LOCATION: MAURITIUS

THURSDAY: My first day on the beautiful island of Mauritius was dedicated to a trip for my history of women class. We visited a few different centers around that ranged from a place that worked with women who just got out jail, a nursing home, a place for young single mothers to give birth, and a drug rehab facility. The visits were interesting, but the majority of the group had expected to have some sort of interaction with the women. The only place we had this experience was at the drug rehab place. There were about 12 women living there at the time, and the thing that most surprised me was that if they have children, they can live with their moms at the facility until the age of 12. After I got back from the practicum I had a nice little dinner on the ship before making my way to Flic and Flacq to meet up the everyone who had been there all day. I was welcomed into the villa with some fresh homemade guacamole and a Phoenix beer, the local special. We started with a little improvised beirut in the kitchen, but of course since I was with USD people, we played west coast rules. We all decided to go out for a little bit, it was a Thursday night though, and their weekend really didn’t start until Friday. We went to a bar and met a few locals who gave us some suggestions about where to go next. We ended up at a random place where a bunch of other SASers were and we just hung out pretty low key. The only high light of the night was some local man who played the guitar and harmonica, horribly serenaded us with Bob Marley songs. Before hopping in bed that night, I tossed on my suite and walked right out our door to the swimming pool, and had a ‘just lovely’ swim.

FRIDAY: We decided to peal ourselves out of bed to hit the beach. Of course mimosas were in order, so we loaded up our champagne and orangina settled on the beach. Thankfully it was a little overcast, had it been that temperature and sunny we all would have melted. We met up with some friends who invited us back to their villa that was right on the beach. It was a huge house with a big porch looking over the water. We stayed out side all day and for lunch did a little BBQ with the resources we had. Stephanie had bought a snorkel at the grocery store so we waded into the water and tried to look for some fishies. They must been scared of us cause we didn’t see many. In the end, the snorkel was put to better use as a funnel for mixed drinks. We all went back to our villa to regroup/nap and shower for the night. We got a little dinner at a place called Pe Pe’s Café, which had super good pasta. We ended up going back to the other villa to hang out and meet up with people before going to a ‘disco’ or something. The one we were referred to had a super expensice cover, so we ended up at the place next door and hung out with probably every SASer in the area. Just another typical port taken over by semester at sea.

SATURDAY: On our last morning here we went to the beach again for a little, but it really wasn’t a nice sunny beach day. We grabbed some lunch at a place everyone ate at on the first day which had amazing drinks called Mauritian pearls. It was an orange-juicy drink that had ice cream floating on it, and a pineapple on the rim. I got in a taxi back to port with Missy and Andrew and we had a really nice driver. Missy mentioned how much she liked mangos and asked if they had any here, and driver said he’d look for some. We ended pulling up in a random drive way of a business or something with a HUGE mango tree in it. He went up to the security guard to ask if we could take some, and then started picking up ones off the ground and flinging them up to knock more down. The three of us jumped out of the car to help, the security guard got a ladder and our driver was on the roof picking them, and the guy brought out one of those long sticks like an apple picker. We ended up with a shopping bag worth of mangos! Back at port where we still had time to hang out before on-ship time, we were giving them away and people we loving it!