20 April 2024

Seychelles

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Other Indian Ocean Reviews

Push the boat out

Sometimes there comes a time and a place to pack the cash and credit cards and spare no expense. That's what Max hastlings did in the idyllic Seychelles... and he says it was worth every penny.

1 Seychelles hideaway 2 Beautiful Seychelles beach 3 Lunch by the pool

THERE IS NOTHING WORSE than a noisy hotel. Here we were on Mahe, kept awake all night by the roar of surf throwing itself upon the shore of the Indian Ocean, 20 yards beyond our bedroom window.

Do I hear you say that there are worse problems in life? Maybe so, but one must find something to moan about in paradise.

My father, a man of extravagant enthusiasms, once had himself cast away upon an outlying atoll of the Seychelles’ 115 islands, to prove that he could survive with only a gun, a fishing line and a machete.

He won his bet narrowly, having neglected to do any homework about edible vegetation. He came home on a stretcher after two months with some nice cowrie shells and a shocking case of scurvy, looking as if he had done time as a prisoner of a particularly brutal Japanese investment bank.

From his hospital bed, he announced he would be delighted to return to the atoll permanently, if he might be allowed to take a case of gin and some cigarettes.

The Seychelles has that effect even on people less dotty than father. I was thinking of his 1960 experience as we were shown to our villa at the southern end of Mahe.

Ochre sunsets

From the sea, the whole place tucks discreetly into the landscape as if it had been there for a century rather than last year. Only the ochre sunset interrupted the view of the ocean.

Beyond the little terrace of our villa, the size of a young bungalow, was a private open-air Jacuzzi, pavilion for lounging in the shade, and swimming pool that would hold the Deputy Prime Minister and both his Jaguars.

My wife took one look and said: “You are going to have serious trouble getting me home from this place.”

We sat drinking under our private palm tree amid the rampaging tropical vegetation, and wondered whether a second mortgage would suffice to pay the bill if we always holidayed like this. The presidential villa, which is even grander than ours, costs between £1,500 and £2,000 a day according to season. There seems no shortage of eager occupants.

The main hotel is a white clapboard building with wooden balconies, designed to look like an inviting old plantation house.

It is years since I ate Thai cuisine. After a week of spicy lobster and such-like in the hotel’s Saffron restaurant, I would have converted to Buddhism to get more of it.

I still have dreams about Pla Yang -grilled fillet of fish in banana leaf with chilli and tamarind sauce, and Nuea Ohad Num Man Hoi - sautéed tenderloin with oyster sauce. There is a pretty good French restaurant, too, with lots of scallops, prawns and fish.

We rented a small car to drive around the island, which cost £50 a day. An afternoon’s snorkelling in the marine park off St Anne’s Island cost us £50, which included bread rolls to feed shoals of exotic fish crowding the boat.

Then we discovered that the snorkelling off the hotel beach is terrific, though I fear that I spoilt some people’s view by floating over the reef in trousers, to avoid giving my legs an un-British tan.

Exotic pedigree

The Seychelles people have wonderfully interesting, often beautiful faces, reflecting their exotic pedigree - they belonged to the French empire before the British very decently liberated them and included them in ours.

They are so laid-back as to be almost horizontal. This makes them charming company, but impedes their effectiveness as entrepreneurs. Much of the serious work on the islands is done by expatriates, in our hotel predominantly Thais and Balinese.

In the switchback roads that twist and climb from sea level to 3,000ft among the riot of tropical vegetation on Mahe, even Michael Schumacher would be pushed to speed above 40mph, or want to.

The views are awesome; the midday heat would fry an egg on your palm. Seriously, my only quibble about the Seychelles in February is that they can get very hot. Even the fish seem to puff and pant.

Around noon every day, a tropical storm dumps an inch or two of rain, which is great for the foliage but can make it pretty humid.

We went for lunch one day with Michael Adams, a British artist who has made his home here for 30 years. I first met Michael 20 years ago. He and his wife Heather seem as much in love with the place as they were the day they came. They have a gallery not far from our hotel, where they live in splendid chaos with 16 cats, five dogs, two ponies, two giant tortoises, a rowing boat full of goldfish, and too many ducks, chickens and guinea fowl to count.

The Adamses can never bring themselves to kill anything for the pot. The cats strolled proprietorially across the table as we ate.

Michael’s paintings, most depicting the exotic greenery amid which he lives, keep the family and their wonderfully zany zoo in rations and contentment.

In the rainy season’, he says, “you can actually sit and watch things grow before your eyes.”

Looking at one of the 30ft trees he planted as saplings a couple of years ago, I believed him. No one could dispute that the Seychelles is an expensive destination. Everything but the bananas must be imported. The local rupee changes hands on the black market for about half its face value.

A Coke in the hotel costs £3, a roll of film £12. The Seychelles has suffered as much as many other holiday destinations from the after effects of September 11. But for tourists, the consequence is that the islands seem prodigiously peaceful.

Palm trees and white sand

The private beach in front of the Banyan Tree’s 37 villas is the sort of place you bottle and sell to TV holiday programmes - framed by huge rocks, palm trees and white sand, with the sea changing colour from pale green to deep blue.

The hotel’s real theme is self-indulgence on a scale that would impress some Roman emperors. Its spa is a mecca for hedonists and, for all I know, masochists. It offers a range of exotic treatments which I was too frightened to try, but which my wife adored.

She spent several happy mornings being bathed in salt, milk and warm honey (yes really), manicured and pedicured until I suggested that it would be a tragic waste not to enter her for Crufts.

All that week, absolutely nothing went wrong and (dismissing the racket of surf on sand) we couldn’t think of a thing to complain about.

We got home so rested as to have become almost inert. I wish the Banyan Tree had been there 40 years ago, to deter my father from his adventure on the atoll.

This time, not only did we not get scurvy - I have sent my wife out to buy a Thai cookbook and a wok.

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