At 6.42am on Friday the sun climbed over the shoulder of Le Rempart — the 2,550ft mini-Matterhorn on the southwest coast of Mauritius. Gold spilled through the mist and poured across the cane fields down to the Indian Ocean, where a white line of breaking surf proved the efficacy of the island’s encircling reef.
For Mauritians this is a new dawn. The protective barriers erected by the island’s government had been lifted at midnight, bringing an end to exhaustive testing and mandatory hotel quarantine, and granting access all areas to vaccinated tourists with a negative PCR certificate. With one in ten jobs dependent on tourism — and in many cases reliant, for the past 18 months, on furlough payments of as little as £90 a month — this sunrise meant it was time to get back to work.
“People in Britain may not realise how enthused and excited we are about opening up,” says Nilen Vencadasmy, president of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority. The starched ladies waiting for the hotel staff bus in Case Noyale are giggly with excitement. “Last year we couldn’t celebrate my daughter’s birthday,” says Cecile Swamy, a kitchen assistant. “This year we will have a grand party at the beach.”
Those beaches have been largely off limits to Mauritians until now; the food trucks and samosa — or gajak — stands at Flic en Flac, Trou-aux-Biches and elsewhere have been battened down, and the only footprints on the white sands are those of the terns and lizards.
As for tourists, “They’ve been rarer than dodos,” sighs Amba Raffray, a souvenir seller at the market in Port Louis, the capital. He’s so happy that restrictions have been lifted, he wants to give me a fridge magnet with flamingos on it — I insist on paying; he refuses the money; I refuse the magnet; he grudgingly takes the money and hands me my change. Later, when I check, I realise he has given me the same sum back.
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At 8am Tamarind Beach — white sand, blue sea, sighing casuarina trees — is empty but for a knot of local fishermen. Unable to resist the tranquillity, I wade into the dawn-cool waters for a swim around the bay. The fishermen applaud as I emerge. “Welcome, welcome,” enthuses one. “You are the first. Are more coming?”
They are — 2,099 arrivals on nine flights on Friday alone. But as eager as Mauritians are to get back to the good old days (1.4 million tourists came to play in 2018, contributing nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP), there are fears that visitors’ desires may now be different.
The taxi drivers parked around the gates of the Hilton, the Sands, the Sofitel and Sugar Beach at Wolmar are especially worried. Being self-employed, they have received the least in government handouts and had to take whatever alternative work they could find to survive. “A family cannot survive on 1,250 rupees [£20] a week,” says Poonit Nirpatee, of the Federation of Hotel Taxi Associations, “so we’ve become jacks-of-all-trades. Of course we are relieved that restrictions are being lifted and that we are now allowed to take tourists on excursions around the island, but we are very worried that visitors will be too cautious to leave the resorts.”
Alexander and Philippa Hutchison, newlyweds from Durham, are among those visitors, disembarking to a gala welcome complete with dancing girls, drummers and what looks like the entire Mauritian press pack at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam airport. Married on Tuesday, they picked the island precisely because restrictions were being lifted.
There is widespread praise here for the manner in which Mauritius has handled the pandemic. In May 2020, and in stark contrast to British government policy, ministers pledged to protect this nation’s tourism industry; Steven Obeegadoo, the tourism minister, worked with the sector to ensure that visitors did not encounter scenes of shuttered hotels and boarded-up shops and restaurants when lockdown came to an end, as happened in Sharm el-Sheikh.
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A fund of £1.5 billion was made available through the state-funded Mauritius Investment Corporation to support businesses in a protection scheme so effective — says Jean-Michel Pitot, the president of the Association des Hôteliers et Restaurateurs de l’île Maurice — that just one hotel out of a membership of 100 closed down in the past 18 months.
The consequence is that the view from the beaches looks less like a tourism-dependent destination emerging from a devastating pandemic and more like an island coming out of a relaxing off-season break. Everywhere I go I find restaurants and bars open; surf schools and watersports facilities operational; and hotels where shiny, happy staff outnumber guests by up to ten to one.
