A garden in Mauritius

One thing about spending most of November in a hot climate, is that you seem to jump from summer to Christmas very fast!  I took this photo at the end of October...

and now we have this -  the chill and bitter wind, and the glamorous Christmas decoration of the central stairwell of Fortnum & Mason.... 

...  and The Snowman in Piccadilly!

So, to keep the warmth going, I'd like to show you some photos of a wonderful private garden that I visited in the South of Mauritius.  It was created from 15 acres of an old sugar cane plantation, and here below is the view from the terrace that overlooks the garden. You can walk down through the gardens and around the lake, or linger in a thatched summerhouse, and there are so many different plants and different views. It was a peaceful, somewhat cloudy day, so not too hot ...and it felt like paradise on earth. I spent a lot of time trying to photograph some maroon insects like large dragonflies on the lake, but they always eluded me. 

Many of the plants in the garden are tall and have huge flowers, and the garden's particularly well stocked with varieties from the Heliconia (Bird of Paradise Flower) genus. These flashy colours remind me of a parrot. 

This deep pink and purple bloom is slimmer and more elegant. 

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  This is sometimes called the "cigar" heliconia.  It's supposed to look like a cigar, with the leaves wrapped round and round.  Not sure I agree that it does, but it is an imposing bloom that looks good in flower arrangements. 

And the purplish-blue and cream one shown below, grew about ten feet high - a very striking plant.  Sorry it's not a very good photo.   The flowers are slightly past their best, but I put it in because I could so easily imagine them turning into giant, crested, long-beaked birds at night. 

Then T and I went back home with our friends and had a snack of rotis, popular Mauritian street food.   Here is a typical roti stall - this one is in a market.

The rotis resemble tortillas and are freshly cooked, and often filled with either a mild fish, meat or octopus curry, plus some pumpkin curry, plus red beans and two or three chutneys, which might be very hot.  Really delicious! 

The markets were fun, with local people bringing in produce from their smallholdings.  I bought some bitter gourds, and although they were extremely decorative, with that fabulously intricate rind and big orange seeds inside, they looked better than they tasted.  The bitterness comes from quinine.  In order to make them edible, you must cut them open, remove the inner pith and the seeds, and soak them in brine for quite a while, then fry them. By that time, it seems to me they taste basically like salt, but they're supposed to be good for various illnesses.

This is where I bought them - it's a large market which we visited a couple of times, and it's at Mahebourg, on the south eastern coast of Mauritius.

These pineapples shown below reminded me of pineapples I've had in Hawaii, and might as well be a different species from the acid, under-ripe and fibrous things you so often get in our supermarkets. 

I might have mentioned that Mauritius is over 60 percent Hindu, so you might glimpse a brilliantly coloured Hindu religious building pretty well anywhere you go.     I snapped this view from the car.  If I lived in a Hindu area I would probably think it looked ordinary but since I'm unfamiliar with Hindu structures, their colour and variety surprised me every time. As the official language of Mauritius is English, you might be able to see that these gods are named and explained on their plinths in English and not in Hindi.

I mentioned in another post that Maurituis has some fun buses. Here's one I liked - I came across it after taking a wrong turning near Mahebourg.  Look underneath and you'll see a dog, apparently guarding it - or at least, it got up and barked at me as I took this photo, so I reckon it thought it was being a guard dog!  I am not really sure I'd want to ride on a Destroyer bus, but then, Mauritian bus drivers seem to have a reputation for being rather fiery characters. 

As well as the always-interesting buses, I liked that there were so many bright and, to me, unfamiliar plants growing outside houses or scrambling over wasteland. Does anyone know what the flower below is?  I'd love to try and grow it at home. It is like a cross between a convulvulus and a sweet pea. 

And below is one of the photos which I like the very best.   I like it because it shows just what I imagined I would see in Mauritius.  And when I took it, it felt amazing to be moving quietly through so much blue, knowing that the ocean stretched out there for hundreds of miles beyond the reef.  

