Beautiful scenery greets us as we descend into the airport – so lush, so green, such beautiful mountains and hills. 

As you can imagine, it takes forever to deplane, but once we are off, everything works like clockwork.  We get lucky in passport control when they open up another side to the Disney-esque lines and we are 2^nd to go through.  The Immigration Officer gets a little confused as to how we are leaving Mauritius, but we finally get her to understand we are leaving on a ship and she stamps us on our way.  Health control just waves us through – we’d done our digital forms, guess it counts for something even if they didn’t look at them – and we are in the baggage area in no time. 

The bags did take forever to come out, more than likely because they were first on.  We checked them in at 11:30a for a 7:35p flight.  But they both arrived relatively unscathed and we set out to find our driver who was waiting for us the minute we passed through customs.  Couldn’t be easier.

On top of that, the drive takes no time at all and we are in our lovely (way too big) 3 bedroom apartment before 1pm.  The driver hauls the bags upstairs to the apartment, opens the door and hands us the cardboard sign stuck there letting us know this our place.  Cute.  Gives us a quick tour around the place and then leaves us to our own devices.  Awesome. 

Here is where it begins to unravel a little bit though.  It is January 2 – no big deal in most of the world, right?  Well here, it New Years Day 2 – seriously the 2^nd New Year’s Day – and a public holiday.  Nothing is open.  The grocery store 3 minutes from the apartment.  Nope.  The grocery store 15 minutes from here – through a narrow trail in a huge overgrown lot – is open but sells no alcohol.  We are at our wit’s end.  Plus, we are tired, we are hot and sweaty even though there is a nice breeze and it is lovely in the shade if you can find it, and getting cranky.

We reconnoitered back at the apartment, searching Google maps for alternative supermarkets, looking at the ride share app to possibly take us to the mall where we know there is a store (but it is really expensive), finally heading to a store we think it open about a 20 minute walk away.  As we turn onto the main road heading toward the store, a random guy walking down the street comes up to us and says “Edward?  You’re Edward right?”  Me being little miss cynical is thinking it is somehow a scam, but no, this is Siddick, our apartment host.  He’s going somewhere else to check somebody in and just happened to be walking there near the apartment.  Talk about random! 

But a very fortuitous meeting.  Not only is Siddick lovely, he’s also now bringing bikes over for us tomorrow, and informs us that nothing is open today.  Not even restaurants and we should go to the store to pick something up for tonight. Nice to know as we’d not have done that and been SOL later on when we couldn’t find a place to eat.  He tells us to go to Loyeung Supermarket, which is actually where we are heading, to pick up supplies and he’ll see us tomorrow.  Perfect.

We schlep down to Loyeung only to find the store locked up tight.  Tighter than tight.  Sigh.  This is crazy, but hey, when in Mauritius…..So we decide to bite the bullet and pay the exorbitant ride share cost to get to the mall.  Unfortunately, the ride share app doesn’t work (it isn’t Uber or Lyft, but some other locally sourced thing), so we make the fateful decision to walk the 35 minutes to the mall….in the sun and the heat.  We aren’t happy, but what to do?

As it turns out, luck was on our side as we stumble onto an open grocery store not 10 minutes into our walk.  Yay.  Beer, wine, snacks and frozen chicken burgers for dinner.  What more can you ask for?  (We’ll see once we cook them) The walk back to the apartment is only 20 minutes, making us very happy we didn’t have to walk all the way to and from the mall. 

Once home, we turn on the A/C and sit outside for a bit in the nice breeze (if only we could capture it inside!) waiting for the place to cool down.  Later, trying to push our awake time as long as can, we eat our gourmet dinner on the balcony a little before 7 – it’s actually quite good tbh! – then hang out watching and listening to the firecrackers until it starts to get dark and we feel the mosquitoes buzzing around. 

Retiring to the now cool living room, we end up watching one episode, then succumb to our exhaustion and hit the Thai-style rock hard bed.  We’re so tired, we definitely do not care!