Exploring Beyond the Sand in Exotic Seychelles

VICTORIA, Seychelles — Despite its 2:30 a.m. departure, the Air Seychelles flight from Singapore to Mahe was early confirmation of what my husband Ken and I had heard about Seychelles’ atmosphere of sensual tranquillity. It was early December and we were ready for it after traveling five exciting but grimy months in Asia. It was time for the relaxed, romantic part of our extended honeymoon.

We stretched comfortably in the half-empty 767 jet for seven hours, interrupted only by soft-spoken flight attendants bearing tropical fruit.

As we thumbed through glossy photographs of secret coves, crystal waters and tropical forests in an in-flight magazine, we understood why a British bosun had called Seychelles “an earthly paradise” when his ship landed on one of the islands in 1609.

Despite such praises, the British weren’t interested enough to make a bid for Eden until more than a hundred years later, when they saw that the French and their slaves had begun settling Seychelles, growing cassava, maize and sugar. The two colonizers struggled over the islands until 1814, when the British won them as part of the treaty that ended the Napoleonic Wars.

The Seychelles, in turn, won independence from the British in 1976, but lost democracy a year later when France’s Albert Rene took control and made himself president of a new socialist government. Since then, Rene has had to foil at least three coup attempts.

Today the islands are peaceful. The most unsettling aspect for visitors is getting the name right: The country is called Seychelles; the islands that comprise it are the Seychelles.

Having learned that distinction, Ken and I spent the last part of our flight trying to decide which of the 115 islands to visit. The Seychelles are sprawled across a stretch of the Indian Ocean roughly the size of California, but their total land mass is less than half that of New York City’s. The islands are about 600 miles northeast of Madagascar, about 1,000 miles off the East Africa coast from Mombasa, Kenya. In fact, only about 20 of the islands are considered tourist destinations; eight offer overnight accommodations.

Still, there were choices to be made among islands formed from sand, coral or granite. We knew we wanted to see some of the latter, because Seychelles has the only mid-ocean granitic islands in the world. Because the plane was landing on Mahe, the largest of these, we stopped planning and decided to start exploring there.

Bedraggled but excited, we crossed the palm-fringed tarmac, already hot at 6 in the morning. But we didn’t start to perspire until the man at the immigration counter said we couldn’t enter the country.

“You don’t need a visa to enter Seychelles,” he explained, “but you do need hotel reservations.” We didn’t have any. Smack in the middle of nowhere, Seychelles isn’t exactly a place people visit on a whim--but that’s what we’d done.

Fortunately, the airport tourist information booth had plenty of brochures, a telephone and a very helpful staff. After waiting an hour for the island to wake up, we were booked into a bungalow at Lazare Picault overlooking a quiet bay.

The first thing we learned on Mahe, other than an instant appreciation for Disney-blue skies and sweet-smelling air, was that we needed a car. Some scientists believe that the islands of the Seychelles were formed millions of years ago when a shift of the earth’s tectonic plates fractured the coast of Africa and swept it up toward India, leaving pieces behind. Thus the islands are like miniature continents, complete with rain-forested, mountainous interiors rich with potential adventures but difficult to reach.

In fact, Seychelles is much more than a string of beautiful beaches. After a few days of shameless lazing on some of those isolated stretches of sand, we began our discovery of Seychelles’ interior.

Snug in our rented mini-moke (slightly larger than a matchbox car and probably equally safe), we negotiated narrow, winding mountain roads to Victoria, Seychelles’ charming capital. At the tourist center there we bought guidebooks for seven nature trails that have been blazed on Mahe and some of the surrounding islands.

We spent the next afternoon struggling up an almost vertical path past wild cinnamon, vanilla and insect-eating pitcher plants to the 2,307-foot summit of Mahe’s Trois Freres.

The trail at the top wasn’t well-marked, and the climb took a lot longer than the guidebook said it would, but one look over the steep, forested hills to the swirls of blue and green waters surrounding distant islands made it all worthwhile.

Ken explored some of the other trails during the next several days, learning about fruit bats and banana trees, while I probed the island’s underside.

Beneath the silky waters of Seychelles, another world teems with multicolored corals, spectacular fish and hundreds of other creatures I’d seen only on public television.

For five days I learned the fundamentals of scuba diving at the Seychelles Underwater Centre. Morning theory sessions by the Coral Strand Hotel swimming pool were followed by afternoon dives at sites that lived up to names such as “the Aquarium.” In the evenings, Ken, an experienced diver, quizzed me on scuba theories over locally brewed Seapearl beers and pizza at Baobob’s restaurant on the beach.

Certified at last, I was ready for the ultimate dive experience: the night dive. On a moonless night, we joined a small group 30 feet below the dark surface to see Spanish dancers--soft creatures that undulated in our flashlight beams like flamenco dancers dressed in brilliant reds and oranges.

All of this activity required energy, and we soon adopted favorite calorie-loading spots. Most visitors to Seychelles come from Europe, so many of the large hotels and restaurants serve continental food. But we opted for the local cuisine instead.

One night we tried creole food at Manresa’s, a small restaurant on the harbor side of Mahe. The menu included fruit bat curry (you can see the ingredients swooping overhead at dusk), tec tec soup (made from tiny local clams) and “vegetable” dishes created from unripe mangoes and papaya. Dessert was a creamy coconut sorbet served in the shell.

We found great food and a quaint hotel room at Marie Antoinette’s. The funky green building, we were told, has been everything from a bordello to a hotel visited by Stanley on his way back from tracking down Livingstone. The current owner, Madame Fonseka, takes good care of her hotel guests while presiding--in the restaurant below--over lace-draped tables covered with dishes such as pumpkin soup, parrot fish and octopus curry.

