The world is asleep but I am wide awake. This beautiful room, with its table of shells and walls of coloured art, is quiet. The balcony doors are closed, their green gossamer drapes hang motionless. 4.29am. Awoke about ten minutes ago. Had a really deep sleep. Dreamt of nothing – just one of those bottomless, velvet starless sleeps where the shoreline of contentment never moves beyond the tides of breathing in and breathing out. Everything feels still and at peace. But I am awake and four hours ahead of local time. The rest of this guesthouse sleeps. Most of the other guests are from France (and they are a further two hours behind). Breakfast is served at 8.30am; some of us are meeting at 6.30am to walk to the beach. There is nothing I can do to make the time go faster.
Along a road, along a lane was a house in Pointe aux Cannoniers. I stayed there for only a short while, but long enough to love it and the experiences it gave. Due to my jet lag the mornings were longer than the nights. I began each day by boiling a kettle to make some vanilla tea (thé à la vanille), and would sit on the floor of one of the small balconies waiting for the hues of dawn to blend and change across the sky. My room was large, on the top-floor. The space inside generous: white washed walls with the owner’s artwork on display (in essence it was a living gallery). Ocean shells could be found on tables and shelves. In the corner of the room was a small desk. I wrote there a few times (especially during the afternoon), but found preference with one of the balconies seated within its cast iron railing surrounding the drop. This balcony overlooked the al-fresco courtyard where meals were served; it also overlooked the long laneway linking this little world with the long road out of Grand Baie, and to the rest of Mauritius. For that time before daylight, I would sit and write. As my vanilla tea cooled in its red rum colours, I ate mangoes, oranges, pineapples and wrote about the previous day. On reflection, I probably spent no more than an hour there each morning writing, lost in the thing I loved to do.
The sun would rise around six, bringing a honey-coloured light into the sky, creating pastel hues within the thin drifts of cloud smudged high above. Before then, the silence existing at the edge of night would give way to a dawn chorus. The other balcony, at a right angle to where I sat, reached directly into a tree – much taller than the guest house – this was home to a number of small, orange songbirds. At breakfast they would come to tables and eat any crumbs fallen to the floor. But the day would only begin when they sensed the moment before sunrise. At first one solitary voice would begin to chirp in soft, regular trills. Then, within minutes, the entire tree was alive with the most beautiful sounds and songs of morning praise. These birds would sing all day until sunset. Few moments will ever come close to replicating the beauty I heard at that hour. In fact, wherever I am, whenever I make vanilla tea, I am immediately back in that room, in the guest-house in Pointe aux Cannoniers, glimpsing those moments before dawn.
Half the world is asleep but I am wide awake. 6.30am. Waiting for Virginie from Arles. We are going to walk to the beach. People are leaving today. The honeymooners are going home; as are Michel and Marie-Claude. Had such a lovely evening last night. Ate at the restaurant here. Last night’s special was a crab salad. It was incredible. Gérard the chef brought it to me himself. Rahma from Paris arrived yesterday; a guy called Benjamin from Kenya was also eating in the restaurant. After the meal, Michel bought rum for all of us and gave toasts to the future. They were such a lovely couple. We’d spent the day together at île aux Cerfs on a day trip when I first arrived. Despite language barriers I enjoyed their company; they were lovely people. At the end of the night, when we came to say our goodbyes, Marie-Claude was crying. She hugged everyone goodbye. She told me that she wished for me good luck, to be happy and to have a beautiful life. She repeated this twice, slowly, wanting me to remember. Michel and Marie-Claude left at 4am this morning for the airport. I didn’t hear them leave.
The walk to the beach from the guest house was long, but always worth it. There seemed to be an adequate amount of time to walk all the way there, to swim, and to walk back before breakfast. On arriving back at the guest house Yasmeen, from Rodrigues Island, had just begun serving coffee. Flanking the laneway, all the way out to Royal Road, were tall, stone walls. Plants, flowers grew there. A giant cactus held its arms wide to the sky, showing a giant white flower which only seemed to blossom in the morning. There was also a small shrine to the Madonna hollowed out in one of these walls. There were always fresh flowers placed there and weeping wax candles burning. Once I saw an old woman kneeling there praying in the afternoon. There were tears streaming from her eyes.