Hurrah for the Prince of Love!

I'm now settled back at home in rainy old London, and quite glad to be, although I did love Mauritius.  We had two special birthday parties this week, both a lot of fun.   And we've been babysitting, because Littlest A was sick. Not very sick, but very proud of his snotty nose and other symptoms, pleased to be lolling in our house watching CBeebies and eating snacks, and having the drawing program all to himself.  T and I are always glad to spend time with our grandkids, but now we both wonder if we've picked up something from Littlest A.  I'm not as proud of my drippy nose as he was! 

I've been working hard transcribing some of the interviews from Mauritius. This is many hours of work and I'm not halfway through yet, but also preparing for another trip to Jersey sometimes after Christmas, to interview more people. 

And looking at the weather (above) I think I'll post some nice tropical island photos too, just to prove Mauritius and Rodrigues weren't just a delightful dream.   These pictures are all of Rodrigues.  

So, down at the beach at Pointe Cotton, someone is about to go fishing ...

There were only about a dozen people on the beach when I took the photo in late morning, and here are seven of them swimming. 

 This is the view from our first guesthouse which was on the hill outside Port Mathurin, the capital of Rodrigues.  You can see the waves breaking on the coral reef beyond the lagoon. 

And here's the extremely steep road down to Port Mathurin.

People are not wealthy, but it is a very close community, and religious (Catholic). It feels very safe in Rodrigues, which is perhaps not that common in an area where so many people are hard up. So it is nice to feel here that the people you meet will be friendly and honest.  You can see one of the typical brightly coloured small houses peeping from the trees on the right, and usually there are chickens and goats roaming about. 

Below is our second guesthouse which was near Point Cotton, on the east coast. 

The beach was round the corner from here, hidden in a forest of the casuarina trees that have been planted around many parts of the coast and provide welcome shade. Perhaps today native trees would have been planted, but I must admit I love the feathery, elegant casuarinas.  

There were a couple of tin shacks, one sold drinks and snacks, the other was a little restaurant which cooked whatever fish had been caught that day, at lunchtime. 

 Rodrigues has an excellent, frequent and cheap bus service, and I like the way the buses here (and in some parts of Mauritius) are elaborately painted up with motifs, ideas and mottoes of their owners' choice. The bus drivers are very confident - they have to be to get their vehicles around the narrow roads, many of which have hairpin bends. 

This was our favourite bus, "Prince of Love," painted and polished.  Who wouldn't want to give it a try?

 Inside, there were butterflies and flowers where most buses would have adverts. 

And just to make the point that it isn't always sunny in Rodrigues, here is another bus in the pouring tropical rain. 

There were many small family run restaurants serving home cooked food.  All that we visited were good. They usually had only one or two choices, but all were served with an extra helping of red beans which is a staple food in Rodrigues.  "Chez Madame Larose" was over the road from our guesthouse. You ate on the verandah.    

 

The garden was shaded by a breadfruit tree. 

 

People in Rodrigues and Mauritius mostly speak French Creole, which I'm told you can just about understand if you are a native French speaker. Fortunately they mostly spoke some English, and most of them could understand my rubbish attempts at French.  This advert for Phoenix Beer is written in Creole, and if I understand that it says: "Our country, our beer"

As I suggested in my last post, Rodrigues is almost a cliche dream desert island - it really is beautiful, peaceful and friendly, it has no poisonous snakes, reptiles or insects, and just the occasional stonefish or sea urchin in the sea (although we saw none). 

  As I said in my last post, the local people seem conscious that over-development could kill what makes their island so nice. Yet it's only fair to say that it is not that simple - it never is.   There is a lot of poverty and many of those colourful tin shacks are not much fun to live in and not remotely proof against the cyclones which sometimes wreak havoc. Nor indeed can they be much protection from that heavy tropical rain or baking sun. If I lived there I'd be pretty fed up with the dreadful quality of some of the local shops, too - I went to a supermarket in Port Mathurin that was a real hell hole - dark, dirty, cramped, disorganised, and smelling of mice. I can't imagine shopping there every day is much fun.   

