As with all itinerary blogs, I will start this one with the story of how we ended up deciding Mauritius as the destination.

We were planning this trip with our friends (who were also with us in Georgia and Armenia). The typical process was happening – “this place is really good but flights are too expensive”, “we don’t have that many holidays”, “this would be repeat for XYZ, let’s do some new places”. Then we switched to a different process – which places have direct flights from Bangalore? That narrowed it down quite a bit and one country popped out of the map now – Mauritius. There was a direct Indigo!

What was surprising when we started planning our Mauritius itinerary was that a lot of people didn’t really know where the country was located on the map. It is tucked in as a small dot in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar and is a part of Africa. It is further south of Seychelles, a trip we had done just before Covid.

A quick history of Mauritius

Mauritius was an uninhabited island till the year 1638. While it was originally discovered by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, they didn’t settle there. The island was named by Dutch explorers after Prince Maurice of Nassau when they landed in 1598. They started colonising it in the year 1638 and started chopping down the dense forests to make way for sugarcane fields (which they brought from Java). Ultimately, they abandoned the island in 1710 after numerous failed attempts to tackle the cyclones and diseases.

The French took over 5 years later and the French Governor, Mahe de La Bourdonnais started laying the foundations of the modern day “development”. They brought in slaves from Africa and India to work on their fields – ancestors of the present day population. The British attacked in 1810 and took over the island. In 1835, slavery was abolished and indentured labour took over. Most of the labour came from India – a significant population from the present-day Bihar. Hence, the most spoken language after Mauritian Creole is Bhojpuri!

Mauritius got independence in 1968 and Sir Seewosagur Ramgoolam became the first prime minister.

Knowing this brief history really helps as it brings in a lot more appreciation for the people, their culture, food and various influences that led to them.

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