End of Mauritius trip

Yesterday, we spent about two hours continuing the search for any research publications for Mauritius and eventually had to admit defeat – there just aren’t any. The only task left was to go through the French translations of all the tables for the database. I had thought that this would be a fairly quick task but it actually took us the rest of the day. I do still have some small queries and will try to get these answered in the Seychelles or alternately ask one of the French scientists that I have had some dealings with.

After work I went with Satish to his home to spend the evening with his family. I met his three children and immediately hit it off with his youngest son, seven year old Navdeep. While Satish and his wife prepared the dinner, Navdeep and I played computer games and watched animated videos on YouTube. Satish’s parents joined us for dinner and we started off with chilli bites minus the chilli because the kids won’t eat them if they have chilli included and then dinner was served. As with all people of Indian descent that I have had the pleasure of dining with, I had my plate well and truly piled high with all these wonderful spicy and flavourful dishes and I had not even made a dent in the food on my plate before I was being offered, very insistently, second helpings. As I mentioned previously, Satish and his family are fasting so there was no meat on the table but the food was so tasty that I didn’t miss the meat at all. The jack-fruit curry was delicious but my favourite was a homemade cheese served in a sauce of tomato, ginger and other spices. This was pure heaven! I think Chandikar (not sure of the spelling) was particularly happy that I like this the most as she had made everything herself, including the cheese.

After dinner, Navdeep wanted to show me a new game that he has. It is called Alibaba and basically each player gets a turn balancing little plastic models of items that a Bedouin trader would have on the camel’s back. If the balance is wrong the camel “gets angry” and springs up scattering all the items all over the place. It was great fun actually, nice to do something completely fun and relatively mindless. Satish dropped me back at the hotel at about ten. The outing was a good break from the dull evenings at the hotel but I ate way too much LOL.

This morning I woke to the sound of rain and thunder. I did have a vague plan of heading to the beach again but it rained most of the morning so just settled down and read a book. At about midday the weather cleared so I went for a walk around Quatre Bornes. It was nice to get out but very hot and humid after the rain. In the afternoon I repacked my suitcase and then spent some well-needed time in the gym.

This is my last evening in Mauritius for a week. Tomorrow I fly to the Seychelles for the last of the WIOFish workshops. I am looking forward to the week there. The B&B where I stay is walking distance to the beach and I really like going for a swim in the sea after work every day. I don’t usually have Internet access out of work hours so the first blog from there will most likely only be late on Monday afternoon.

Until then take care everyone!