Rodrigues mini-series: Part 1

The blog has been a bit quiet recently, partly because we went on a trip to Rodrigues with some friends. It's an amazing place, and there's too much to say about it to put in just one post, so I decided to make a mini-series. Part 1 will start with a bit of background info...

With a total area of 42 square miles, Rodrigues is an even tinier dot on the map than Mauritius. It's about 350 miles east of here and has a population of 41,000. The inhabitants are Mauritian citizens, but the island has been autonomous since 2002, meaning that they have a regional assembly to write laws and manage their budget. 

From what I saw, the two islands are quite different in terms of landscape, population, and industry. The dry, arid land in Rodrigues reminded me a lot of Gozo, off the coast of Malta. Unlike Mauritius, there are animals everywhere; mainly cows and goats. The only place I've seen goats in Mauritius, is by the side of the main road through Tamarin!

There's no sugar cane at all, and the economy is driven by fishing, agriculture, tourism, and handicrafts. Everything that can't be produced on Rodrigues is brought in from Mauritius (more on that later).   

The population of Mauritius is mainly of Indian origin, with some Chinese, African, and Europeans, whereas the people of Rodrigues are mainly descended from the African slaves taken there by the French to tend to their livestock during the 18th century. For some reason, when the British took over and abolished slavery, the French cleared out completely - in Mauritius they stayed and kept a lot of prime land for themselves!

I did find two things the islands have in common; their creativity with shop naming, and their buses!

The Fair Price supermarket

The Corner Store

The Safe Drive, Happy Life bus

Anniversary lunch in a château

Last week was our second wedding anniversary so we decided to go out for the day and have a nice celebratory lunch. After a bit of research, we decided on Le Château de Labourdonnais; a colonial house similar to Eureka, situated in the north of the island.

 

We had some things to do in the morning, so arrived just in time for lunch at the Table du Château. There were a few large tables of business men in blue shirts, who must have been there on some kind of office team building exercise. Lunchtime was clearly the first moment they'd had to check their phones, and the lawn area in front of the restaurant was full of people texting or chatting, fortunately not too close to our table! 

 

 

Taken after lunch when they'd all left.

I'd taken a sneak peek at the menu online when we booked, so I had a good idea what I was going to eat before I even sat down. The prices are mid-way between the cheap and cheerful local restaurants we usually eat at, and the fancy places you find in the posh hotels. There are a few restaurants like this around Mauritius where you can eat tasty and creative dishes at a fraction of what they'd cost in Europe. Here's one page from the menu:

 

Our starters - prawns for Merv and fish of the day tartare for me - were beautifully presented and absolutely delicious.

 

I'm not sure what was in the dish next to the butter, but I didn't get much chance to try it after Merv discovered how tasty it was! It was a little spicy for me anyway so I left him to it.

 

Often when we eat out, one of us at least is disappointed when we order and they don't have the thing we've chosen from the menu. I don't know why it happens so much; maybe because it's an island and everything is imported. I don't remember what Merv's first choice was, but they didn't have it and he ended up with this:

 

He didn't regret it though. I think this was braised beef cheeks with carrot and taro crisps. I went for some more fish. When it arrived, I realised I'd basically ordered the same thing as my starter, but presented in a different way and with a taro puree, which I wasn't that keen on as it was a bit too sweet and creamy for my taste. The rest was lovely though.

Merv maintains that, however much you eat, there's always space for pudding because it goes into a separate stomach. Normally I'd struggle to eat a three course meal at lunchtime, but when I saw the menu, I decided I'd try out his theory. Besides which, I knew he'd sacrifice himself if I needed help clearing my plate.

 

Chocolate and caramel tart with ice cream

Some kind of crumble; I can't remember exactly.

After all that food, which I managed to polish off without Merv's help, we decided a walk would do us good, so we set out to visit the house. To be honest, I didn't have very high expectations after my Eureka experience, but it couldn't have been more different.

 

Shame about the cloudy sky, but it is Winter after all...

