Martin Amis: seeking paradise in Mauritius
The late writer turned his hand to travel journalism too. For this piece, published in 1996, he tried scuba diving and met tortoises and kestrels — but found that the shine never went off simply lying down
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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Although the island is moistly tropical, it is pretty well disease-free. No jabs. And no bugs, either; uniformed and backpacked workers are out there with their sprays, like biological warriors. The fauna and flora have been thoroughly battered and mongrelised over the centuries; but nature, locally, is now being passed into the hands of a fresh wave of far-sighted econauts. A coral reef makes sure that only the prettiest and friendliest fish gain access to the impeccable beaches. Volcanoes add geological glamour, but remain obediently dormant.
In such a location the traveller is a divided self, torn between activity (massively available and frenziedly various) and its simpler and nobler opposite, inactivity. Hereabouts, the latter consists of lying down on a lounger, with a book, on the patrolled beach, occasionally girding yourself to gesture limply at a waiter. Entrepreneurial ingenuity has seen to it that you can sometimes combine doing nothing with doing something: for instance, you can water-ski lying down (on an inflated raft), you can get massaged lying down, and you can eat and drink lying down. After a while I expected the shine to go off lying down — but it never happened. The day after I arrived I learnt that an elephant seal had clambered onto a beach in the southeast, breaking its journey from pole to pole. The elephant seal, soon to be named Joe by the Mauritian Express (written largely in French but with a scribal drollery reminiscent of the journals of India), was showing no sign of wanting to leave. What interested Joe was lying down. And, to begin with, Joe would get no argument from me.
One of the big things about the Garden of Eden was that it had been cleansed of all hazards. In Eden the lion lay down with the lamb and the rose grew without thorn. Milton, for one, believed that the rejection of safety — the need for danger — was definingly human. A full statistical picture would, I am sure, reveal that the most common cause of death among the under-60s is nothing other than the holiday. When else do we take so many sickening chances, in such unfamiliar elements — big-game fishing, bungee jumping, abseiling, skydiving? Paradise is perverse: it makes you want to risk your life.
If someone had told me that I would spend a whole morning on the floor of the hotel swimming pool, I would have humbly assumed that my number was up. But no: I was learning how to scuba dive. And this is a serious business. You don’t just strap on the tank and plop backwards off the boat. You immerse yourself in mortal mysteries. Zestful and humorous on dry land, my expert, Alain, became solemn and priestly as we waded into the shallow end. Down there at the bottom we practised safety routines and emergency drills. I became fluent in the sign language of the deep: the hooped thumb and forefinger (all OK), the wavering palm (not so good), the throat-slit (can’t breathe), and the thumbs up (let’s get out of here). Above us, pale and rubbery, human beings wallowed and thrashed.
Thumbs down, ominously, means let’s go deeper. Early the next morning we drove to Grande Baie in the north. I gouged myself into the rubber suit (which has the deeply unwelcome feel of an even layer of extra fat) and took my place in the open boat. On with the tank, the mask, the booties, the colossal flippers. Five minutes later I was 40ft under. And there, as advertised, was the cocktail lounge of the ocean floor, with the fish streaming past in smooth yet drunken glides, their movements dictated, it seemed, by the opening and closing of a series of invisible swing doors.
By now I had concluded that scuba diving essentially relied on two interdependent skills; breathing through your mouth and not panicking. Furthermore, the key to not panicking was to be the sort of person who breathed through his mouth anyway. For the beginner the possession of an imagination is no asset. Alain’s masterful handclasp, I was pretty sure, would have been no help to me if anything bigger than a disc-shaped scatter cushion had cruised into view. A shark, for example. I would have kicked off from the sand and brawled my way back to the surface. And I would have died in the boat, not from the bites but from the bends (a chaos of oxygen and nitrogen in the lungs). Some people feel at home — feel free — in the strange volumes and the heavy physics of the deep. I thought of all the trouble I had taken to get where I didn’t want to go. Nicely established in Eden, I had gone looking for the serpent of the sea.
The Disney ride is the model of contemporary pleasure. Two hours of queueing for two minutes of terror. That’s our idea of fun.
After the search for danger, the search for blight. The island’s capital, Port Louis, had been described to me as “unquestionably Third World”; and even my guidebook, normally so genial and tolerant, warned that its traffic was “daunting” and its fish and meat markets “not for the faint-hearted”. You go there with your culture-shock absorbers in place — but you find you don’t need them. It is possible to glimpse a beggar, an amputee, a few deracinated spivs in flip-flops and flares. Yet there is none of the expected sense of thwartedness, of scatology, of comic-pathetic mimicry. One feels that it is all going the other way: you are surrounded by the furniture of construction and expansion and, most crucially, by innumerable and impeccable schoolchildren shouldering plump rucksacks. Even in the market the raw meat looks about as good as raw meat can look. The chambers marked Beef and Lamb are positively salubrious; Pork slightly takes you aback with the variety of technicolour beastliness one animal can contain (the Hindus and Muslims — 75 per cent of the population — wouldn’t dream of eating it); and gird yourself for the pungent disgrace of Goat.
