Mauritius Day 1 (Day 39)

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

We arrived in Port Louis early this morning, like around 07:00. It's nice that we were able to arrive on time (even a little earlier) even though we left Cape Town about 12 hours later than we were suppose to. The area that we docked in is the worst that we've been in so far in terms of things to do within walking distance. It's a big harbor, with a lot of cranes and big shipping containers. Like Cape Town, we're the only other cruise ship here right now. We can take a ferry for $2usd to the waterfront where there are a lot of shops and restaurants and stuff like that. You can also take a taxi, there are probably about 10-15 at any given time outside our ship waiting for us. You don't really want one of these though because they know you're Americans that just got off of a big expensive cruise ship, so they will try to charge you as much as possible. Most everyone who comes to Mauritius for tourism comes via plane.

We got going pretty much right away to go and check our our villa. We had to take 3 taxi's to Grand Bay, which is north of Port Louis and about a 15-20 minute drive from our ship to our villa. The taxi charged us $50usd for each car. We found out later that this was a major rip off. The cheapest we were able to make the trip was $500 Mauritian Rupees, or right around $18usd. After getting lost because none of the taxi's knew where our villa was, we finally made it. It's called Ocean Villa's and is located just north of Grand Bay (also spelled Grand Bai at some places). We couldn't check into our room until 1pm but we were able to leave our stuff there until we could check in, so we did that. Then we went to get some lunch at a nice restaurant overlooking the bay area and by that time we could check in.

Our villa is awesome, really nice. It's located in a complex that has it's own portion of the beach probably about 100 yards or so, but the beach extends a long way in both directions. We have about about a 2 minute walk to get to the beach (rough life, I know). Our place is 3 stories tall, the bottom had a full kitchen and a living room, then the upper two floors each had two bedrooms with queen size beds and it's own bathroom. 9 of us actually ended up staying there (originally it was 8) though because David decided to join at the last minute. It's a nice place though, I liked it a lot. There was also a pool, bar, restaurant and a gift shop in our complex.

The first day we got right to business and went to a small grocery store nearby and bought some food and drink for our stay. Food has been relatively cheap everywhere that we've went so far. We were going to buy some steaks at this place to throw on the grill for dinner but we weren't exactly sure that they were steak so we're going to hold off on that until we can get to a more reputable store. There's a big store called 'Super U' in Grand Bay that we can go to later. It's about a 30-40 minute walk to the main part of Grand Bay from where we are. We made the trek once while looking for an ATM, but since then we always take a taxi.

After dinner at another local restaurant we got everything situated and went to the beach. The weather was absolutely perfect the entire day.