Mauritius

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I LOVE GOING IN HOLIDAY - and even more so when it is raining hard at home.

Somehow, it makes you feel you are leaving all the drudge and grey behind and heading off on a great adventure, to a place where the sun always shines.

Not that I need the rain to get me excited about holidays. Shara, my wife, can’t understand why, for someone who spends so much time away from home, I get so animated about going on holiday.

The answer is really very simple: being away normally involves – courtesy of the Born Survivor producers’ warped imaginations – surviving the hard way in some godforsaken corner of this Earth, whether swamp, jungle or Arctic wasteland.

So the chance to get away from the crevasses, snakes, quicksand and mosquitoes and to spend time with my young family is heaven – and it’s also a massive motivator for me when I’m enduring hardships and struggling to reach ‘civilisation’ in the Born Survivor shows.

As a family, we try to go abroad on holiday once a year. The other break we take is to our small Welsh island each summer. Friends joke that facilities on the island, miles offshore, are a bit on the 15th century side, with no mains electricity or running water.

An object lesson in service

But I adore it. In return, though, I owe it to Shara to make sure we occasionally have a holiday to a place where everything works and she doesn’t have to flush the loo with rainwater. This time we did it in style.

Welcome, Mrs Grylls, to the Four Seasons Hotel in Mauritius. Getting there, of course, involved a long-haul flight. Travelling alone, heading off filming and with a book to write, flying long-haul is a relative breeze.

However, spending 12 hours on a plane with three young boys is an entirely different proposition. But before we knew it, the Four Seasons loomed into view. It is billed as the jewel in the Mauritian array of luxury hotels, and we couldn’t wait.

We were immediately struck by how insanely kind and polite all the staff were; the hotel was an object lesson in service, and it was a privilege to be on the receiving end of it.

It is why the Four Seasons brand stands apart: the obsessive attention to service, service, service.

Nothing was too much trouble, from special requests from me to have super-healthy food (although I did give in to the odd home-baked pain au chocolat – I mean, who can resist that?) to laying on a chauffeured Land Rover Discovery to visit some friends at a nearby hotel.

Instead of a normal hotel room, we had an immaculate three-bedroom detached villa, sumptuously furnished and with its own veranda, garden and small pool. We tended to breakfast there as a family, then eat in one of the three restaurants, each of which had its own individual type of cuisine.

The boys loved the Italian one, where they could bake their own pizzas. Really, you wanted for nothing. What I loved was that once you were there, almost everything was included: the Ernie Els golf course, the sailing and water-skiing, the

bikes, the tennis, you name it. It was so refreshing in comparison to many hotels, where if you so much as sneeze they charge you for it.

Every day, we were offered cultural trips by the hotel, but every day we resisted. It was just too much fun messing around in the vast infinity pool with rocks in it, with fresh sushi and juices within arm’s reach.

The boys and I played incessantly on the sailboats and canoes, while Shara sank into sensual bliss in the spa. I loved the fact that the staff didn’t get annoyed when weburst in on her mid-massage. Those moments when you pray that time will stand still are all too infrequent in life, aren’t they? But love, fun, family and good food are often at the heart of such occasions.

The Four Seasons stands apart

So, in summary, the holiday was heaven; the more so because it gave me a chance to spend time with my family with no distractions, save the choice of whether to work out before or after sunbathing on the paradise beach, or what sort of freshly squeezed cocktail we were going to drink.

I know that in difficult economic times we are somehow meant to feel guilty about any indulgences, but I don’t buy into that. If we work hard, we deserve tobe able to indulge ourselves when we get the opportunity.

I work super-hard in some true hellholes for most of the year and I have no reservation about heading off with my family to get a little pampering for a few days. As we used to say in the military: work hard, play hard. It is a great ethic to live by and I do so unashamedly. So on that note, it is back to work.

As I write, I am about to leave for the Canadian Arctic to start filming a new series of Born Survivor. So thank you, Mauritius, for the re-energising. I kind of needed it and I am supergrateful.