Like everyone else, the people of Rodrigues want a better life for themselves and their children, and it's good that so many of the young also want to stay on the island. I do feel its prospects are more hopeful than in many other places, so I will be keeping my fingers crossed for them.   

We went for several evening walks along the coast and in the forest, but dusk comes quickly (at about 6.30 PM) in the tropics. So if you linger too long, you might be walking back by the light of the stars, and not even the Prince of Love will come to your aid, because the bus service stops at six p.m! 

Back from Mauritius.

I'm just back from Mauritius - the flight's twelve and a half hours each way, so we are feeling tired. But it is good to be home, even though we loved Mauritius and its neighbour island Rodrigues.   We travelled around a lot and saw so much, including some of the conservation work being done.

 I didn't blog much about this before I went (too busy, too nervous).  But all this is part of my research for a book about Gerald Durrell and Mauritius.  The island meant a lot to him and the intervention he planned with huge care thirty five years ago has been quietly developing and flourishing.

One result is the saving of five species of birds, birds so close to extinction that they were down to 12 or fewer individuals. There are other notable successes too, which make Mauritius a pretty remarkable story. 

Anyway, I talked to many people in Mauritius, went into protected wildlife areas and had some memorable experiences, like being in the middle of the forest surrounded by some of the birds that everyone thought would be extinct by now.  These are two pink pigeons...

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and these are echo parakeets, the only native parrots left in the whole of this section of the Indian Ocean. They are a cousin of the Indian green parakeet but quite different from them in many ways. 

Part of the rescue strategy for these birds is to release them into the wild, and also supplement their diet while their numbers continue to build. This keeps them wild but gives them the best chance to reproduce and thrive.   A bit like we feed birds in the garden, I suppose.   

Apart from having several expeditions with naturalists, exploring the island and meeting up with some old friends who live on Mauritius, we also visited Rodrigues island. You reach Rodrigues by a small turbo prop plane which buzzes over the ocean for an hour and a half,  finally landing at an airport where very free range chickens roam about.

Rodrigues is part of Mauritius but has its own assembly, a bit like Scotland or Wales in relation to England. It is said by many mainland Mauritians that Rodrigues is like Mauritius was 30 years ago, laid back, easy going and unsophisticated.  Most of the population is descended from African slaves, and they're noticeably charming, friendly and public spirited compared with almost anywhere else I've been.  And although they might not be considered sophisticated, they certainly seem to have their heads screwed on about looking after their very special island. So far they've stood out against the building of luxury hotels and resorts, they've rejected the polluting fish farms that are now being planned in mainland Mauritius.

It was clean, it was safe and many of the local people live in traditional ways. Here are some of them gathering seaweed to use as fertiliser.  The time was 7 AM, and they were already hard at work before it got too hot.  Since Mauritius is in the tropics, by 11 AM the sun is directly overhead and anyone with any sense then goes home. 

 Now, back in London in November, it's time for me to start transcribing some of my interviews, preparing for more interviews (in Jersey and the West of England early next year) and also get down some of my personal impressions of Mauritius and Rodrigues before I forget.

Marching, Music and Mauritius

So, continuing to research Mauritius and its wildlife, I have been going through the transcripts of several interviews I did with the conservationist Gerald Durrell, who you will probably know either through his books or through the  TV series "The Durrells of Corfu."  Here is a photo of him and his wife Lee which accompanied one of my articles. I think this picture conveys what good company he was.  

