Africa-Press – Mauritius. By Martin Amis
The thing about “paradise” is that it doesn’t exist; not on this earth. We keep searching for it, though, and so of course do all the traffickers in travel, worldwide. Yet what do we seriously expect?
Paradise should be fabulously remote but also readily accessible (in other words a direct flight, if you please); the accommodation should be tasteful and authentic but also futuristically luxurious, the staff proud but willing (noble savages born to serve), the climate tropical but monsoon-less, the wildlife wild but strictly regimented (and let’s lose all the insects).
Furthermore, like motorists who complain about the number of cars on the roads, tourists are baffled and saddened by — of all things — tourists. We want paradise to be so exclusive that only we get to go there.
And it would be nice if paradise came pretty cheap. Sensing, perhaps, that our demands contain certain contradictions, we are prepared to compromise. Indeed, we have no choice.
We will settle, then, for the attractive smattering of high-tech cabanas, on the turquoise lagoon, under the throbbing stars. Tonight, at the consecrated barbecue, King Magua will be serving a samphire soufflé followed by killer whale à la mode de champagne.
The only other guests (we gather) are Brigitte Bardot, Mario Vargas Llosa and James Bond . . . Mauritius is that neat little orb in the south Indian Ocean, just to the right of Madagascar and about 4,000 miles from Australia.
Arriving on its shores, from London, in January, wearing your winter coat and your winter skin, you are easily persuaded that you have died and gone to heaven.
Successively colonised by the Dutch, the French and the British, Mauritius is now a racially harmonious and wisely governed republic peopled by the descendants of the settlers’ imported slaves and labourers: predominantly Hindu, with large minorities of Franco-Mauritians and Creoles.
There is full employment, and as a result vacationers find that their presence excites no obvious resentment (and only the mildest importunity). In the contemporary world the tourism industry is the descendant of imperialism; and the tourist is the ravening foot soldier.
But the new-deal Mauritians who are now in political control are developing their country with respectable caution. You can visit this paradise without the sense that you are inevitably polluting it.
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