent, Mauritius becomes huge.
Thirty years ago, in Madagascar, it was my rear wheel hub that took strain. Mountain bikes had not yet arrived on the Great Red Island but fortunately a local version would last for a week at a time.
For much of last month, cycling in Mauritius gave me a “chain reaction”.
My chain kept coming off, then snapping. Eventually it seemed like something down in my bike’s nether regions was faulty and until that was sorted out, the chain would keep snapping.
While the trouble was a pain in the saddle, it also exposed Mauritians for what they are: damn nice, asking for nothing and willing to help.
Fortunately, my tour of Mauritius’s non-touristy and wild south was nearly over when I hit wheelbarrow mode.
It was after turning a corner on the south-west “hoekie” of the island to head north instead of west, I saw through the trees that somebody had set a bad example and abandoned a bicycle.
Just what I felt like doing and taking the bus. But flying with a bike these days has become so much more complicated. Gone are the days when one could simply wheel one through check-in, tyres deflated and pedals removed. Nowadays it must go in a cardboard box. I didn’t feel like the schlep involved in taking it home.
Logic told me it was time to convert to being a bus traveller but there was no way I could discard Carlos (so named after former news editor Trevor Bruce called me that whenever my car was broken). I was too fond of the bargain I had scored on Gumtree a few years ago. Besides, my environmental grooming told me never, ever to litter.
So, it was only when I found a beneficiary in the town of Tamarin that Carlos and I parted. I asked a man behind the till at a restaurant, where I had gone for the wi-fi as much as the food, if he knew anyone who may want a “semi-stukkend” bicycle.
“Olivier would,” he said, pointing at his colleague. “And it’s his 30th birthday.”
So, after a ritual selfie I left Carlos with him, draped by panniers over my shoulder and headed for the local bus stop.
Minutes later I boarded a bus.
The tables turned. I had been dodging buses and other vehicles on Mauritius’s narrow roads, which often drop down a ledge, offering no cyclist or pedestrian space. Now I was watching the odd cyclist having to dash out of the way.
In spite of Carlos’s chain and traffic troubles, the Durban Beachfront rust bucket did very well on paths and farm roads I often ended up on. Many were carved out of the rough volcanic lava stone.
On any ordinary midday in Mauritius, the heat calls on one to have a siesta, under a tree or at a pavement café like the one in the town of L’Escalier where I collapsed, directly across from a massive, elegant and colourful Hindu temple.
L’Escalier seems to tick on a working sugar mill, Omnicane, which is branded all over the place. Even on the local bridge the company obviously built or donated.
This name sounded ominous, I thought while pedalling over to cross the Riviere du Poste. A strain of Covid with a slightly similar-sounding name ‒ Omicron ‒ postponed my cycling trip to Mauritius when the island closed down, once again, at the beginning of the year.
Sugar is very much part of Mauritius’s economy. The remnants of a past sugar boom ‒ old stone furnace chimneys ‒ are dotted all over the island.
An old man who came to chat to me as I was putting up my tent on a public beach where his grandson was playing soccer, explained that when these old mills closed down his father headed to the south to eke out a living.
“I managed to then get work as a clerk for a sugar cane company. But I still fished every day and sold my catch at the market. I put my two sons through school like that and, now, they have both been to university. I never touched a rupee from my salary, except to buy my house.”
Beach camping is Mauritius’s best kept secret. It’s free and, from my experience, safe.
As a courtesy, there’s a cop shop to let the police know you’re camping. They, in turn, may check up on you during their patrols.
The men in blue at my first beach started giving me a briefing about what not to have, or at least show that I have.
“Don’t have like a thousand euros on you,” one began.
I interrupted: “I’m from South Africa.”
There was a chuckle: what briefing would they need to give me?
Arriving in Mauritius late in the day and looking for a meal before I had any local money, the owner of my budget accommodation pointed me in the direction of a restaurant that accepted card payments.
“Three streets up and to your left,” he said.
I hadn’t reached my destination in the dimly-lit streets of Mahebourg when another appetite reared up inside me: my need to become “normal” again and feel I could safely walk the dark streets without having to watch my back.
Women on their own were going for evening walks. Men were sitting at intersections drinking beer. Children were playing football.
I walked the streets for ages before even thinking of my tummy.
Mauritius was last big in the news with the wreck of the oil tanker MV Wakashio which ran aground on a reef off Mahebourg, causing a devastating oil spill. I was so in awe of the environmental community spirit that saw people offer their hair, which absorbs oil, to help with the clean-up that I went for a haircut.
The barber, named Mohamed, recalled how he offered free haircuts and took people’s hair down to the town's waterfront.
By day, as a seasoned Durban cyclist I noticed some distinct differences between home and all parts of Mauritius: no constant smells of sewage mixed with zol smoke. There was also no urinating in public.
Gris Gris, the southernmost point of the island, has a Transkei Wild Coast look. Waves crash wildly against cliffs into which the sea has carved caves on the small beaches.
For two nights in a row at Gris Gris the wind howled at about 3am, the time when one’s imagination grows as wild as Mauritius’s “savage sud” (wild south).
“Could climate change bring about an early cyclone season?” I asked myself, having reported remotely on a cyclone that struck the island a few months ago, for the Independent on Saturday.
The flysheet of my tent almost ripped right off. Wind and rain entered.
But by sunrise Gris Gris was as still as glass.
The coastline is even more wild at Pont Naturel ‒ the natural bridge ‒ which forms a blow hole where spray from high waves offer a rainbow that lasts two seconds while tropicbirds ‒ seabirds with long, white plumes ‒ race after each other. One minute they’re up in the sky, the next they’re down in the deep walls of the blow hole. It looked like they nested there.
A piece of heavy machinery was busy flattening the earth near Pont Naturel.
What would they be replacing the sugar cane with? Housing? I wondered.
There is a lot of that sort of activity throughout the island but not much in the south, which starts getting touristy at Bel Ombre.
Somewhat shocked at having moved from village Mauritius to holiday brochure scenes, I asked a man riding a golf cart where I might find a place where I could get food.
Street food, I meant: rotis, samoosas, dholl puri and boulettes. He recommended a restaurant owned by Dutch expatriates.
He was from Durban.
I asked him if he was a South African who had moved to Mauritius.
“No, I have a place here but I live there,” he replied, before saying he would like to chat, “but, sorry, I am late for a game of golf.”
Further on, the local population was distinctly predominantly more of Creole than of Indian descent.
I took shelter from the midday sun in a village eatery decorated with a picture of Mother Teresa.
A nearby plateau on top of a mountain has a fierce slave history. Runaway slaves started a settlement on top of Le Morne Brabant. Legend has it that when British soldiers, in 1834, came to inform them that slavery had been abolished, they threw themselves over the cliffs, preferring death to being returned to lives as slaves.
The days of slavery have influenced the local sega music and dancing, which Mauritians often perform. I encountered a group clapping as a couple of them danced to the sounds of a special drum, at a picnic under casuarina trees near a beach.
The sea surrounding Le Morne Brabant was filled with surf skiers. From a distance, they looked like a flock of butterflies.
It was there that my chain went “snap” for the last time and I turned my bicycle into a wheelbarrow.
Fortunately, friends have offered me a bike they’ve given up using. It will be called King Carlos II and will be sure to carry me through other parts of Mauritius: more of the swimming beaches around the island of 1.2 million people where water is clean and as clear as a swimming pool; the highlands of the Black River Gorge; and the Courtil D’Antheia camp ground to pitch my tent in the absence of a free beach site.
Independent on Saturday