Orewar, Mauritius

Okay, I'll be honest with you all: Mauritius has never really been on my travel list. I certainly knew about it - as well as having a few friends from there my local mosque of twenty years (of which five I spent in their madarassa) was run by Mauritians, so it wasn't like I was totally ignorant of the place.

A part of me did think that a visit was inevitable at some point, I just needed a good reason to go and so when a friend invited us to their wedding celebrations back home I was the first non-family member to book their flight. That's right: I was once again flying across the world to attend a wedding. What can I say? I'm lucky to have international friends, and will always jump at the chance to use them as an excuse to have a holiday; and since I actually love attending weddings anyway, attending one during a holiday just makes them all the more awesome.

So yes. As my time in Mauritius draws to an end it's pretty clear to me how much of an awesome time I had during my stay here. For sure it was less to do with the island and more to do with the wedding and people, but that's just a reflection of how much time I had to do be a tourist rather than the lack of things to do here; judging by the little we did manage to do as well as the feedback from others who have visited there was plenty of touristy stuff that we missed out on.



Quite amazingly an apartment, car and even mobile phones had all been pre-arranged by the hosts of the wedding, and these all gave us a level of autonomy which ensured that we would enjoy our time here even more. Along with the fancy technology in our phones, we were able to do our own thing on our own timetables, whether that meant taking drives on the islands or hanging out with the family much later into the night than we really should have. In effect we had pretty much gone native.

Overall though Mauritius has definitely made my list of best-holidays-ever, and is up there with Australia and South Africa (funnily enough both of which involved weddings too) and the other places I'll always remember - but even more than that it's one of the very rare places that I wouldn't mind going back to either.