“Our pandemic was worrying, but it wasn’t like yours, “ says Julia Marimootoo, PR manager at the Lux Le Morne Resort. “People fell ill here, but we did not have patients dying in hotel corridors.” You could go as far as to say that Mauritius got off lightly, with the World Health Organisation reporting 15,695 total Covid cases and 84 related deaths here.
Lux Le Morne was among many hotel operators to use the enforced hiatus to refurbish its property, but it ran into two snags: first, supply-chain problems hit procurement efforts on an island traditionally dependent on imports; second, contractors were like hens’ teeth, so hotel management went to Mauritian manufacturers for supplies and retrained their staff as builders and landscapers — Marimootoo moved from marketing to gardening, the chef became a carpenter, and the hotel photographer went from wedding snapper to painter and decorator. “The pandemic gave us not only an opportunity to find a sustainable way to revamp the hotel, but also gave the staff a feeling of investment in the property,” Marimootoo tells me.
Refurbed hotels, happy workers, empty beaches and the tropical heat of the austral summer are tempting for those of us who — like Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison Blues — haven’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when. But can we believe that UK ministers won’t do something dastardly to dash our holiday hopes? And can we be confident that Mauritius won’t lower its portcullis once more and reinstate resort bubbles or, worse, reimpose its torturous, almost- in-paradise hotel lockdown, in which tourists were confined to rooms for 14 days in agonising proximity to the ocean?
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The answer to the former is no, but as for the latter, the island seems boldly optimistic. Hygiene protocols are enforced with noticeably more rigidity than in the UK, with mandatory mask-wearing in public and a ceaseless cleaning regime, and the entry requirements are reassuringly strict. Mauritius is taking extreme care of business, because with foreign reserves depleted by the government’s support programmes, it needs this season to succeed.
“It was a challenge deciding when to reopen,” Vencadasmy says. “The date was dependent upon vaccination levels reaching 60 per cent, and we achieved that in September. Mauritians were easy to vaccinate — they realised the wisdom of getting jabbed, and increasing rates have given us the confidence to pretty much rule out any further lockdowns.”
“I have a very good feeling about recovery,” Pitot says. “I feel we may have reached the end of a disastrous two years and are slowly getting back to normal.”
At present the only direct service to Mauritius is with British Airways, which flies five times a week from Gatwick and is adding another three departures from Heathrow between November 3 and January 8. Indirect services include Emirates via Dubai, Air Mauritius via Paris and Turkish Airlines via Istanbul — and seats on all are selling fast.
As I write this on a terrace of a hotel room with views of Eden-like gardens and the ocean beyond, it’s 25C and the southeast trade wind is rattling the coconut palms. The sunbeds are laid out under thatched palapas on an empty beach, and in the distance the surf is ripping mockingly along the reef. The booking data suggests that Mauritius won’t stay this quiet for long — the UK is already topping the reservations table for this month. So if you fancy a bit of the above, book now.
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Chris Haslam was a guest of Kuoni, which has eight nights’ half-board at the Solana Beach hotel at Belle Mare, on the northeast coast, from £1,499pp, including BA flights. Departs on October 27
Visiting the Indian Ocean: what you need to know
With one exception, the Indian Ocean “Big Four” beach destinations are now off the UK’s red list and have also been given the green light by the Foreign Office. Fully vaccinated visitors became free to explore Mauritius from Friday, although a PCR test taken in the 72 hours before arrival is still required, along with further tests at your hotel on your first and fifth days in the country.
The Maldives has eased restrictions for arrivals who are 14 days past a second vaccination, and may not even require a negative PCR test from the 96 hours before your flight — check with your hotel for the relevant regulations, which are island-dependent.
The rules for Sri Lanka have shuffled a lot recently, but as of last week fully vaccinated travellers arriving with either a negative PCR or antigen test do not need to do a PCR test on their first day in the country or stay at a hotel on the approved list, as was the case before. Finally, although the Seychelles will gladly have you subject to the usual tests, the islands are still on the UK’s red list, so you’d face hotel quarantine on your return.
Rory Goulding
