Mynahs by Morne
July 29. 2018

We left Mauritius in December of 2010, thinking it was as far as we'd
ever traveled, and that we were leaving a piece of paradise, never to
return. So I was shocked to find myself there again only eight years
later. It's as far as I remember, but when you reach a destination at
the end of many, individual jumps, it seems farther.

Morne Brabant To get to Mauritius the first time we'd flown and
installed ourselves in West Africa, then traveled through South
Africa, making the final three hour jump from Johannesburg to an
island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. There's another way, of
course: a grueling, 24 hour flight via a layover in Paris: from Paris
to Mauritius alone is eleven hours on an aircraft.

This trip should have been the continuation of an exploration we'd
begun with two happy children; instead to visit the final corner of
the island without them felt sad and lonely. Every corner of the place
was riddled with memories of two binkyfaces who are already a lot more
grown up than they were when we visited as a family. Morne Brabant My
plane arrived before dawn, and the sky lightened as I passed through
customs and found a taxi. The morning was still and the roads were
empty: it was Eid il Fitri and most Mauritians were resting at home as
we parted the thick fields of sky-high sugar cane in our little French
sedan. As we approached the south side of the island, the sea began to
appear in glimpses, patches, whispers. And then it lay spread before
me: the infinite turquoise and azure blue of the Indian Ocean, the
earth's most picturesque body of water.

My hotel lie just a few miles along the coast from the famous Morne
Brabant, a basalt monolith at the island's southwest extreme that
adorns half of Mauritius' postcards, and for good reason: it's
alluring and majestic and mysterious, steeped in local legend and
absolutely eye-catching, a rocky bump emerging from a forest of
green. We'd driven by it eight years ago on our way through Souillac
to Flic-en-Flac, but this time a conference I attended spread along
its flanks, and I had the pleasure of a few days' looking up at it in
the mid-morning, tropical sun. Heritage Le Telfair Now protected by
UNESCO for its value as cultural patrimony, the Morne retains a wild
look, and its forested slope remains home to all sorts of birds I
enjoyed looking for each morning: the chatty Mynahs, with bright eyes
and beak and white wing bands that flash when they spread their wings
for flight, and the pointy-headed, Red-Cheeked Bulbuls. Neither was an
elusive find; in fact the Mynahs are aggressive little pests, inviting
themselves onto restaurant tables and trying to steal pommes frites
before getting shooed off. The Bulbuls were looking for snacks too,
but chatted contentedly from the thick foliage of the hotel's gardens
at sunrise. Theirs was the song of morning.

I may yet make it back to Mauritius. I hope it stays as lovely as it
is now, its mornings full of Mynahs, its Morne full of bird song.