 

Information boards are plentiful and bilingual, and I especially liked that it wasn't just lists of facts. There were stories and anecdotes about family life and happy times spent in the house. It was as if the owners were giving us a personal tour. 

Normally in museums, I wander around looking and skim reading the information boards before heading to the shop (does that make me a bad person??)  In this house, there was so much interesting stuff to read that I'd need to go a second time to take it all in. The only thing missing from the explanations was why this chair has such amazingly long armrests!

Le Domaine de Labourdonnais doesn't stop at the family home. The business employs 175 people and produces 3500 tons of sugar cane and 1000 tons of citrus and tropical fruits annually. These are used in the production of fruit juices and jellies, and rhum which is distilled on-site. Included in the entrance fee there was a chance to taste all of the above. In the summer months, they also do cycling tours around the 40 hectares of orchards. I'd love to do that one day, and there were definitely some options on the menu that would be worth going back for. We paid the "locals" price of 200 rupees for the museum visit and the tasting session, which I thought was pretty good value. The restaurant also has the advantage of being separate from the house, so you can just go there to eat, without paying the entrance fee each time.

What's in a name?

A lot of people who read the blog regularly have told me that their favourite post was the one about the houses and how pretty much anything goes when it comes to style and decoration. I found out early on that the same is true of shop names, and I've been collecting photos for this post for the last year. There are so many more I haven't been able to photograph so maybe this will just be the first in a series of shop posts, but I couldn't resist sharing what I've found so far.

Inspiration for your shop name can come from just about anywhere. Some people choose to name them after existing shops, or places, or even TV shows:

Harrods, complete with unnecessary apostrophe

I know they look like shopping trolleys in this photo, but it's actually a shop selling fabric and saris. Aux Champs Elysées also sells material.

Aux Champs Elysées

The friends clothes shop

In the slightly more creative category we have West Side Store. I like the fact that they are retailers of foodstuff AND non foodstuff. Doesn't that basically mean they sell everything? 

"Mine" in Mauritius (and maybe elsewhere but I'd never heard of it before) are noodles; the kind you get in a Chinese restaurant if you don't want rice. They're very common here. La bonne mine, for those who don't speak French, literally means "the good noodle", but "avoir bonne mine" is also an expression which means to be looking well. 

The next ones might be my favourite category of shop name, and it's the one I see most of; the "make your shop sound amazing" category.

The Magic Deal supermarket where you always win. This is a chain.

"Ideal Corner" - this one is a bar as well as a shop

Chicken Chef - Awesomely Chicken!

Dream Price. I've also seen "Prix Logique"

Charming Fashion. So great it needs to be hidden.

Some people don't even bother with a name; they just tell you directly what you can expect to find in their shop or on their stand. In this case, gateaux doesn't mean cakes as you might expect, but rather a selection of savoury, fried things like samosas, chili cakes, or slices of aubergine or potato.

The originality in this one is not the name - it just says "hardware store" and the name of the owner, but more the fact that he's written it backwards. Well, it certainly caught my eye.

I particularly like the name of this one. Hard to know what it sells, but it's so friendly I'd go there anyway.

Some shop names are just plain strange, like the UK Connection English Ladies Fashion (which certainly doesn't appeal to this English lady!) and Le Crack Boutik, which sells TV and phone accessories. I don't know what they sell in the "Big" shop next door.

Finally, there are the people who name their shops after themselves or their families. Unfortunately, some names don't come across so well in other languages....

Cook like a Mauritian

In fact the title of this post is a bit misleading; when I told my Mauritian friends what I was planning to make, they'd never heard of it, let alone cooked it themselves. 

In previous posts I've talked about my liking for local vegetables, especially pipangaille. In case you've forgotten or haven't been reading that long, it's this one:

 

Papy Pierre taught me how to prepare this with tomato, garlic, ginger and thyme, but I've heard also of a "chatini peau de pipangaille"; a kind of chutney that you make with the skin, which I normally remove and throw away. I was intrigued and decided to try it out using a recipe I found online.

