Voyager: Travel Writings (24 page)

The next day I set out on my first serious hike. I drove out Sans Souci Road from Victoria, past the U.S. embassy, the radio station, the forestry service headquarters, to the trail marker for the mountains called Trois Frères, where I parked the vehicle and began my climb. The trail led through a lovely section of the Morne Seychellois National Park. I found it helpful to have the
Trois Frères
Trail Guide,
which I had purchased earlier in Victoria, and absolutely necessary to carry water, lots of it. The heat and humidity were of an intensity I had never before experienced. It was like climbing in full wet suit. The trail was nicely, intelligently marked and, like Adirondack or Appalachian trails, was deceptively easy at first, then very difficult. For several hours, I clambered up the mountain, crossing wide-open sheets of black granite, passing through fifteen-foot ferns and forests of cottonwood trees, thickets of cinnamon and wild vanilla and pineapple, mahogany groves and sisal, while mynah birds and bulbuls and sunbirds squawked and sang as I crossed below them. Not one person passed me. I was alone.

After two hours of steady climbing, I reached the top, exhausted, and sat back against a chunk of blue-gray granite. Just as I was about to enjoy the wonderful 360-degree view of the entire island, a heavy white mist moved in, bringing light rain and blocking off the world entirely, and I was suddenly locked inside a small white room. I could have been anywhere; I could have been home in Princeton, New Jersey. Several long, cold, lonely moments passed, and then it suddenly cleared again, and now I saw how far from home I’d come. An Asiatic jungle spread out below, the famous tea plantation, terraced, like Cambodia, and beyond that Morne Blanc and the whole
long spiny ridge of mountains all the way to the distant, pale green flatlands of the south. Sooty terns and kestrels and fairy terns cruised along the passes hundreds of feet below my crag. I peered down and saw the town of Victoria and its harbor and the four isles of the Ste. Anne Marine National Park below in the east, with Praslin, Cousin, Round Island, and La Digue farther in the distance near the horizon. I saw the sea as a huge glistening disk, with me situated exactly in its center, the sky a blue celestial bowl above, and the sun a cosmic eye. Propelled out of time, I felt in touch with something ancient and primal that I couldn’t name.

The geology of most of these islands is as old as Gondwanaland, the mother of continents. They are a Precambrian granitic archipelago believed to have been left behind in midocean when India split off from Africa and headed for its fated collision with Asia. They are the only granite islands in the world not tied to a nearby continental shelf. Despite the palm trees, rain forests, and white sandy beaches, the Mahé group has little resemblance, geologically speaking, to the coral islands of the Lesser Antilles or the volcanic islands of the South Pacific. Here was an island experience of another order, I mused, sitting on my mountaintop.

Later, after a shaky-legged descent and a long swim and shower at the Northolme, I drove down for a drink at the seaside bar of the Coral Strand Hotel, where sunset watchers off the Beau Vallon beach ritually gathered—the young and the restless, mostly. At the bar I ran into Steve Ambrose, the casino manager I’d met the other day. He came up and saved me from a dreary conversation with a young Australian settled in the south of Mahé, a thoughtful person, perhaps, but basically an idiot. We had been arguing politics. The average Seychellois’s monthly income after taxes is about $400, which the Australian thought was just fine, since they had free health care and free education and food falling off the trees and leaping from the seas into their pots. Never mind that prices for food, clothing, and shelter were about what they are in Westport, Connecticut.

Steve offered to buy me dinner. We went to a place called La
Perle Noire, and as we ate, Steve’s own story came out. He was a working-class Liverpudlian, a guitar-strumming boy who’d done lighting for rock groups. He’d found work early as a croupier in Liverpool, then had signed on for casinos in Baghdad, South Africa, and Liberia, moving up with each job and leaving each country just before war or revolution struck. Except for Las Vegas and Atlantic City, he said, all the casinos in the world are managed by Brits. Must be the way they look in tuxedos, he said and laughed. Adventures in the tropics, Steve went on, had been a hell of a lot more interesting than life in Maggie Thatcher’s England. He knew he was spoiled for normal life forever. Seychelles, especially, will do that to you, he said to me. Be careful, friend.

Grousing about town the next morning, trying and failing to make arrangements to get across to Silhouette Island, I finally gave it up, and at nine thirty at the Marine Charter dock talked my way aboard a day-trip boat out to the Ste. Anne Marine National Park, an island and underwater reef preserve located at the mouth of the bay a short boat ride from Victoria.

