The population is a benign mix of the descendants of freed African slaves,
Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Europeans. The islands were discovered piecemeal
by explorers going to Africa or up to Arabia. Pirates hid here and practised
their bandana-tying. Sailors landed here to take on sweet water, coconuts
and fat turtles, which were such a vital fresh meat source for long sea
journeys. Turtles could be stored on racks in the holds of ships, and would
stay alive for months, gently weeping.
The islands have been inhabited, apart from castaways, shipwrecks and
Scandinavian nudists, really only since the 18th century. They were a French
colonial outpost for a bit, and then a British one. They gained independence
and joined the Commonwealth in the 1970s. There were a couple of false
starts, and a bad-tempered coup. The problems of the islands are the grimly
predictable ones that affect beautiful dots in pale oceans.
I’ve never really understood people who have trouble doing five-star nothing.
It’s not like it’s a skill, or you need training or a Padi licence or skis.
Tramps can do nothing; labradors do nothing; deckchairs do nothing in the
sun. I can do nothing in any number of elegant positions. I can do nothing
and walk at the same time, and the Seychelles are possibly the most
sophisticated and complicated place of nothingness in the world. They demand
minimal thought and negligible activity, and that’s not a good thing – it’s
a miraculously great thing.
This is a place with one of the most delicate and precipitous environments –
dozens of filigreed smudges of sand with spectacular birds. Seashores are
particularly fragile ecosystems, while at the same time being laundered
fresh every morning. And the tourism of nothing is the Seychelles’ biggest
industry, which is set to grow.
The islands are lobbying for more direct flights, and there is a queue of
speculators who want to invest. The experience of island resorts around the
world is not encouraging. So much of the West Indies has been ruined, to the
point where the main attraction for tourists is the dress sense of other
tourists. Maintaining low-impact tourism while providing jobs and services
for a poor and underemployed workforce is almost a social oxymoron. But the
Seychelles is gingerly embarking on the nervous and delicate ballet of
trying to increase tourists while reducing the effects of tourism.
There is a market for uncomplicated travel. The term “ethical tourism” is
patronising and sanctimonious. The holiday isn’t an exam in relative
morality. But still, a lot of you want to go and not be surrounded by
grotesque consumption, waste and gaudy opulence, or people who see swank as
sophistication. In fact, everything that Mauritius has become, the
Seychelles are trying to avoid: marble bathrooms, Michelin-starred
restaurants, golf buggies to the casino.
The things that make you look around and think, what’s underneath it all? What
have I just consumed? On the other hand, people don’t want to pay
considerable amounts of money for a hair-shirt gap-year experience. You do
want a massage and room-service ice. You’d like the internet and CNN.
It’s a complicated sleight of hand, a delicate conjuring trick, this
less-is-more business. But the Seychelles are starting off with some things
in their favour: impeccable bone structure. The beaches are the best in the
world. We can argue about this, but I’d win. The sand is white and fine; the
sea that iridescent, butterfly-wing blue that you only get on atolls and a
temperature that’s like being peed on by somebody you love. There is little
that stings or bites; there are no indigenous Marxist guerrillas or
fundamentalist terrorists. The polyglot mix of people makes it very
uncliquey, even allowing for the fact that they were once French. And the
islands have always made a living from looking out to sea, not looking in
each other’s windows.
A lot of the indigenous biology, particularly the birds, is spectacular and
rare. On the vast tern colonies, the islanders once collected eggs in oil
drums to export for house paint. Now, divers harvest sea cucumbers for
Chinese kitchens – a dangerous and unpleasant job, but very well paid. There
are turtles and shark fins, but their most famous export, now banned, was
the mysterious and lubricious coco de mer, the largest seed in the world.
The palm tree that drops these huge suggestive nuts into the sea to be
carried to other islands is only found here. They were sailors’ souvenirs
and wishful thinking, as they look uncannily, miraculously, like female
sexual parts, complete with pubic tufts and silky rounded black buttocks.
They are now protected. In fact, you can be jailed for up to 15 years for
smuggling coco de mer, which, for a laid-back, liberal country such as the
Seychelles, is a fearsomely draconian punishment. Life for coconut scrumping
– but it’s a symbol of serious intent to put the environment first.
The Seychelles have everything that people once travelled to the West Indies
to find, plus the natural cuisine, which is far better. Dishes are a mixture
of Indian, African, Chinese, Arab and European. The national speciality is
bat curry. That’s not a joke. Nor is it to be missed. The bats in question
are big flying foxes, half umbrella, half Jack Russell. They’re trapped in
nets – I’m told being a bat-catcher is highly skilled work. They don’t taste
remotely like chicken, which is what people always say new meat tastes like.
More a synthesis of lamb’s liver and muntjac that’s been hit by a Range
Rover.
The unaccounted benefit, the extra, the free gift brought by the trade winds,
about being a fragile tourist on a fragile shore is that you become as
protected and fussed over as the whitetailed tropic bird. A healthy and rich
breeding colony of tourists is essential to the Seychelles. What is lucky is
that the tourists have evolved from Australian backpackers and shoestring
bloggers to those who are after uncomplicated, undecorated, unorchestrated
and unsophisticated life for a week or two, and are willing to pay a great
deal for it. Time that leaves you to the call of the sea and the birds, the
thud and hiss of the surf, and the cool, I-told-you-so smirk of fresh aloe
vera on your stinging shoulders.
The most exciting thing that happened to me in the Seychelles was that the
tiny Seychelles kestrel roistered and roosted in the thatched eaves of my
room, an indigenous, neat and sprightly raptor that, like all kestrels, was
a God-blessed minion of the morn. He was a fleeting reminder of the rare
otherness and singularity that should be the point of a holiday. It is a
truth that there are those who travel to get away from it all and those who
travel to get at it all. When you finally get home and you’ve tipped the
sand out of your bags and put the shells in a jam jar in the bathroom, there
is one final, last gift that the Seychelles has to give you: its rather
elegant passport stamp is a line drawing of their most famous plant. You
have in your passport an anatomically correct picture of a rotund, pouting
pudendum.
AA Gill travelled to the Seychelles as a guest of Seasons in Style
TRAVEL DETAILS
Seasons in Style (01244 202000, www.seasonsinstyle.com)
has seven nights at Maia (www.maia.com.sc)
on Mahé from £4,840pp, with flights from Heathrow to Victoria with Air
Seychelles, oceanview B&B accommodation and transfers. Or try Carrier
(0161 491 7610, www.carrier.co.uk),
ITC Classics (01244 355550, www.itcclassics.co.uk)
or Elegant Resorts (01244 897505, www.elegantresorts.co.uk).
