Our relaxing overnight stay in Nairobi before our return flight to the ship didn’t work out. Yesterday our tour escort was told by Silversea central that our plane will be delayed by several hours. Thus, the ship would leave Mauritius before we arrive. That’s a problem. The solution was to take the earlier flight, which has us on a red-eye at 11:30pm and landing at 4:30am. Sucks, but what can you do? Bottom line, we got there.
However, we were now on the island BEFORE the ship arrived. Silversea stuck us in a nice beach resort where we caught up on our sleep and enjoyed lunch before the next step. We had the option to return to the ship or take a quickly organized tour. Most went to the ship, but I am the intrepid CruiseBoy! I had not visited Mauritius before, so I wanted to look around. I can finished my sleep time that night.
The resort was sturdily built – Mauritius is on the western part of the Indian Ocean, so gets cyclones (hurricanes) – and the restaurant operated on “island time”. So we left an hour later than scheduled. But we still saw stuff.
Our first stop was the Bois Cheri tea plantation. The tea fields were nice to drive by, but the processing area to a bit congested. For information about tea processing see my 2019 tea plantation visit.
A few minutes from the factory is a restaurant and tasting center. Time to dive in.
We started with the vanilla blend, which our guide said is the standard tea in Mauritius. Each individual teabag was vacuum sealed, which I have not seen before.
I went thru Vanilla, Fruit Blend, Mint and Lemon Grass. Of the samples I agree with our guide. The vanilla is a good everyday tea. For something different the lemon grass has a great taste and aroma kick. They used a glass bowl to hold all our refuse.
With our late start we could not visit the gardens across the island, so we stopped to see the Grand Bassin Hindu temple that was on the way to the ship. A slight majority of the island’s population is Hindu. Here is a volcanic crater lake with many Hindu deity statues. There are two giant statues nearby, which I will get into later.
Around the corner are some 100+ foot (33m) statues of Shiva and Durga. What was funny is the monkey that was eating all the offerings.
After all this travel it’s now a short trip to the next island. It’s now time for a nap attack.