It was a hotel group, mostly Germans and some Italians, everyone loaded with cameras and video cameras. It cost me $73 for lunch on the beach, drinks, snorkeling, three island stops, fish feeding, and a glass-bottomed-boat tour that turned out to be in a glass-
hulled
boat, a brand-new Australian-built forty-seater, the
Nautilus
. The guide, who spoke as if he believed his audience was actually intelligent, which was a relief and a pleasure, was named Jancy, a smart kid who asked the Germans if they wished him to speak English or French.

The people of Seychelles, although generally shy and reticent and not at all worldly, seem linguistically gifted. They almost all speak fine French and better English, as well as their native Creole, a language vaguely resembling Haitian Creole but utterly incomprehensible to my ears, and many speak an additional language or
two, depending on their off-island travels. The young guide’s ability to move easily, happily, among several European languages, none of which was native to him, was typical.

The best part of the day trip was the stop at Moyenne Island, owned by Brendon Grimshaw, a man in his late sixties—another British expat, it turned out. Expatriates, most of them British and French, with a few Yanks, seemed to run the country. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for a nation with fewer than seventy thousand people and an economy dependent on tourism, fishing, and agriculture to train its own management.

Grimshaw ran a small restaurant-bar and guesthouse geared to the party boats from Victoria. Over a cold beer he told me his story. He had been a journalist for the
Financial Times
of London and had bought his twenty-five-acre island in 1962 for ten thousand pounds. He was a past president of the local Rotary Club and for all intents and purposes a proper businessman, but he was also, like so many of the longtime expats, a rogue who’d settled in, a loud, somewhat theatrical fellow, very bright and energetic and wary. He was an old-time ward heeler whose ward was a tiny tropical islet in a bay, not an urban neighborhood. Like Rick, like Steve, the man had invented a life out here to suit his strange needs exactly. He’d survived thirty years on the island, while political movements and conspiracies and coups and palace revolutions whirled around him.

From what I’d gleaned of Seychelles’ recent history, this was no small feat. From the mid-1960s until shortly after independence, in 1976, Seychelles politics was run by the flamboyant, even grandiose, James Mancham, the nation’s first president and the leader of the Seychelles Democratic Party. Sir Jim was friend to starlets, to celebrities, and to Adnan Khashoggi and various petroleum potentates, many of whom had bought huge tracts of land and pushed for big-time tourism. Mancham’s prime minister was France-Albert René, a left-leaning young lawyer who’d founded the Seychelles People’s United Party (SPUP) and had formed common cause with
Mancham in order to obtain independence for Seychelles. Then, in 1977, while Mancham was in London attending a conference of Commonwealth leaders, René and a small force of Tanzanian-trained Seychellois carried out a nearly bloodless coup.

Under René, the economy foundered, capital fled the country, and tourism all but disappeared. In November 1981, there was a widely reported and badly botched countercoup attempt led by the ex–Congo mercenary colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare. A troop of British and American mercenaries entered the country disguised as a South African rugby team, carrying automatic weapons and grenades in their suitcases. There was a failed mutiny of NCOs in the Seychelles army in 1982, then several more coup and assassination attempts, but despite all, René stayed in power.

He was coming now to the midpoint of his third five-year term, which was all he was permitted under the constitution. Though he seemed less the Marxist dictator he was sometimes called than a paternalistic socialist unwilling to delegate power, clearly Seychelles government was his show and had been since 1977. His strong, far-seeing policies for preserving the precious and fragile Seychelles environment and carefully developing the tourist industry were as enlightened as those of any government anywhere. It was easy to see, however, that the government and René’s SPUP were extremely involved in the daily business of every citizen, and not all of them liked it.

The following morning I took a long, easy walk, hardly a hike, from Bel Ombre, on the west coast of Mahé, to Anse Major. While I walked, I picked up mangoes and custard apples from the ground and stashed them in my pack. The trail wound through jungle and fields of rose apple, along high black cliffs overlooking the sea below. It rained off and on, but no matter, as I was soaked in five minutes from sweat anyhow. I had parked my Mini Moke in a yard where the road ended, then walked for two hours to reach
the beach. The only people I met were a local man and his two small boys in the jungle gathering coconuts, splitting off the outer husks on a sharpened stake on the ground. The man gave me a nut, and I slipped it into my pack and moved on. Where’s the serpent in this garden? I wondered, as I walked along a winding narrow path beneath towering palms. Silent, solitary hiking is practically religious. Once you’re into it and tired, your thoughts gradually replace the world, and you become a transcendentalist.

