Seselwa Days
Illuminating a Brief Stay in The Seychelles
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?”
— Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walden’ (1854)
Onto the fringes of Africa. The Seychelles is a place that seems to take great pride in being a faraway land from faraway lands, given that you would need to travel nearly 1,000 miles in any direction before arriving somewhere else. Plenty of modern maps (even ones focused specifically on detailing its mother continent) don’t even bother to call out the country by name. A large majority — about 98% — of the 100,000 Seychellois who live here can be found on the three central islands that sit atop this granite shelf, which arises from the depths of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa’s Eastern shores. These are the “inner islands” — Mahé, Praslin, and La Digue (along with a smattering of others that mostly host international resorts) — each replete with individual charm.
Mahé (“ma-hey”), referred to as the big island by many, is home to the colonial capital of Victoria, as well as two thirds of the country’s population. Its shabby airport offers a bit of insight into the people who travel here; the flickering arrivals board showcases a curious but consistent mix of intercontinental flights: Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Paris. I’ve arrived in the still-apparent grasp of a pandemic, and sneak in on a once-per-month flight from South Asia just ahead of one from Russia. The former had less than ten onboard, the latter well over one hundred.
The second largest of these core islands, Praslin (“prah-leen”), is most known for its nature reserve Vallée de Mai, which has remained unchanged for thousands of years and is perhaps the most closely-aligned place on the planet with the storybook definition of an “enchanted forest.” Amongst its hanging gardens is one of the two places on Earth where the giant of the plant world, Coco de Mer, grows naturally.
Moving in tandem with the itinerary of the local ferry, as well as the general pace of life in descending order, we reach the third inner island — La Digue (“la-deeg”). La Digue is known in circles of the international elite and globetrotting intelligentsia as home to some of the most unique, stunning, and secluded beaches that one could ever hope to find. Traveling by common means, it requires long-haul flights (usually at least a pair), a bus, a shuttle, and two different boats to get here — but the helipad for private charters is properly visible from the jetty that welcomes more plebeian arrivals like ours.
These islands are only three of one hundred and fifteen in total that exist under the flag of The Seychelles. In venturing beyond the realm of publicly-available aquatic transportation to the “outer islands” (which, collectively, has recently won official group representation in parliament) there are true lost worlds to be found.
Arriving in Victoria on a muggy Sunday afternoon in one of the slower months on the calendar, one could be forgiven for thinking that they have somehow been placed inside the frames of a colonial painting rather than a sovereign international capital. It’s quiet. Molasses-like, in the words of a Tarantino character from a similar era. Seen from my own perspective, after a flight of only a couple of hours, a scene of strong South Asian influence and daily routine tethered to the schedule of Islam has cut to one of African heritage that is dominated by Christianity. The Maldives and The Seychelles are at once geographically proximate and conventionally distant. The thought of this serves as an aide-memoire of the unrelenting influence of history and man’s decisions, of lines drawn on a map.
Nearly everything here is closed on a Sunday. So much so, in fact, that I have to finally ask a neighbor where to find something to eat. She thinks on this for a few seconds, and then invites me in for some fish creole, realizing that the detached traveler standing in front of her was entirely unprepared for Victoria’s sabbath routine. After the delicious supper, I take a stroll downtown. The occasional twang of late-afternoon church bells fill the ears, their rings lazily bumping into one another while floating over the town square and palm-laden hills before fading upwards past the towering granite peaks cradling the city, the silhouettes of which might remind one of Hong Kong. These gentle sounds of the city are interrupted only by pop and reggae music in symmetric crescendo from a passing car, when there is one, every five or ten minutes.
But Monday is different. I walk from my flat in the hills down to the pier, alongside very many locals moving in the same direction. It’s 7am and the city is completely alive, almost unrecognizably different from yesterday’s island Sunday ennui. People shuffle into businesses downtown or head towards a day’s work on the docks. I jump on the morning’s first ferry, heading for La Digue, stopping off at Praslin along the way. Flying fish bounce along the sides of the ship once it escapes the jetty and reaches full speed. Pure-white terns play in the wake of the boat’s disturbed air, and follow us all the way to a new island.
The islands of The Seychelles were almost totally unburdened by humanity until the late eighteenth century, when a few were finally “discovered” during Vasco de Gama’s armadas East. Before this point in history, the archipelago was likely only known about and used on rare occasion by groups of Indian and Arab sailors. Ancestry here can be traced back to the first travelers who decided to stay put, comprising 15 Europeans of mostly French descent, along with a dozen slaves from Africa and India. A type of mutual language, kreol, was developed as a means of communication amongst the expanding group, forming a linguistic basis for the French-influenced Seychellois Creole (or, “seselwa”) tongue spoken today. Throughout history, the islands were seen as a useful and isolated place to keep political prisoners — it was at times home to relatively high-profile detainees from Zanzibar, Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine, amongst others — yet more than one of these captives would later write how they came to assimilate into everyday Seychellois life, beyond their labor-driven sentences, and develop a fond relationship with the place. Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, who was exiled to the remote islands in annoyance by the British (following failed attempts to emancipate his country from the grasp of the Monarchy) later journaled after his imprisonment: “…we shall take with us many good and kindly memories of Seychelles…may God bless them all.” However prosaic the binding realities of detention, there is also something oddly poetic about falling in love with your jail. The Seychelles were surrendered by the French to the British before gaining independence in the mid-1970s — the country remains in diplomatic relations with the Crown via its seat in the Commonwealth of Nations today.
