Mauritius: Not A Shithole, Nor Worth It

Having finally returned from Mauritius, I can now, at long last, answer the most important question of our time: does it suck?  There’s a reason I’ve stayed in over eighty countries and spent four months a year away from home, and still left Mauritius alone this whole time.  It wasn’t that I was saving the best till last.

People I respect have told me it sucks.  People I don’t respect told me.  Random strangers have shouted it in my face in the street, for absolutely no reason.  My mum rings every Thursday to tell me, and she’s never even been.  When I told other travel agents I was going, I could almost hear the disgust in their voices, like the sliver of respect they had was gone and I was now in net-negative respect.  I have had friends respond to the word “Mauritius” with a tone reserved for a terminal diagnosis during a prostate exam.

I was going in with low expectations.  Like getting on a Ryanair flight and just being happy that my neighbour hadn’t shat himself and caused the plane to have an emergency landing.

And yet I didn’t find the hellhole I thought I would.  When Death comes knocking on your door and tells you it’s time, and then that afternoon you merely lose a testicle in a completely unforeseeable incident involving a lawnmower and your mother-in-law, you consider that a win.

For the first few days, I didn’t think everyone was wrong, but I certainly was not anti-Mauritius.  I wasn’t marching around the streets, demanding the dissolution of Mauritius.

During those first few days, I was taken aback by it not being terrible.  But luckily I’m a professional.  No one pays me (no, really, no one pays me) to go to these places and just dip my toe.  No, I’m here to do proper journalism, and I spent six nights, across One&Only and Four Seasons, to get the full deal.  And the conclusion is: well, you already know it, don’t you?  Yes, the wisdom of the crowds remains.  You can indeed get much better elsewhere.

What we’re dealing with is better than I expected, because of all you miserable — sorry, honest — bastards talking it down.  But, in reality, we’re dealing with a very mediocre offering.  It wasn’t a shithole.  It wasn’t even horrifically windy, like I was warned it would be in July.  Instead I got sunshine, calm oceans and even more laid-back staff.  Yep, service at both was exactly what I’d been told to expect, which is to say: about as hospitable as an Iranian drone.

The grounds were nice enough.  Nothing was broken.  I found myself composing a contrarian defence, convinced I was the only honest man left.  And then the fourth day happened, and the fifth, and I understood that what I’d mistaken for quality was simply the absence of catastrophe.

I should confess at this point that I did not leave the resort.  In my defence, that is precisely what you will do too.  Nobody pays for a villa and then spends the day at Port Louis market.  So if the honest case for Mauritius is that, unlike the Maldives, it’s an actual country with actual culture, then the counter is that the product is designed so you never encounter any of it.

The Four Seasons is a golf estate with a hotel attached, and it has a beach problem it has solved by putting you on a boat to a different island.  One&Only Le Saint Géran was the first luxury hotel on the island and still acts like there’s little need to try.  It is fine.  It is also a pale imitation of the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mozambique, and frankly embarrassing next to the Maldives.  So once again I found myself thinking: what’s the point?

More importantly, who is it for?  I have tried to construct the client.  I can get as far as a keen golfer, in a specific week, with every other beach property on earth sold out.  That’s it.

Going to Mauritius is like meeting someone so bland you forgot their name, even as they were telling you for the ninth time and dry humping your leg.

So perhaps the real lesson here is the friends we made along the way?  Yeah. Should listen to them.