Mauritius and its wildlife fascinated Durrell.  When the remote Indian Ocean island was discovered in the 17th century it was uninhabited by man and full of extraordinary animals and plants that had evolved in isolation, almost like the Galapagos. Unfortunately, human beings arrived in Mauritius before anyone had heard of conservation, and so now only fragments remain of the original wonderful plants, birds, animals and reptiles. Durrell used the Dodo, the island's most famous extinct bird, as a symbol of Durrell Wildlife Trust and the zoo which he founded in Jersey. And very good work is now being done in Mauritius to conserve and re-wild ecosystems that are left.

Sadly, Durrell died in 1995.  The transcripts provided quotes for my articles, but most of them have never been published. Reading through them again after all these years, I often laughed out loud - he was so witty. I've also some found some more unexpected treasures. During one interview he mentioned a piece of music, since our interview was being held within sound of church bells ringing the changes, very loudly and very distractingly, outside.

I didn't look the music up at the time, but this time I did, and here it is!  It's called The Bells of St. Genevieve. It was written in 1723 by the French composer Marin Marais, who was being driven totally mad by his local church bells in Paris, and needed to write the piece to get his head straight.    I love its powerful hypnotic sound. What do you think?

Apart from spending hours on Durrell and Mauritius, I went on the People's Vote March in London last Saturday with various members of my family, including my cousin who came down from Rutland. 

What an incredible march it was.  I go on very few marches, but this reminded me of the march against the Iraq War, - the huge numbers of people were packed side by side across all four lanes of Park Lane and hardly able to move because more and more came flocking in.  When we finally reached Piccadilly - after two hours - the crowds stretched front and back as far as the eye could see.  

I took lots of photos but as the nearby Rinky Dink Bicycle Powered Sound System launched into another number, my camera was drawn to the dear little girl on the left who is one of the people I remember best from the march.

  Her joy and pleasure were infectious. 

   

 It was great the way that so many workers in nearby shops and cafes and street vendors waved at us, and even staff in the department store where we went to have a coffee afterwards, gave us the thumbs up when saw our badges.  Even the busker in the tube on the way home was covered in stickers advertising the march!   

Truth is that most people in Britain, whatever their views on Brexit, are exhausted and horrified at the way it is going, and many people just want to forget it.  So it was wonderful to see that folk of all ages, old, young and even disabled people on walking frames or in wheelchairs,  made the effort to come, not only from Britain and Ireland but also from further afield. I spoke with English citizens that had travelled that day from both France and Holland. They said they were not allowed a vote in the original referendum yet their lives are being turned upside down by Brexit,

 Revised numbers are that about 700,000 people turned up and nobody we met or saw in that huge crowd was angry or nasty, the weather was beautiful, the music was good,and the atmosphere was great, so, even though it's a very serious topic, we all agreed it was a fun day that we will remember for years.  

Getting some Sun in the Chess Valley

We've been feeling a bit fed up in Woolf Villa lately because T did something to his back. He's had various tests and it's baffling the doc. I don't think it's long term serious, but it hurts, so I'm staying home a bit more to keep an eye on him and sharpen up my medical skills. Like, I carefully check him every day for viruses or a sore throat... just say "Aah!" like this cat.

And I check in case he has lost his bones altogether like the cat below :D

(Ph: www.sweetperfectioncakes.deviantart.com

The rain is continuing to come down, too, but there are some good things.

Our friends and neighbours who spend most of the year in Mauritius are back for the rest of the summer now. It's always good to see them. They have all kinds of projects in Mauritius, including growing heliconias and bananas, and they brought us back some vanilla rum with a vanilla pod inside (Mauritius grows sugar cane and vanilla).

They also brought us a book by one of their friends, about the journals of Rose de Freycinet, who sailed round the world in the early 19th century on a military ship, disguised initially as a man, on a scientific mission. (And yes, she stopped by at Mauritius.)

It's on my list to visit Mauritius one day, and see all our friends' projects for ourselves. Meanwhile, who could feel bad when presented with top gifts like this? And also, we had a good day just before T did his back, AND the weather was also good, so I'll tell you about that. We decided to take the Tube out to the country.

