Golden Dust

Thanks to an excellent privately developed local site at

https://www.mauritius-buses.com/

we have been able to make more sense of Mauritius’ dense bus network.

Yesterday we decided to visit a place near the aptly named Cape Malheureux commemorating a shipwreck which inspired enlightenment writer Bernardin De Saint Pierre to write his immortal ‘Paul et Virginie’.

The first part of our bus journey was on an express bus which meant that for over thirty minutes we were holding on for dear life as a somewhat clapped out Leyland rushed at break neck speed through a countryside of sugar cane plantations and papaya trees.

We reached the town of Goodlands, a very busy shopping centre with a colourful Hindu temple.

Transferring to a more leisurely vehicle we arrived at our destination, the quiet fishing village of Poudre d’Or.

At the end of a promontory stands the monument to one of the most famous shipwrecks in literature.

The ‘Saint Geran’, a ship belonging to the French East India company, was launched in 1736. Her first sailings were from Pondicherry under the command of captain Laurent Dupleyssis. In 1744 with a cargo of food for Mauritius, which was suffering from a terrible drought, she was shipwrecked off the island’s northern coast. Just nine out of her crew of 149 survived.

It was this event that inspired Jaques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, a French civil engineer and botanist living on the island, to write a novel which for many marked the new sensibilities of the romantic movement. In Bernardin’s story the heroine meets her fate by drowning when the ship she is returning on from France is wrecked on the lethal reefs of Mauritius. Could anyone have saved Virginie? The fact is that she could have saved herself if only she had taken off the cumbersome eighteenth century clothes she was wearing but which she kept on out of a sense of modesty. Ah well!

After our visit to the monument’s site, which also holds a much more recent memorial to another drowning, we walked to Poudre d’Or’s local eatery where we tucked into an appetising biryani, just one dish characteristic of an island which, true to its nature as an oceanic crossroad, invites cuisine from Africa, India, China and Europe into a deliciously assorted melting pot of flavours.

Leaving the beach at sunset

we concluded our evening by attending a rumbustious session of the island’s traditional music form, the Sega which incorporates elements from both Africa and India. For long despised by more prudish authorities this lively dance has encapsulated the spirit of the island in much the same way as reggae has done for the West Indies.

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