“Mister Andy?” the driver from the hotel asked as I approached him at the airport.
“Oui, c’est moi,” I replied, hoping that I didn’t look as exhausted as I felt.
“Bienvenue à Maurice,” he said, pointing me to the car. “Let’s go.”
I’d just spent the last 30 hours crammed in the flying cubby hole known as Coach Class on three Delta and Air France planes, hopscotching their way around the globe , from Boston to New York to Paris to Mauritius. The last two flights were both transcontinental overnight flights. I’d managed to sleep on the plane to Paris – a first – but couldn’t catch a wink of shuteye on the 11-hour flight to Mauritius, partially thanks to a Scottish family sitting next to me, who held the philosophy that it’s best to encourage your three children to stay awake the entire night before starting your vacation.
And now it was 6:30am on Wednesday, and I sat quietly in the back seat of the hotel shuttle, watching a steady rain obscure my first views of Mauritius. A small island nation in the middle of nowhere off the eastern coast of southern Africa, Mauritius is blessed with beautiful beaches and pastures perfect for growing sugar cane – two facts that have helped make Mauritius one of the more prosperous southern African states. As we drove northwest across the island, it became quite clear that sugar cane was indeed king – endless fields of swaying, corn-like stalks in every direction. Off in the distance I could see several irregularly shaped mountains, dark silhouettes on the far side of the island. As the sun tried to peak through the thick morning clouds, the darkness of the mountains spectrally transformed into a lush green.
About an hour on the road, we reached the capital city, Port Louis (pronounced por-LWEE in honor of the island’s French heritage) . It was bigger than I expected, a tight mass of modern skyscrapers intermingling with a collection of colonial buildings built by the British after the French exited the scene. Port Louis was busy with traffic, as locals from the suburbs came into town for work, some in their own cars, some in big red public buses.
Despite the rush hour hubbub, we passed through quite quickly, circling a rotary leading us up the northwest coast. Traffic thinned out after a few kilometers until the only traffic we passed were small trucks overloaded with precarious amounts of sugar cane. Meanwhile, the fields of cane were now the only game in town; the sugar stalks encroached to the very edge of the thin road, towering more than 10 feet in the air for hundreds of meters at a stretch. I almost half-expected George Patton and his mechanized army to appear suddenly, steamrolling their tanks like juggernauts over the sugary hedgerows.
Losing track of time, space and distance due to sugar cane-induced tunnel vision, I was somewhat surprised when we arrived at the Meridien Hotel. Reminiscent of the luxury hotels of Bali, Le Meridien Ile Maurice is built around a series of enormous, open air pavilions. Through the center of the lobby there’s a beautiful view of the swimming pool, cascading down several levels on a series of waterfalls, while a thatched-covered tiki pavilion served as the poolside bar. Beyond it were a number of thatched umbrellas along the beach. It was the perfect place for a retreat, a honeymoon, an ICT policy conference. And given the sheets of rain now falling out the sky, I was glad I was here for a conference.
Though I’d been traveling for a day and a half and was living on three or four hours of sleep since Monday morning, I had to rush to my room, shower and shave: my conference would begin in less than 90 minutes. Somehow, I managed to get ready with a few minutes to spare, so I had a quick breakfast in one of the restaurant pavilion, eating scrambled eggs and passion fruit, a pair of song birds crooning as they ate some bread scraps on the table next to mine…. -andy