At a perfect small arc of a beach, there was a palm-frond lean-to, and I crawled under it to get out of the rain, reading a week-old London
Observer
I’d found in Victoria that morning, and ate my mango and custard apple and coconut. Strange, but lovely, to be stretched out under a Robinson Crusoe–style lean-to eating a lunch of fallen fruit and nuts, reading about the Redgrave sisters opening in London in Chekhov’s
Three Sisters,
a fine warm rain falling, waves crashing at my feet. Soon the sky cleared, and I dried my clothes on a branch, swam, read a bit more, and wandered the beach and rocks for hours. There was no one else in the world, and it was wonderful.

At some point that day, much later—time had started to melt for me—the
Blue Marlin,
a charter fishing boat out of Beau Vallon, pulled into my bay and anchored. A fat lobster-red man in shorts jumped into the water and swam ashore. He was a Colonel Blimp type, British, who popped his eyes with delight when he saw my
Observer
and the front-page photos of England in snow. He grabbed it from my hands and sat on my rock, cruising through the news. Then abruptly he plunged back into the water and swam to the boat, clambered aboard, jovially waved, and took off, leaving me to my lovely solitude for the remainder of the day. Leaving me to the natural world—sea and sand and rocks and trees. Birds and lizards and sand crabs were my only companions. I was becoming a misanthrope.

That night, after a late dinner alone at the Northolme, I sat out on the terrace listening to the sea break against the rocks in
the darkness below and fell into conversation with Rick Howatson, the dive master, who had stopped off on his way home from the Japanese restaurant located north of Victoria on the east coast of Mahé. He was unusually white-faced. He told me that tonight after he’d finished dinner the restaurant owner had brought out a tray of liqueur bottles, each with an odd, organic-looking object marinating in the liqueur. Rick had chosen the one that looked least harmful, he said. In fact, it tasted fine, but when he had drunk it off he was told that he’d chosen the liqueur with sliced deer’s penis in it. All the bottles had animal penises in them, different types—some whole, some sliced. Rick had blanched and gagged, but kept it down all right, he said, but he now felt the need for a party. One would soon be in full swing at his house.

At first I declined his invitation, but a while later, after he’d gone—confusing solitude with loneliness—I got into my Mini Moke and made my way to his house. It was a garish white hilltop palace with a pool, three dogs, miscellaneous cats, several local teenage hangers-on with guitars, the Australian I’d been talking to at the Coral Strand the other day, and his wife or girlfriend, a very young black Seychelloise woman. It was the sort of house you’d expect a successful rock group to rent and wreck in Laurel Canyon. There were Steve Ambrose from the casino, another dive instructor named Avi, who was a South African Israeli, and his British wife, who was very pregnant, and a half-dozen others who looked like Europeans and North Americans, not locals.

It was not a good party. For a few hours, folks stood around and drank SeyBrews or straight gin and mostly talked local politics, until finally people drifted away, and it was only me and Steve and Rick and an American woman diver named Pat Scott, a Red Cross worker from Illinois who’d just spent four weeks in Kenya and Tanzania and was out now “for a few weeks of R and R,” she told me. I asked her what had brought her so far from Illinois. “It’s simple,” she said. “You got Bonaire, you got the Red Sea, and you got Sey
chelles. Those’re the three best diving spots in the world. I’ve been to Bonaire, and I can’t go to the Red Sea right now.”

The following afternoon I finally caught an interisland boat to the tiny island of La Digue, some twenty-five miles away, a three-hour ride. It was a freighter with fifteen to twenty passengers, mostly school kids going home for a few days on holiday break, a few intrepid travelers, and a man I especially noticed, a tiny, very old man who I assumed was British. He spoke to no one, and his demeanor resisted conversation. He had a furled black umbrella and a crisp gray military mustache and around his wattled neck a pair of binoculars on a string. I pegged him as a lifelong, hopeful birder coming out to see, before he died, the paradise flycatcher on La Digue and the black parrot on Praslin, two of the world’s rarest birds, and even here seen only infrequently.