– Mauritius – 

March 28, 2005 – We just spent a week on the tiny African island of Mauritius, which is located in the Indian Ocean, 550 miles east of Madagascar. Mauritius, with a population of 1.2 million, is about the size of Washington, DC. The main source of revenue for the islanders is sugarcane and tourism. We were not visiting as regular tourists. My husband had traveled to Mauritius with a dozen other scientists from around the world (USA, Monaco, Russia, Australia and Japan) to investigate submarine groundwater discharge in a basaltic coastal zone. While they all worked, I explored the island and took lots of photographs.

Mauritius is a humid tropical island. Right now it's the rainy season in Mauritius, very hot and very wet. We never saw a single sunny day. Near the end of our visit we experienced a tropical cyclone. Our bungalow was right by the beach so we had a ringside seat for the storm. Fortunately "Hennie" was a relatively weak system, however she closed the airport and brought the country to a complete halt. Over a foot of rain fell on some areas of the island. If Hennie had struck a day later, we probably would have missed our return flight to India.

I spent a great deal of time at the Royal Botanical Garden – impressive for its many speciman plants, including a pool of giant Amazon waterlilies, which you can see below. Other species of tropical waterlilies flourish at the botanical garden, along with countless varieties of palms, ferns and exotic plants I couldn't begin to identify.

The people of Mauritius were friendly enough, but it was the flora and fauna that stole the show. One day I traveled upland to see an enormous, and scenic, tea plantation. (Mauritius is famous for its vanilla tea.) Over the next few days I visited the island's largest and most famous Hindu shrine, saw some beautiful deer (species unknown) and witnessed giant tortoises in the throes of passion. The birds of Mauritius were colorful, but they couldn't compete with the amazing range of colors found in the hybrid hibiscus bushes that pepper the island.

Below are some favorite views of Mauritius...

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