Mauritius Photos

Welcome to Mauritius. We originally had planned on just spending one day here, but with all of the changes, we got to spend one day in port, two days floating within eyesight of the island, and five more days in port. It's an incredible island a bit and a ways north east from Madagascar.

Watch out Mauritius, here come the Johnson-Lecks!

Obviously an island in the Indian Ocean is all about the beaches. The water was a million shades of blue and the sand was perfect.

 

 

We headed out to do a little snorkeling right away. We had been on the ship for a long time so we wanted to be out playing as much as we could. We hung with a bunch of other families from the ship and went out to swim with sea turtles. They were feeding and swimming right with us and would sometimes bump us on their way up to get air. Amazing experience for the kids.

 

But Mauritius is not just about beaches. There are mountains and rain forests as well so of course we went hiking. We hiked in clouds mostly and it rained on us too. But we had so much fun. It felt like an Indiana Jones movie since we only ran into a couple other hikers on the trail. Our driver thought we were a little nuts when we came back soaked and covered in mud.   

This was our hiking buddy for the first half. Notice the hurt back paw. Remind you of anyone?

 

Next stop was the city, Port Louis and the markets. They have tea plantations and vanilla plantations and sugar cane fields.

They also cut their pineapples so you can eat them like they are on their own stick. One cool thing about this whole experience is that the kids got to see how other countries do things so much better than the US. Toilets and transportation in Japan. Pineapples in Mauritius. 

This shot was taken from the balcony of our Airbnb. Notice the wildlife.

Dad even got some beach Scrabble in.

Mauritius is a small island so we ran into friends everywhere we went.

These are Fort Collins kids and the middle one will be starting at Rigley's school in the fall. (IF there is school in the fall.)

Mauritius and some of the other islands around here are famous for giant tortoises.

Snorkeling was so much fun the first time around, let's go again. This time in a protected marine park. Corals there are facing the same fate as many around the world, but the fish we saw were the best we had ever seen.

This woman made, according to Wally, the "best food he had had on the entire voyage. Veggie fried noodles. He loved it so much he tried to tip her. She refused his tip so he gave her some shells he had collected.

It started to rain while we were getting ice cream so this guy brought all the kids into his truck to wait out the rain.

We stopped off at a Hindu temple. Amazing colors and amazing people.

Rigley and Wally were so cute, people could come up to them and ask to take their picture. They must have posed with this group for 15 minutes. They were good sports and the people fawned over them to no end.

Mauritius also was the home of the Dodo bird. After all this time, it's still the national bird.

Alright, until next time Mauritius. (We're hoping there will be a next time. It's a hard place to get to, but the whole country was amazing. It's got everything you could ever want. Plus, the island was uninhabited until the Dutch showed up so there's no indigenous population that was oppressed!)