Fully renovated in 2019, its colours match the ocean: turquoise, blue and grey. Domaine Anna was a name that kept on popping up as being a good place to go – a taxi ride away in an old colonial-style building.The Seastar Hotel in Flic en Flac is a boutique hotel with 21 rooms.For an Indian meal on the beach at lunchtime, try Zub Express – there’s no wine, though, or at least when we went.The best take-away boulettes, or Chinese dumplings, served in stock were said to be from Chez Cristelle, a shack on the beach.We had a very good Chinese meal at Ay Youn, on the coastal road – I asked them not to add GSM, as this always affects me.It’s all about eating together, laughing and having fun. Be ready for lots of laid-back meals inspired by Indian, Chinese and Creole cooking. The island might not be about fine dining, but the food is good, and Mauritians like to eat well. With great sadness I saw much fruit and veg coming in from South Africa. Farming may account for around 40% of the land, but 90% of this is devoted to sugar. Mauritius is not a food destination like Peru or Japan. A reflection, no doubt, of the many lives once lost at sea. Like in other coastal villages and towns, the cemetery is in a prime location overlooking the beach. Mauritius is about beaches, friendly people, the tropics and music and it’s also about supermarkets and advertising for processed foods. The centre of life, apart from the beach and the restaurants, was the Spar supermarket. There’s no local market and I only came across one bread shop. Originally Flic en Flac was a fishing village – a few fishing boats, but not many, still push off in the mornings down on the beach. The Dutch were the first settlers on the island, and the ones who brought the sugar cane which covers so much of the land.

Others say it is Old Dutch for ‘freed, flat land’. The name Flic en Flac originates from Old Dutch, and is an onomatopoetic word for the sound of hands beating a goatskin drum (source: Bradt Guide to Mauritius). What was good is that the temperature drop very little at night. It took a while for my body to adjust to those early nightfalls, given that in Northern Europe we still had another three hours of daylight to go. The water was warm … almost the same as the air temperature that was hovering at about 20✬/68✯. There are no sharks in the shallows of Mauritius… the coral reef, 100-200 metres or so out to sea (I’m no good at distances), protects the bathers from such intruders, or so I was told. I saw no one… to the point that I got scared and started to imagine a shark in the water. My first swim and only swim at Flic en Flac beach was at 5pm on a Monday. A few take to the water, but not many in winter. They park their cars under the trees, get out their cooked food, and sit in a circle, chatting and laughing. The beach at Flic en Flac is a favourite with the locals. The beaches are public in Mauritius, at least up to the high-water mark. The view looked south to Le Morne Brabant peninsular, with its 556 metre/1,820-foot high volcanic monolith, and north was the walk to the centre of town. The beach at Flic en Flac was a hop across the road from our apartment, then through a strip of casuarina forest and onto a 8 km/5 mile stretch of white sand.

Flic en flac mauritius