Mauritius Day 3 (Day 41)

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

This morning we had this great idea of renting some scooters to run around the island on. They're relatively cheap to rent, especially when compared to having to take a taxi everywhere. Ocean Villa's was able to hook us up with a company in Grand Bay that we could rent them from for a day. So they came and picked us 5 guys up and brought us to their little office to sign paperwork and such. First they asked to see our drivers licenses, but only 2 of us had ours on us at the time. They didn't seem to have any problem with that though (umm....okay.....). So eventually we get done doing paperwork and paying and David and I were able to get instructions on how to properly use them right outside the office while the other 3 had to go down the street to get the other three scooters. I should mention first that none of us have ever actually driven a scooter. Our guy was really good at explaining everything too us and I was sure that everything was going to be fine, at least on my end. So David and I leave our place to go down the street to meet up with the other three where they got their scooters. They were located right in the busiest intersection in Grand Bay. Probably not the best place to learn how to drive a scooter. Actually I would say that it's easily the worst place to first drive a scooter. Anyway, we think that we're all good so three of us leave in a line back to our villa. A few
blocks down the road we realize that the other two aren't behind us anymore so we turn off the street and wait for probably about 10 minutes in hope that they catch up. Well they never showed so after debating whether we should just go back to our place or the opposite way to find them we decided to go find them. They were still where we started, but this time neither was
on a scooter. The guy that was teaching them runs over to us, tells Kevin to move to the back of the scooter so he can drive, then drives Kevin's scooter back to the first office and tells David and I to follow. At this point, we had no idea what was going on. Apparently when Jim was starting he ran into a tree before he could even get to the road. Also, when he hit the tree he
didn't remember right away that the right grip was the accelerator so he continued hitting the tree a couple times before taking his hands off of it. Once the guy saw this he ran over to him, got him off of the scooter, then ran to the last one, Chris, and got him off of his scooter before he was even able to start it. Then he made the claim that we were 'too risky' to let drive these things. So basically we all ended up without scooters for the rest of the day which was kind of a bummer. However, the 15 minutes that we were able to ride them was SO much fun!

Once we were done eating David, Chris and I headed over to David's sister's (Donna) resort in hopes of some free Internet and to chill by the pool. She came to Mauritius with her boyfriend for a nice week's vacation and to see David since his birthday is coming up. I forget the exact name of the place but it was a big 5 star resort located right on the beach overlooking the
ocean. Unfortunately, they are really strict on letting people who haven't rented a room go in the pool and hang out in the resort so we had to stay pretty low key. The Internet also wasn't a whole lot faster than our villa so we didn't stay there too long.

The three of us headed back to the ship. David and I needed our scuba certification cards and Chris needed some fresh clothes. Once we all got our stuff we headed over to the waterfront to get some food and check out what was all in the area.

We ate at this really cool sports bar called Shots or Shooters, one of the two... The decorations were what made it awesome. They had TV's in the floor as you walked in surrounded by a bunch of various athletic balls and some of the tables were glass with balls underneath the glass such as 500 ping pong balls. I really should have taken a picture now that I think of it. After dinner we grabbed a taxi back to our villa to meet up with the rest of the group. By this time it was about 10pm.

It wasn't long before we headed to the beach to hang out next to the ocean, since this was our last night in Mauritius. While we were out there we ran into a group of like 15 guys from the UK who were really awesome. They were all in Mauritius for a wedding. A couple were brothers, one was the groom, and the rest were cousins or some part of one of the family. Some of the
stuff that they were talking about was absolutely hilarious. Anyway, a few of us just stayed out there and hung out with them until like 3 in the morning. They had brought a Cuban Cigar out to smoke, this was my first taste of a Cuban, which was really good. Eventually we decided to call it a night and head back to the villa, but they joined us about 10 minutes later and we continued conversing for another hour in our living room. So now it's 4 in the morning, and definitely time for bed since I have to wake up semi-early to go scuba diving.

Mauritius is a really big travel destination for people from Europe, India, South Africa and other countries in that vicinity. Not so much for Americans. I would bet a lot of you haven't even heard of Mauritius before it was put on my itinerary and you looked it up :). A lot of maps even leave
it off along with quite a few other small island countries that technically belong to the African continent. Because of this, it seemed that people thought we were first from South Africa, then Europe, but eventually from our accent they narrowed us down to being Americans.