Day 20
The Seychelles
The Seychelles turned out to be everything we’d hoped the Maldives would be. Gorgeous water, sandy beaches, interesting culture, clean, and beautiful. I suppose that if you’re in a resort, the Maldives might look like that, too, but we were less than impressed with their capital city.
The Seychelles, though… wow. We began the day with a beautiful sunrise as we passed the wind turbines on the way to our dock.
Upon exiting the ship, we were greeted with some local music. Now, not knowing anything about the history of the area, I expected to hear some sort of “island” music, perhaps with a steel drum or maybe a ukulele. What we got was this:
Wait, what? It sounds like Zydeco (minus the washboard), the music you’d hear the Creoles play in New Orleans! I asked one of the locals what they call that kind of music, and she said, “Creole.”
Our guide, Jeanette, had a gorgeous Creole accent, but the cadence and tonality was closer to Jamaican than to the Louisiana Creole accent I’m more familiar with. I could’ve listened to her talk all day, which was a good thing, because she talked a lot.
She explained that the Seychelles were first inhabited by the French, who brought slaves with them from Africa. Now it makes sense: French + African cultures mixed together in isolation = Creole. French and English are the official languages of Seychelles (and they are part of the Commonwealth), but Creole is the mother tongue, spoken by the locals. It’s French mixed with some African languages, plus local words, and it’s really lovely to hear.
The first stop was the Botanical Gardens.
There were giant tortoises here that you could feed.
Lots of nice flowers and trees, some indigenous and some not.
One of the more interesting trees was the starfruit tree - mainly because I don’t think I knew that they grew on trees.
There was an interesting long-tailed bird flying around. This is the clearest shot I got of it.
…but this is my favourite shot of it. It came right from the camera like that, no photoshopping.
After enjoying the gardens for a bit, we had a little walkabout in Victoria, the world’s smallest capital city. You can absolutely see the Creole influence here. Some places reminded me very much of New Orleans.
Jeanette explained when we got off the bus that where we were standing used to be the coastline.
Many years ago, there was a massive landslide that dumped so much earth, it nearly doubled the land mass of Victoria. One of the few buildings from before the landslide that still exists today is the Anglican Church, now considered a memorial.
In the Maldives, we noticed that many shops were closed due to Ramadan.
In the Seychelles, many of the shops were closed because it was Sunday and people were at church. There were a few stores open - souvenir shops and groceries. Some locals had their produce stands out on the streets, this one selling the smallest watermelons I’ve ever seen.
Then it was back on the bus for a trip up the east side of the island, across the top, and down the west side.
Eventually, we ended up at a beach resort for about an hour, where we waded out into the Indian Ocean. The water was nice and warm. That look on my face is me trying to see the screen whilst facing the sun.
The resort looked pretty nice. It was a Burjaya branded property. They exist mostly in Malaysia, although they have a few outside of that.
By now, the ‘feels like’ temp is 38C / 100F and we’re more than happy to get back on the bus to the ship. Rob got in a good nap (jealous!) and I took advantage of relatively fast wifi whilst lots of people were still ashore, because I knew how many photos were going to be in this one.
And you know what? I’m going to end this one here. Tomorrow is a sea day, so if anything interesting happens this evening, you’ll hear about it on tomorrow’s post.