 

The recipe says to use only the green part of the skin so I "pre-peeled" them to get rid of the old looking, brown parts. Let's face it, they're not very appetising, are they?

 

While the lovely, bright green peelings were boiling merrily in unsalted water for 30 minutes, I prepared the rest of the ingredients; onion, garlic, salt, and chili.

 

Mauritians eat a lot of chili but fortunately, it's mainly served on the side so I can avoid it. We didn't have any fresh chilies at home and the shops were closed because it's Sunday, so I used a very tiny spoonful of Volcano Chili, made by my Mother-in-Law. Even she overestimated its strength and left some on the side of her plate the last time she was here! It's basically just a lot of these, crushed with oil and salt:

The onion had to be finely chopped which was easy enough, and then, because I didn't read the recipe correctly, I crushed the garlic as well (you add it to the blender later so all you really have to do is peel it). In the interest of being like a true Mauritian, I didn't use my handy Ikea garlic press, opting instead for our pestle and mortar bought from a market stall, local style. Go me.

When the time was up, I poured away the water and put the pipangaille peelings in my blender along with the chili and garlic to produce a paste. It kept its nice, deep colour which I was very pleased about.

The final stage was to soften the chopped onion in a small amout of oil, before adding the pipangaille paste and some salt, and cooking on a low heat for about ten minutes. The result looked like this:

It looks nice, it tastes pretty good, and it got the Merv seal of approval. The problem is that we've never eaten it before and don't know what it's actually supposed to taste like! In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I'm calling it a success.

Gorge-ous nature

There's more to Mauritius than beaches and sugar cane. Almost 70 square kilometres of the south west of the island is an amazing area of forest, waterfalls and stunning views known as the Black River Gorges National Park. I've seen bits of it before from the car on the way to Chamarel, but have never managed to get Merv off the sofa long enough to go hiking, which is a shame as the main entrance to the park is a ten minute drive from our house.

I finally made it to the park last week with some friends and it was lovely. Their children are quite small so it was only a short walk, but enough to show off the beauty of the park and make me want to go back again.

Unlike a lot of other places in Mauritius, the national park is well indicated and well maintained. At the main entrance near Tamarin, there's a car park, picnic tables, and signposts indicating the distance and direction of the various trails. There's also a visitors' centre but when I went it was closed because it had been vandalised.

 

I found out further into the walk that the Mauritius Tourism Fund and an association of 19 hotels have been working together to manage and improve the park for visitors.

We walked along a flat, shady trail through the trees. My five-year-old friend pointed out every termite mound we passed; I'm now an expert in termite mound spotting. I was also reliably informed that if you put all the termites in the world on one side of a set of scales, and all the humans in the world on the other, the termite side would be heavier. Nice. For the curious ones, that big, dark coloured thing on the tree in the middle of the picture is a termite mound.

Streams of varying sizes cross the path at several points. Some people stop each time to take off their shoes and wade across barefoot.

 Some of us just get wet...

It was pretty cold! My shoes were almost dry when we reached the next one and had to do it all again. 

The park is home to over 150 endemic plant species and 9 endemic birds. I wasn't organised enough to take a guide, so I couldn't identify them, and I imagine they're likely to be further into the forest than we walked, but here are some nice scenery pictures:

 

After about half an hour we reached our destination; a wider stretch of river with a pebbly bank where we sat down for a drink and the boys went in for a swim. It was lovely and peaceful until a group of hikers came along and spent ten minutes wrapping plastic bags around their boots before crossing the river. As they emerged on our side, we could see the bags were full of water, so it was a bit of a waste of time!

As with many places in Mauritius, there was also a small shrine built into a rock by the river:

The highest peak on the island - Le Piton de la Petite Rivière Noire - is in the middle of the park. There are three different paths to the top, one of which is less than 5km because you begin on the heights of the Plaine Champagne and you only actually have to climb 150 metres. I'm hoping to convince Merv to come walking with me, and that's where I want to go next. If the weather is right, there are some amazing views over the south of the island. 

In the meantime, here are some shots of the gorges from the Plaine Champagne viewpoint: