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| Fishing in the lagoon to the south of Rodrigues Island. Photograph: Marcozier/Corbis |
News on Sunday
14/05/09
There aren't many places left in the world that not even your best-travelled mate has heard of, but Rodrigues may be one of them. This island is so very remote and so little known, only the poshest of atlases reveal its existence.
The island is in the Indian Ocean, 600km east of Mauritius, named after a Portuguese explorer, with a population around 40,000, mostly Roman Catholic.
Rodrigues is a dependency of Mauritius, and is often described as its sister island. In reality, they are siblings who have little in common. Where Mauritius is lush and verdant, its tropical woodlands alternating with vast fields of sugar cane, Rodrigues is drier, rockier, more sparsely wooded, and has no sugar cane at all - which is ironic, since 97% of its population is descended from African slaves brought to work the plantations.
Daily flights
Just two flights come into Rodrigues every day, and both belong to Air Mauritius. The connection takes 90 minutes, but the only alternative is a 36-hour crossing on the weekly cargo boat that constitutes the island's main commercial link with the outside world.
Economically, Rodrigues has very little going for it - no industry, no commercial fishing to speak of, and it lacks the hugely profitable machine of Mauritian tourism or the honeymoon island's dazzling array of five-star hotels. Agriculture is strictly subsistence: every family has its vegetable plot, its fruit trees, its pigs and goats. Some of the men have small fishing boats, and the women go out to hunt for octopus in the lagoon. The extent of Rodrigues's tourism industry is a handful of three-star hotels and between 30 and 50 guesthouses (no one seems to know the true figure) known here as chambres d'hôtes or gîtes, where you stay with local Creole families and share their tasty home-cooked meals.
Coastal path
Rodrigues was once thickly wooded with ebony forest. Giant tortoises roamed the island in huge numbers; birds unique to the island flitted among the branches, or, in the case of the flightless solitaire, a relative of the dodo, pottered about on the forest floor. Then humans arrived to colonise the island and created an ecological disaster zone. Now most of that forest has long since gone, and most of the birds too, though a few native species have recently been dragged back from the verge of extinction.
But, despite the disappearance of the forest, the island looks extraordinarily beautiful. I couldn't suppress an audible “wow!” as I rounded the headland on the coastal path to see a string of delectable bays, ringed by white sand. No beach bars, sun-loungers, parasols, or any of the usual seaside paraphernalia here - nor the hawkers, masseuses, cocktail waiters, and sunglass-cleaners that work the beaches of Mauritius.
Where much of the coastline of the big-sister island has effectively been privatised by the swanky hotels, pushing out local punters to ever more crowded public beaches, all Rodrigues's beaches are public. But with one big difference: they have no public on them. At Trou d'Argent, the island's most photographed stretch of sand, the only signs of life were a cow lying on the grass behind the beach, and a hen with her chicks, clucking and pecking among the rock pools.
Earlier generations would have passed Rodrigues by as insignificant, terminally sleepy, primitive, even dull. To me it's precisely the absence of stuff - I mean hotels, restaurants, entertainment, other tourists - that makes the island soappealing. It is so new to tourism that people still seem genuinely delighted to meet a foreign visitor. Service is gawky and informal. There is no luxury accommodation as such but more than enough homely, unpretentious comfort.
Main attractions
One of Rodrigues's main attractions is its delicious Creole cuisine. The island's volcanic soil is ideal for vegetables (they are practically organic, since farmers here cannot afford expensive imported pesticides). The local meat - pork, beef and kid - is also good, as is the octopus from the lagoon, typically served in a vinaigrette salad with chives. But the staple food is fish. I ate grouper and parrotfish, sea bass and dame berri; all tropical species with meaty white flesh. Favourite cooking methods for fish and meat are rougail (a kind of casserole, with tomatoes) and cari (curry) gently spiced with ginger and garam masala.
As a first course you might have cono cono: abalone, sliced and marinated with lime juice and spices, or smoked marlin. Everything comes with side dishes of achard (pickles) and chatini (chutney), and a paste, made from crushed green chillies, that is a misleading shade of avocado green but as piercingly hot as wasabi. For afters there might be gâteau maïs, a yellow pudding-y sweetmeat; piavre, a deep-fried doughnut drenched in honey; or the pride and joy of the island's patisserie, la tourte rodriguaise, a thick-crust pie with a jammy filling of coconut and papaya.
Cultural charm
Rodrigues has cultural oddities that charm and puzzle. You drive on the left, and the road-signs are UK-style, with curvy white letters on a green background. The currency (the rupee) and the spiciness of the cooking plainly reveal the influence of India. The French were in charge here for just 74 years, from 1735 to 1809, and the English for the next century and a half. Yet it's French culture that has triumphed, oddly. English may be the official language, yet most locals speak Creole French and/or French. The shops are all quincailleries, tabagies, boucheries. Even the island's name, a Portuguese word, is pronounced the French way, with two syllables instead of three.
Port Mathurin
The town's few thoroughfares have names such as Victoria Street, Johnston Street and Rue de la Solidarité. It has a low-rise, somnolent, villagey feel. The government buildings are single-storey colonial houses with corrugated roofs under the shade of giant banyan trees. There is a branch of Barclays Bank, a bookshop called the Bold Endeavour, a cyber café with the slowest internet connection I have ever experienced, and a general store, the Magasin Mackoojee (”Fondé en 1901″), which sells kitchen mixers, brooms and palm-leaf hats.
The island's main tourist attractions are the François Leguat Giant Tortoise and Cave Reserve, named after a Huguenot exile who arrived on Rodrigues in 1691, when the island was still uninhabited and pristine. The park and its installations, which include a small museum and a long cave through which visitors are taken on tours to gawp at the stalagmites and stalagtites, were founded in 2007 by the Australian naturalist Owen Griffiths. There is plenty to keep you occupied here for an hour or two, what with the cave, the tortoises in their picturesque surroundings, and the fruit bats in their special enclosure. The Rodrigues fruit bat, Pteropus rodricensis, very nearly met the same fate as the solitaire. At one point in the 1970s, there were only 70 left in the wild, and it became the world's rarest bat. Now it's up to several thousand, though the species is still endangered.
Despite being only 18km long and 8km wide, Rodrigues has plenty to see.