The result of so much time spent with time alone has resulted in a contemporary picture of biodiversity matched by very few places on the planet. Plant and animal life here was unique in the first place, and in addition to that evolutionary head start, has been given the chance to fully flourish beyond most tropical peers. This is a place where you might come across a 200 year-old Giant Aldabra tortoise roaming the hills freely; where the normally-elusive flycatcher may join you for a moment during morning coffees; where even downtown, The Lord of the Flies seems oddly relevant to your current situation; where the “boundary” of the botanical gardens is almost completely unnecessary. It is also a place where seeing your current location on a map might induce a bit of existential and isolating concern.
The Seychelles has more protected land areas as a percentage of its total square mileage than any other nation on the globe. It not only has an official Ministry of Climate Change, but also chooses to house this department in brand new and handsome facilities on a central promenade. I like to think that you can sometimes learn a bit about a country by studying what they choose to show the world via the images on their banknotes — here they’re covered with beautiful plants and animals that can’t be found anywhere else.
Though the entire nation is a pristine example of harmonization with and conservation of a country’s natural environments — there may be no better place to experience the sensations that these circumstances can have on daily life beyond La Digue. To spend a few days on this particular island is to be in a world completely apart. It is hard to overstate just how verdant things are; the land is absolutely teeming with healthy plant and animal life. A faint sort of haze, kept in abeyance by strong equatorial sunlight and deep blue ocean water, is apparent at all hours of the day and adds an almost dreamlike quality to everything you take care to look at — as if to remind that this place is operating at the very edge of the capabilities of the natural world. The always beautiful sunrises and sunsets are two major events of every day, seldom missed by either locals or tourists. While taking in a slow-motion afternoon at the island’s jetty port, I can’t help but feel totally dazzled and wonderfully confused by it all — eating creole and jackfish masala curry, drinking SeyBrew and local coffee, hearing French, feeling heat, seeing green, being in Africa.
The de facto standard method of individual transportation on La Digue is an early 2000’s mountain bike with generous suspension capabilities and a grocery basket strapped to the back wheel (Russian make). These can be rented for less than a dollar a day, and are the ideal vehicle for zipping around beaches or through the tiny, trail-laden local neighborhoods. I’m staying with Telma, a local Seychellois, and her granddaughter Clanna Laure. Clanna is six; already blossoming as a passionate illustrator of pencil-sketched marine life and is first in her class at school, which she loves. She tells me that there are twenty friends in total at her primary school. I help her with a bit of English homework throughout the week — they’re studying adjectives and moving through a French-annotated version of Snow White.
The beaches on this island are legendary for a reason — they are not like other beaches. Dalí-esque granite boulders dot the entire shoreline, usually bookending a stretch of ultra-fine and pure-white sand with a surrealist formation. The best of them require a trailfinding bike ride and a hike through dense jungle to reach. The water here is not of the turquoise shade found on some other tropical atolls and magazine-flaunted reef breaks — it is utterly translucent. Moorish Idols and Rainbow Parrotfish float just offshore and wait to join new swimmers.
At a roadside café, I order an octopus green curry with fresh chillies and fall into conversation with the owner. We talk about the temporary and permanent impressions that the pandemic is making on her country. It doesn’t take long to arrive at the dilemma that many beautiful but poor countries have to grapple with at one point or another — an issue that coronavirus has stamped an exclamation mark on — which is: do the locals enjoy having so many tourists around, or do they resent them? Is the business gained from a porous approach to international tourism reason enough to put up with the visible changes that their beloved country goes through because of it? According to this long-time local business owner: “Yah, we always want more people to come!” And in my short visit, I can definitely endorse her comments — everyone here has been nothing but exceptionally kind and genuinely interested in a conversation. However, a slightly-hesitant undertone that can be detected in her otherwise approving answer betrays something else hiding beneath it. After a few seconds, she adds: “But you should ‘ave seen the jetty waterfront a few years ago, it was so beautiful. You know, before all them wild bike rental shops and expensive restaurants come up.”
On the final morning at Telma’s, I sit on the front porch just after dawn breaks. The house faces West, one set of low houses and a small dirt road separates it from the edge of a protected forest. Those tall, regal trees proudly guarding its frontline are slowly undressed from darkness by the first light of the day. The air is cool and clean. Coffee is in hand. An occasional rooster shakes off its sleep by warbling a call — a brief intrusion upon the calm. It’s the final few moments that I’ll be able to bask in the island’s idiosyncratic beauty, and I try to take it all in through a bit of final reflection. The Seychelles is a country that spent a lot of time with itself, and in so doing, developed into something wonderful and completely unique. Maybe there’s something to be learned from that approach. After a few moments, my attempted pensiveness is broken as a local rides down the path in front of the house on a bike. He’s guiding an extra set of wheels with each hand, instead of holding onto his own handle bars—certainly on his way to deliver some rentals to a couple of fresh tourists. He spots me and yells, without slowing down: “We gonna ‘ave that good sun today brotha, yah!” holding onto the final note until bending a corner and fading away towards the woods.
/S
New York City, December 2021
