Sunday, 10th October 2010
Today is going to be a rest day, relax and just take it easy, well thats what we thought. No sooner were we out of the bunks, but we were marched off to the local Cathedral for mass at 8.30 am. It was an interesting mass, in that it was all conducted in French. The whole service took 1 hour.
The catholic population here is about 26% and Hindus are by far the vast majority at 60% and again, they obviously have a lot of Indian ancestors. Most people are very slim and good looking. Then there is also a large Chinese population, who seem to have most of the business connections.
Following mass, we wandered back to the local 5* hotel and had a full english breakfast for just about 10 Euros. We thought that was good value for what we got, in fact we ate so much, skipper had to have a nap to sleep it off.
Our first impressions of Mauritius are very good. As said before,clean, well organised and happy. A different kind of paradise. Later, Neil and Terry washed down and cleaned the boat, while skipper did the emails and the blog.....
14.00hrs After a relaxing morning, we decided to go and do some food purchasing in the supermarket, particularly butter and spuds for the dinner, as we were going to have dinner on board tonight, roast belly pork and chicken snitzels. Of course, when we got to the supermarket, it was closed, It closed at 12.00hrs so that was that. With nothing much to do, we wandered off down the town through the Sunday Markets, where we managed to get enough potatoes for dinner, costing approx. 4cents for 1/2 doz huge potatoes. We also got an LED reading head lamp (one that straps around the head) for less than 2 Euros, great value.
Back to the boat, having done lots of window shopping on route, we relaxed again and watched many of our boats arrive into the little harbour basin which was reserved for the World ARC boats. One big happy family. Then there was an exchange of all the different experiences that each boat had, many boats having had some damage done on the crossing, but luckely, nothing too serious.
We were joined on A Lady by our American friends from Wild Tigris, for some drinks. That's Casey, Heidi, and Henry. We were cooking our dinner at the time, we had a good time and a laugh. Henry was on neat gin and was very funny. We exchanged all sorts of stories.
Later, when dinner was finished, skipper took his new laptop to the Hotel, where there is free Wifi and tried Skyping home, but the pass word would not work, blinking computers. I am sure they were designed to drive humans daft! So we will have to try again some other time.
So back to the boat, where everyone else had gone to the scratchers, that is except Neil, who had gone to Crazy horse to a sing song organised by the younger folk. At this stage, most of the fleet had arrived, and were soooo happy to be here!
That's all for now. Hope you enjoy the photos on the boat gallery pages.
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)