If 10 days ago, I’d been asked to assign a word to the Seychelles, my answer would have been a very quick “beach”. Because – duh – what other word would you associate with a tropical island?
Well, I’ve changed my mind. The word I will always associate with Seychelles, after spending a week on the main island of Mahe, is “jungle”. And I’d like to add “green”, if I may. A hundred different shades, from an almost-translucent yellow-green through to a deep, almost black-green, to the purest green you could ever imagine. The vegetation here is quite something else. Verdant; beautiful; overwhelming – the jungle clambers up the granite mountains with absolutely no regard for anything built by humans. Palms, creepers, takamaka trees, mango trees, skinny-trunked papaya trees – they grow in abundance. In fact in 1742 French explorer Lazare Picault landed on Mahe and named it L’Ille d’Abondance – “Island of Abundance”.
I’ve spent a week exploring Mahe, and two days on Cerf Island, a 10-minute boat trip from the mainland. In many places, the jungle tumbles down onto the beach, and along the roads you drive through exquisite cool tunnels of green. On Cerf I confidently wandered paths in the jungle on my own, with forest birds hardly bothering to flutter out my way.
“Seychelles is like a paradise,” I’d been told by Kenneth, who’s lived on Mahe all his life. “We have only 87,000 people altogether, and we are 115 islands. We have 15 types of mangoes, 17 types of banana and four types of coconut. We have no monkey, no snake, no tiger. Here, you are in paradise. It’s like that.”
No snakes, in all this jungle? This must be paradise, indeed.
PS. In a few days time I move on to explore the islands of Praslin and La Dique, and I’ll also spend two days on Bird Island, which at the moment is home to more than two-million birds. After that, I’ll be on a catamaran for six days, sailing around some of the smaller coral islands. Stay tuned for updates!