The end of the laneway faced directly opposite a small grocery shop on Royal Road: Persand Royal Super Market. This had been one of my first navigation points when exploring my surroundings on my arrival. From here, I turned right and walked along the long road to the beach. I had been told it was a long walk, but one which was possible (I had even been given a hand drawn map by one of the staff at the guest house). At that hour there was very little traffic on Royal Road – occasional early buses coming in from the capital Port Louis and suburbs such as Goodlands (where some of the hotel staff lived). Occasionally, I found candles burning on the road side, bottles of rum asleep on their sides, sometimes other people walking the same pathway as myself.
At the end of the walk was a roundabout with a confusion of roads all branching off in other directions. As long as I followed a sharp left, hugging a path that curled around a shopfront (facing onto the roundabout), I would stay on track. The shop was large – a kind of supermarket selling everything from food to souvenirs; the owner, a welcoming man from Madagascar, recommended good varieties of rum for me to try. Back on the track, past the shopfront, the pavement ended and I would have to walk carefully along the shared tarmac with oncoming traffic. I came to recognise a row of small houses as my final marker; I crossed the road and made towards a thin forest of trees. Then, there were two beaches alongside each other to choose from: Mon Choisy and Trou aux Biches. Mon Choisy was the one I came to love the most.
The whole world is wide awake but I am ready to sleep. I am walking back along the narrow tarmac road that leads back to the guest house. With the time difference, it is already way past my bedtime at only 7pm. Dusk has fallen, stars are beginning to pierce the sky. Trees hang tired branches down. The air is warm. Everything smells of a day in the sun. I have been down to the beach to swim and watch the sunset. It was not so busy there tonight. Last night was amazing – it was packed with makeshift tents erected between trees, sheets and blankets pulled together; several camp fires danced with leaping flames, people moved to sega and reggae, the sound of drums thumped into the sand. Before my walk there, I went down to Grand Baie to sit by the water’s edge. I saw Gérard the chef there fishing. Not sure if he caught anything. Virginie leaves for Reunion Island tomorrow afternoon. She told me this morning on our walk to the beach that Marie-Claude had terminal cancer. She thought I knew. It had been Marie-Claude’s dream to visit Mauritius. “Good luck, be happy, have a beautiful life.”
Mon Choisy faced west. The beach played host some of the most incredible sunsets, filling the sky with vibrant colour as the red sun slid behind the horizon and across the rest of Africa. As in the morning, the water was almost always flat and calm at sunset. In the morning, the bright yellow sunlight arrowed out from the surrounding trees and illuminated the ocean. Yet at evening, the setting sun faced you as you sat facing the ocean. The colours were every bit as mesmerising as I had always dreamt they would be. It was difficult not to want to share that beauty with someone close. As with any encounter with the Indian Ocean you come to realise this magical ocean is always awake, always alive, somehow connected to you.
To visit Mauritius had been one of my dreams, and the short time I spent in the house at Pointe aux Cannoniers was literally a dream come true. During these experiences of travelling you meet strangers sharing the same path, the same moments in time; invariably, they become woven into that dream’s unfolding. From his home in Souillac, the poet Robert Edouard Hart wrote from a house facing the Indian Ocean. In one of his poems he spoke about how the ocean, like many of our shared dreams, has a natural quality to touch, inspire and include all people (transcending cultures, countries and difference):
Tous les songes d’Asie, Tous les parfums d’Afrique, Toute le poésie chimérique, me viennent ce soir avec cette brise de la Mer Indienne…
All the dreams of Asia, All the perfumes of Africa, All the chimeric poetry, comes to me this evening with this breeze from the Indian Ocean…
One of the great indulgences that writing can provide is the opportunity to drink from these wells once again; to travel back in time, to revisit these places and to meet old friends again for the first time. In just a short time, I had met so many wonderful people – from Mauritius, its surrounding islands, Europe – who all gave their kindness and friendship freely. For the whole of today I have been able to see and feel all what I experienced there so many years ago. Individual, separate moments joined together in a whole, shared experience – now colours a part of a dream that lives forever.
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siesta del somewhere 