Seychelles

Two days on Mahé

Seychelles was a short, spontaneous escape from Dubai. The ease of travelling there without a visa made the decision simple, and Pragati and I decided to make the most of a very short break.

We had only two days.

Instead of treating that as a reason to stay in one place, we did almost the opposite. We rented a car and spent most of the visit driving around Mahé, stopping whenever something caught our attention.

In hindsight, that probably tells you more about how we travelled at the time than any itinerary could.

Landing and getting on the road

We flew from Dubai on Emirates EK705, arriving early in the morning on 10 September 2016. At the airport we picked up a Suzuki Vitara rental from Absolute Cars and, with Google Maps as our guide, set off for the hotel.

The Crown Beach Hotel at Pointe au Sel was right beside the sea and had its own private beach. It was the kind of place where we could easily have spent the entire weekend doing nothing.

We didn’t.

After reaching the hotel, we quickly set off to explore the island.

Around Mahé

Most of our time was spent on the road.

We visited Anse Royale Beach, Police Bay, Kempinski Beach and Bel Ombre. We also explored Victoria, including the Victoria Botanical Garden and the Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke Market.

We drove up towards the Tea Tavern, where the tea factory and surrounding plantation offered a completely different side of the island. The occasional drizzle and cooler conditions made driving through the hills particularly pleasant.

Mahé is small enough that a car gives you a surprising amount of freedom. In a short period we were able to move from beaches to the capital, from markets to the hills and from developed areas into quieter stretches of the island.

The driving itself became part of the holiday.

A familiar sight far from home

One of the things that surprised us most was discovering how strong the Indian connection was in Seychelles.

There were many families of South Indian origin whose roots in the islands went back several generations. We came across Indian businesses and familiar cultural references in places where we had not expected to find them.

Then we found the Arul Migu Navashakti Vinayagar Temple.

Seeing a South Indian temple, complete with the deity and priest, so far from home was an unexpectedly comforting moment. Travel often makes you notice things about home that you normally take for granted, and this was one of those moments.

We had travelled to Seychelles looking for an island experience. Instead, we also found a small reminder of home.

Two very different sides of the trip

There was a funny contradiction in the way we travelled around Mahé.

We had chosen a hotel beside the sea with a private beach, but we hardly stayed there. The island kept tempting us to get back into the car and see what was around the next corner.

The weather helped. The occasional drizzle made the drives enjoyable rather than uncomfortable, and every new stretch of road seemed to offer another view or another place worth stopping for.

But two days is still only two days.

By the time we left, we had covered a surprising amount of Mahé, but we had also realised how much we had missed.

What we didn’t do

We never really slowed down enough to enjoy the resort properly.

We could have spent more time on the private beach, simply walked around the property or tried activities such as snorkelling. Instead, we were almost always somewhere on the road.

That is probably my biggest memory of Seychelles: we came for an island escape, but spent most of our time exploring it from behind the wheel.

I don’t regret it. The driving gave us the chance to see much more of Mahé than we otherwise would have in such a short visit.

But if we ever return, I would do it differently.

I would keep the car, but I would also deliberately leave a day with no destination at all.

Looking back

Seychelles was only a two-day trip, but it became memorable because it combined several things we enjoyed about travel: an easy decision from Dubai, the freedom of a rental car, discovering places without a rigid itinerary and the occasional surprise of finding something familiar in a foreign country.

We saw beaches, hills, markets, gardens and tea plantations. We drove across Mahé, found a South Indian temple thousands of kilometres from home and returned to a beautiful hotel beside the sea that we barely had time to enjoy.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of this trip.

Sometimes a short trip is enough to discover a place.

It just isn’t always enough to slow down and enjoy it.