After such generous meals, we would stumble up to our comfortable room and gaze at the harbor lights of Victoria, while strains of local music drifted up from the restaurant to our aerie. The dulcet voices of islanders crooned about “Going back to the Seychelles, my tropic island home.”

By the time the country gained its independence, its people--the Seychellois--were a two-century mix of French and English colonists, freed slaves, Chinese and Indian immigrants, and a sprinkling of sailors from a myriad of lands.

The Seychellois learn English and French but speak French Creole, a local patois that sounds like a softened version of the French taught in school. Children greet visitors with cries of bonzour instead of bonjour , and orewar instead of au revoir .

As we traveled to some of the other islands, we found different attitudes, perhaps because the islands themselves are so different.

The three-hour ferry ride from Mahe to La Digue, Seychelles’ fourth-largest granitic island, was itself unusual: Instead of finding a rusty hunk of diesel-powered steel at the pier, we pulled up to a graceful schooner. We sat on the bow, dangling our feet in the cool spray above dolphins and flying fish.

On La Digue’s landing pier we were met by Muriel, whose father owns Choppy’s Bungalows. The island’s paths are unpaved, and the only vehicles allowed are oxcarts, a few small trucks for the farmers and a gaily painted bus for day-tripping tourists from nearby Praslin Island. Muriel walked us to our bungalow on the beach and gave us bicycles, snorkel equipment and two meals a day--all you need on La Digue.

For us, La Digue embodied Seychelles’ romantic reputation. Its deserted atmosphere made Mahe, where we had enjoyed so many beaches and hiking trails in solitude, seem crowded.

On our first day, Muriel and Choppy packed us a picnic lunch and sent us off to snorkel at Anse Patates on the island’s northern tip. We observed an octopus, a sea turtle, two manta rays and a moray eel during our first half-hour in the water.

The next morning we biked across the island to gape at a colony of rare giant tortoises found only in the Seychelles and Galapagos Islands. They briefly extended their leathery necks to stare back with wizened eyes before going back to chewing anything leafy within reach. The oldest and the largest of the Seychelles tortoises, and something of a local symbol, is 656-pound Esmeralda, who is reportedly 150 years old and only recently was discovered to be a male.

Farther down the shady path that rings La Digue, we discovered Grande Anse, an empty beach with six-foot waves begging to be body-surfed. Just when we’d decided that being pummeled by waves had lost some of its charm, the bright tourist bus pulled up.

We beat a hasty retreat across the five-square-mile island to Source d’Argent, our vote for the world’s most beautiful beach, where numerous empty coves pocket the uncrowded coastline. Our own cove came complete with a rock hollowed out to form a natural bathtub, filled with warm sea water. We leaned against granite boulders and watched fishing boats become silhouettes in front of the setting sun.

That night at the hotel’s outdoor restaurant, Choppy gave us some of Muriel’s island-famous baka , a deceptively mild, fermented fruit juice made from mango, pineapple and something that tasted like cherries.

Still slightly baka -brained, we skipped breakfast and sailed for half an hour early the next morning to Praslin, the source of Seychelles’ famous coco de mer . For centuries, people who found these large nuts on distant shores believed they came from beneath the sea and contained strong aphrodisiacs.

In fact, they are the fruit of tall palms found in small clusters on several of the islands, but mainly in the dark, prehistoric forest of the Vallee de Mai on Praslin.

Our 15-minute flight from Praslin to Mahe brought us back out into the blues and greens of Seychelles. We glided across the sky in a small propeller plane, mesmerized by the shapes of the reefs below the water and the endless stretch of islands fringed with white sand.

GUIDEBOOK: Seychelles

Getting there: The cheapest way to get to Seychelles is to find a low fare to a European city or Singapore, then fly round trip from there to Mahe. Air Seychelles flies to Mahe from London, Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Singapore. Round-trip fares via Europe cost about $1,150; from Singapore, about $1,125. British Airways flies round trip from Los Angeles to Mahe via London twice weekly. Air France flies from Los Angeles to Mahe via Paris twice weekly. Both airlines offer 30-day advance-purchase fares costing between $3,100 and $3,500, depending on the time of year.

Air Seychelles also flies to Mahe from Johannesburg, and Kenya Airways flies between Mahe and Nairobi.

Ferries sail regularly from Mahe to La Digue and Praslin islands. Air Seychelles flies to Praslin, Frigate, Bird, Denis and Desroches. You need permission to visit some islands, and some may be visited only on certain days, so make advance arrangements.

When to go: Just south of the Equator, the islands sit outside the region’s cyclone belt, so they’re warm and calm most of the year. Temperatures range from 75 to 86 degrees. The wettest month is January, the driest July.

Where to stay: Seychelles is very busy during Christmas, Easter and the month of August, and rooms may be hard to get on the small islands that have only a few hotels.

The price of most hotels includes either breakfast, or breakfast and dinner. Unless you have a car, you should take both meals.

Accommodations on Mahe range in atmosphere and price from the remote Northolme ($214 double, including breakfast) to Marie Antoinette’s ($50). For $90 you can stay at L’Islette, which sits on its own quiet island 100 yards off Mahe, and eat delicious, ridiculously large meals.

Lazare Picault ($80) is far from everything except deserted beaches. The best beach, La Petite Anse, is not on any maps; just keep asking for directions.

On La Digue, Choppy’s Bungalows ($96) and La Digue Island Lodge ($195) are on the beach. Bernique’s, slightly less expensive than Choppy’s, is a small hotel on the island’s interior.

For more information: The tourist information centers at the airport and in Victoria are well-staffed with helpful people. For brochures and advance information, contact Jean Walden, Travel Services Seychelles, P.O. Box 33018, St. Petersburg, Fla. 33733, (813) 864-3013.