So, walked to the local tube station and got a train within four minutes. (I sometimes think we are so busy moaning about the Tubes that we sometimes just don't appreciate how good they can be)

Rickmansworth was about half an hour away. Once a small country town, "Ricky," as the locals call it, now has some development but it is surrounded by nature reserves and green belt coutnryside. We took a footpath along the little River Chess. And first thing we saw were some weird trees in a woodland. This one is half alive and half dead, but it looked to me as if it had an animal face -

what do you think?

The Chess is a bright, shallow chalk-stream, running through woods and meadows, spread out beyond its banks right now because it's been so wet.

Ambling along we saw these really ugly whiskery horses in a big field. Knock knees and sway backs well in evidence. I looked around for tinkers whose horses they might be. but couldn't spot any. Maybe they were residents of a home for broken-down horses, I thought next. But

then I saw some of them were only foals, and rather sweet they were too....not broken down at all.

So I asked a friend who breeds horses about them when I got back. She said that horses like this used to be dumped by tinkers wanting free grazing. They're now known as "'traditional cobs' and well marked ones are in demand, crossed with carthorse breeds like CLydesdale and Shires and selected for substance, colour and hairiness (look at those fetlocks.)

"Ooh, that's a funny sheep" I thought, before realising that it was WAY too big for a sheep, not to mention the wrong shape. I believe it is an alpaca. If you are an animal expert, let me know, but I've never seen alpacas farmed in the Home Counties before.

And then a little further along we came to

a watercress farm. Watercress used to be a cottage industry in the area but this is the only traditional farm left. It's a pretty remote place, although you can get a car there, and there was nobody about at all. But a ramshackle fridge was standing outside a hut nearby, containing bags of cress for sale plus some cherries from someone's tree. The price was low and I would have taken a photo of it except that at this point I was stung by a wasp (which distracted me somewhat, haha).

It was very hot and I was tempted to just eat the cress from the bag, but didn't. Fresh watercress needs to be thoroughly washed. Look closely at the above pic and you might spot a duck waddling happily around one of the streams which feeds the beds, no doubt crapping in it too. We had the cress (well washed) for supper that evening, though, and it was really, really fabulous. The supermarket can't compare.

We then reached a little dam surrounded by reeds with a few yellow flag irises still peeping out even though their season is nearly over

Go closer and you'll see not only is there a very old statue decorating the weir, but local ducks were spending their time trying to struggle to the top of it. I don't know why, when it was perfectly easy for them to fly. Ducks aren't renowned for their intelligence, or maybe it was some kind of competitive duck thing.

All the rain has brought on the wild flowers very well, and I loved this beautiful spotted foxglove

which was near the Keep Out sign for an imposing mansion. This is Latimer Place, now a hotel, but once known as Latimer House and used for the interrogation of Nazi spies in the war. Slightly ironically, Joachim von Ribbentrop,

who would become Hitler's Foreign Minister, lived in Latimer very near the house. (Before the war obviously - little did he guess - he probably socialised with Lord Chesham who lived there at the time.

The Chess is good for fishing, - you can just see a fisherman below between the clumps of reeds on the opposite bank...

and (below) the same man, going home with his fish in his basket, tramping across the meadow.

We walked a measly eight and a half miles which didn't even achieve the full length of the Chess Valley Walk, I was surprisingly tired, so I had better do some more walking. But it showed what I often think, that the more closely you look at England, the more there is to see.

On the way back to the tube we checked out the Rickmansworth charity shops. I'm seeking oddments of 1960s Midwinter Spanish Garden china (below), to add to a huge box of it that I once bought from an old man at the side of the road. If I hadn't met the old man, I wouldn't have started collecting the china, but that's how it goes.

Rickmansworth charity shops didn't have any "Spanish Garden" but the train home came in TWO minutes. Yay!