Maritius and Sea Olympics

Mauritius, well there’s not a lot to say about Mauritius. We arrived at noon instead of 8 a.m. because we had to dodge a cyclone that had just hit Mauritius the day before we arrived and the seas were a little rough the night before we arrived. I have a funny story about that actually, I woke up in the morning and reached for my alarm clock to see what time it was, I was searching for my clock with my hand (because our room is pitch black) but it wasn’t on the table next to my bed, in fact nothing was. After searching for a little bit I found all of my stuff inside the top drawer of the table. I guess what happened was in the middle of the night our drawers opened, our stuff slid into the top drawer and the drawers closed. That’s my funny story for this post, and it’s not really that funny!! Hahahahaha.

I’ve been asked a lot where exactly Mauritius is, so I’ll help you guys out with that one. Pull out a map, find Africa (the big mass of land right under Spain and France). When you’ve found Africa, look off the eastern coast of Africa and find Madagascar. Then look east of Madagascar and there’s Mauritius!!

For those of you who haven’t ever heard of Mauritius, I bet you’ve heard of it but you just don’t remember it. It’s the only place where the Dodo bird was found. Until it became extinct in the 1600’s from people eating them non-stop.

Mauritius was basically our spring break, now as to what it’s a break from; well I’ll let you figure that one out cause I’m having a hard time figuring it out. For the duration of our stay here I really didn’t do a whole lot, I pretty much just relaxed. I hung out in Downtown Mauritius with my roommate on the first day and the last day in Mauritius, we just walked around and attempted to find the Natural History Museum but no one knew where it was and the locals who had actually heard of it, highly advised that we don’t go there because it’s not good at all. One of our taxi drivers insisted that we go to the postal museum instead because “they have stamps from all over the world there!!” So we ended up not going to the history museum because we couldn’t find it. The funny thing about Mauritius is that no one knows where anything is. In one day we probably asked 10 different locals where the exact same thing is and their responses are something like this, they look very confident in what they’re talking about and say, “go down this street, take a left by that building down there, go down that street and you’ll see it.” Then you go there and it ends up being a dead end so you ask someone else and they tell you to go back to exactly the place where you just came from. It’s madness!! What makes it even better is 95% of the people we asked for directions were local cops!

On the second day here, my roommate (Ben), Chad and I went hiking. We took a taxi to this little town called Mocca which is on the other side of the mountains. Our taxi driver dropped us off at the very beginning of this dirt road that took you down some fields of sugar cane. We had no idea where we were, except for the mountains were right there. We just went down the road and after a while of going on the wrong trail we found the right one to go up this mountain on. So we hiked up this mountain which overlooks the city, and from the top of it you can see the whole island. We hung out up there for a good while then we decided to hike back into the city and then back to the ship. The trail to the city was great fun!! It was just like jungle trekking, the path was pretty much just bent brush and we had these tall plants on both sides of us the majority of the time, and we all got tons of mosquito bites. It was fun. All together from the time we started hiking until the time we reached the city it took us about 3.5 hours or so. That’s about all I did in Mauritius. We were going to go to a beach but we didn’t want to pay for the cab ride out to one and back so we didn’t, plus it was an overcast day. And that’s all I have for Mauritius.


For the Photos:

One is the view from the top of the mountain, that’s the city of Port Louis below.

One is of the French warship that we were docked next to, but also the mountain that we climbed is in the background and I labeled it, and you can see the Port Louis skyline.

One is of me in front of the mountain (or mini-mountain?) we’re about to climb.

There’s also one of the trail we followed to take down to the city from the top of the mountain, cool trail eh?? Standing there is Ben pondering what we’ll find up ahead. Chad is also in that picture, so let’s all play a game called find Chad. The object is to find Chad in that picture. Ready……….Set……….GO!



We also had the Sea Olympics this week, the day after we got back on the ship from Mauritius. This is just a competition between all the seas (we’re split up depending on where our room is) there’s about 8 or 9 seas total. They have a bunch of activities such as tug of war, a relay race, slippery twister (those are the events that I competed in). The prize if your sea wins is that you get to get off the ship first in San Diego. My sea did not win, we tied for last place!! But it was tons of fun anyways. Plus we didn’t have classes on this day!! That’s all I’m going to say about this for now because I just woke up and I have classes to go to!