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Port Louis provides the sensorium of man and slain fauna. A few miles inland lies the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanic Garden, from which even the seediest townie will come away entirely chastened by the plenitude and power of flora; waterlilies the size of babies’ swimming pools, smells of nutmeg, bay and camphor, textures abrasive or impossibly tender, and all of it shadowed by a mighty dreamscape of trees. Still, these plants are mostly transplants: horticultured imports. At the entrance you are received by a family of magnificent Aldabra tortoises. Its senior member is 125 years old, and continues to reproduce. His legs are elephantine, his head brontosauran; his carapace resembles a camouflage helmet the size of an early Volkswagen. Mauritius is not a siesta culture, but the tortoises, perhaps, are keen to introduce the custom (by mid-afternoon the Beetles look firmly parked and handbraked). For the tortoises, too, are imports, indentured labourers: they are an endangered species, shipped over here from the Seychelles.
The Mauritian ecology, both human and natural, often feels like a balancing act that, for now, is being skilfully and confidently maintained. “Nature can no longer get by without us,” says Carl Jones, himself an import (from Wales), who runs the Gerald Durrell Endemic Wildlife Sanctuary. When Carl came here in the 1980s the Mauritius kestrel — to take one example — was down to single figures. Today a couple of hundred of them flourish in the wilds. “In the past ethologists merely observed,” he says. “Now they must step in and help.” For a modest fee the interested tourist can join Carl and his young helpers on their daily rounds. With a plastic bag full of prekilled white mice you four-wheel-drive into the rainforest (“degraded exotic rainforest”, clucks Carl, because the forest, too, is non-native): the mice are then dangled by hand, and the kestrels swoop down in turn, as smooth and ghostly as a special effect. Carl has a like-minded colleague, and a fellow Celt, in Alain O’Reilly at Le Domaine de Chasseur on the south coast.
“For hunting,” enthuses the guidebook, Le Domaine “has no parallel in the region.” You go there expecting to meet a jodhpured brute carrying a blunderbuss. But Alain is another remorselessly enlightened and proactive naturalist. His estate offers hikes, hides, camp-outs, gourmet barbies, and the very infrequent culling of elderly deer. This is “eco-tourism”. And this is the future. In effect, human beings will pay money to see how the world was before they wrecked it.
In even the most modest paradise you undergo a palpably Edenic transformation: you get less ashamed of your body. Only after the Fall, if you remember, did Adam and Eve start reaching for the fig leaves. On the first day you present the beach with a body grown grublike with neglect. A little later you are wearing tights the colour of tomato juice and your chest is like a painting of a tropical sunset, its brushstrokes answering to your wayward application of the block. But, after a week, your body starts to remind you of its foregone burnish. Of course, the sun is getting more carcinogenic every day, and will continue to do so for at least half a century, by which time the suntan will be a half-forgotten vanity. Yet for now we continue to associate cooked skin with health. The body makes peace with mirrors: how glistening and coppery we look in the shower; how fiercely our eyes shine. Then we go home, and the fig leaf becomes an anorak, and our bodies once again become invisible and parched.
A Saul Bellow character once remarked that he had never come across a fig leaf that didn’t turn out to be a price tag. At the top end of the paradise market, the travel journalist is inevitably surrounded by violent expenditure — and by the people who can afford it, every year. Who are they? Stroll to the tennis courts at Le Saint Géran and the concentration of Germans on their terraces (chatting, chuckling, whistling, whittling) gives the impression of some Tyrolean lakeside time-share. Stroll through the gardens at the Royal Palm and you will pass two bikinied middle-aged French women standing under the shade of royal palms and complaining into their mobile phones (complaining to each other, perhaps). There has recently been a welcome infusion of Russians — obvious gangsters, all caviar and champagne and hard cash. This is no destination for the kind of backpacker who (as the hoteliers say) comes with one £5 note and one pair of underpants and doesn’t change either. The backpacker would have to cash his fiver and sell his underpants if he wanted so much as a Pepsi on Mauritius. There is no happy hour on this happy isle. The tab is Fergie-esque.
How will one recover from all the luxury? In the bathroom the loose end on the loo roll is preshaped into an inviting V. Soon one will have to go back to scrabbling at the perforation with a careworn thumbnail. Le Saint Géran has an activity list printed up daily in three languages: Tennis-Soccer Lesson with Tonino. Palm Tree Climbing Demonstration with Vijay. Towards the end of my stay I looked up from my book and saw that a small crowd had gathered on the shore. One of the gardeners seemed to be smacking the shallows with his shoe. What was this — a Flip-Flop Washing Session with Sunil? I went over. A fat cream-coloured fish had been ladled onto the sand, where it limblessly twitched. At length it was ladled back in again. I expected it to wriggle off, but its internal radar was all cross-purposed. It could only wallow upside down or make confused clockwise circles. Maybe the poor fish was trying to do a Joe — to gain dry land and sleep it all off, like the elephant seal.
Joe was easy to find. He moves from beach to beach, but there are always a couple of dozen cars stacked on the pavements wherever he happens to pitch up. There is also an ice-cream van, milking the extra trade. Joe lay slumped on the sand between the rocks — two tons of glistening grey, like a rock himself. Under the watermelon sunset a couple of hundred Mauritians had gathered behind the cordon: grandmothers in glittering saris, children dolled up as if for church, silent, reverent, gentle-faced. The seal seemed to be lying there on his shoulder, huffily asnooze, entirely turned away from the world. I knew just how Joe felt. Who wants to leave the beach? Who wants to stop lying down? Who wants to absent themselves from paradise and make the long journey back to much colder waters?
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First published in The Sunday Times, Travel, March 10, 1996. Martin Amis was a guest of Elegant Resorts and Air Mauritius, and stayed at Le Saint Géran and Royal Palm hotels
