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Showing posts from October, 2017

Rodrigues... a cursory glance after a very brief visit...

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At the moment Tin Tin and her intrepid crew of 3 greybeards are making the final 40 miles to the northern end of Mauritius (pronounced Maurice en Francais) having said goodbye to her smaller associate island of Rodrigues where we spent a few days relaxing after the long voyage through stormy seas from the Australian Indian Ocean outpost of Cocos Keeling. The islands of Rodrigues and Mauritius were wrestled from the French just over 200yrs ago and one might have thought that in the intervening two centuries that the English language and customs might have all but superseded the French... but no.. It is veritable melange ... although traffic does drive on the left, English is an official language, road signs are in English and a strangely familiar feeling came over me when I came across double yellow lines. Despite these signs of a British presence it appears that French and Creole is the dominant mode of speech, on Rodrigues at least. Looking at the map of Mauritius you will notice

The intermittent Blogger returns....

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YES! .... it is me, myself, I... After a very long absence when I have rather lazily suggested you look at my photo albums, thinking that if each photo was worth a thousand words then it wasn't really fair to inflict any actual written words when you may already be reading the Skipper's blog which is apparently a regular cascade of verbal reporting of our every moment and latterly, in particular, our culinary skills with cabbage... I am attaching four photos to this post (4000 words I need not write?!) which I promise will not include white beaches, crystal clear blue waters and overhanging palm trees.... this time at least, as we have seen a goodly number of those three constituent parts assembled together to the recipe of the classic holiday brochure idyll. The first photo is a shot taken looking forward over TinTin's bow as the large swell raced past lit by the afternoon sun. It is very difficult to capture the real size of the waves on camera and I at last found