50 worldtravellermagazine.com
SEYCHELLES
sipping drinks perched halfway up a
lighthouse, I loaded up the basket of
my villa’s bicycle with a picnic of lime-
zest-dusted smoked salmon bagels
from the deli and set off to explore.
With secluded bays and vibrant
snorkel spots mapped out all round
the island, it wasn’t hard to find my
own perfect stretch of driftwood-
strewn sand. And unlike those slightly
self-conscious, private sandbank
experiences in the Maldives, this
was real privacy: no conveyor belt of
couples queueing up for my spot, no
surreptitious staff hovering behind me.
Even better, the Seychelles does
shade: instead of a spindly palm or two,
gorgeous thick jade-green jungle has
your back here. Fragrant lantern trees,
flowering dogwoods, native mulberry,
velvetseed.... Then there are the beasts
(Sundberg’s day gecko, amberwing
emperor dragonfly, marbled mantis) and
the birds (wading whimbrel, tropical
shearwater, firetruck-red fody), not to
mention the prehistoric monsters.
Roaming free-range across
Desroches’s interior are 160-odd
giant tortoises: cute as cubs, but
disconcertingly, agelessly primordial,
too, as if Jim Henson got the Jurassic
Park gig. I’m introduced to George, 120
years old and the size of a go-kart, but
with the khaki colouring and armour-
plating and (once he sees food) slow,
crushing, single-minded unstoppability
of a tank. He was wrinkly and twinkly
and genial-looking, but there was
something in the coolly reptilian eyes of
his companion, Naughty Lulu, that made
me want to get out of her way before I
found out how she came by the name.
The island’s size comes in handy come
nightfall, as well. Try escaping from
the lights of your resort in the Maldives
and you end up neck-deep in the ocean.
But here, you can slip away unnoticed
under some of the world’s darkest —
and so most star-spattered — skies.
I wandered up to the island’s airstrip,
with its 360-degree horizons and 4,000
hectares of inky black above, and saw a
true, uncountable infinity of heavenly
bodies. Mars glared an angry hot red
on one side of the firmament, Venus
sheened a cool clear liquid-mercury
on the other; and between them, a
creamy, full-fat Milky Way was smeared
across the sky as thick as the good stuff
at the neck of a bottle of gold-top.
The darkness has drama in the
Seychelles. Bats wheel overhead, waves
crash noisily on those millennia-
smoothed granite boulders that bookend
the beaches, and (unlike Mauritius
or the Maldives) people go out.
I crashed a couple of the impromptu
parties that pop up around the bigger
islands’ beaches and parking lots:
barbecue smells effervesced into the
warm night air along with the seggae, a
blend of trad sega and modern reggae,
and just the most tropical-sounding
music you’ll ever hear. Even the resort
islands have a bit of life to them. On
my next one, Six Senses Zil Pasyon,
guests cheerily pilfer the local rum from
mini casks in the (dis)honesty bar.
Zil Pasyon has adventures on tap, too.
One morning I canoe to the next islet
along. Another, I hike a path, ducking
beneath umbrella-sized spider webs (I
felt very Indiana Jones, but the critters
are harmless) to a secret beach, big
enough for just two. And on a third, I
snorkelled early, right off the beach, and
saw an eagle ray soaring through the
water, serene as a seraph, then a turtle,
just as benignly beatific, fading in and
out of sight like a dream. Unsure what
ancient wisdom the visitation was trying
to impart, I interpreted it as ‘Have the
scrambled-eggs-with- crab for breakfast’.‘
THE
SEYCHELLES
HAS ALL THE
SCREENSAVER
GOOD LOOKS
AND ENDLESSLY
EXQUISITE
SANDY
SHORES OF ITS
BROCHURE
RIVALS, BUT
WITH MORE’
Most guests get between the
Seychelles’ outer-island resorts
by helicopter, and that’s certainly
the quickest and most glamorous
way to do it (though you may not
feel quite so Clooney when they
weigh you before take-off).
I loved the views from up there — the
water’s neon blues glow even brighter
from above — but I loved chuffing
about by boat and bus, too, for a taste of
island life you wouldn’t get in a month
of Maldives. I saw impish schoolkids
gambolling through their break-time
games on the beaches beside their
classrooms (who needs playgrounds?),
picnicking families pulling cars over
en route to siphon crystal water from
roadside natural springs (who needs
Evian?), and bantering fishmongers
selling the morning’s catch off upended
crates at street corners, the fish so fresh
and many-coloured you’d think they
were for the aquarium, not the plate.
At Port Glaud, I got a bit damp myself.
Here, just metres from a luxury resort
in Mahé’s northwest corner, is a 1km
path that winds through a hamlet (and
shortcuts through someone’s back
garden, for which privilege he’ll charge
you $2 odd) to the Sauzier Waterfall. It’s
pretty rather than dramatic, but at its
base is a deep, cool, green natural pool,
utterly irresistible, where I whooped
and wallowed alongside a bunch of local
lads until my fingertips wrinkled.
That resort, Constance Ephelia,
sprawls across two delectable bays, a
handful of thickly forested hills and
a mangrove swamp, so to tick off a
few more items in my ‘I-Don’t-Spy’
book of things you wouldn’t expect
on an Indian Ocean holiday I zip-
line through those forests and kayak
through those mangroves, scrumping
milky-sweet cocoplums as I go.
I also spent a day in the capital (which
is more than I’ve managed in eight
trips to Mauritius and the Maldives).
Victoria has a real working fruit and fish
market (you can tell it’s not for tourists
because it’s early and it smells), named
after one Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke
(who seems, idiosyncratically, to have
been named after himself). There’s
the Botanical Gardens, too, where