One of my favourite travel experiences from the last few years was a guided walking tour of the alleys of Kolkata in India where we stopped along the way to sample some of the local street food. When we discovered a walking tour of the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, we decided to see if the experience would be equally enjoyable. And were delighted to find that it was.
The visit to the Embarkation Museum and the spice shop that I described in the previous two articles were all part of the walking tour. The same guide assisted us on all three. The actual food tour started when we entered the Chinatown of Port Louis.
My husband Craig and I had been startled by how often restaurants in Mauritius seem to serve both Indian and Chinese cuisine. We hadn’t seen that combination anywhere else on our travels. And this often proved to be the case on the food tour as well – a glorious mixture of spices and tastes to delight the palette.
In total we stopped at seven different eateries, from a tiny restaurant in Chinatown that seemed to comprise three tables in a corridor of a building, but which still served me the most amazing vegetable noodle, to cakes and sweet treats that rivalled what we have eaten in Central Europe yet with a tropical flavour of coconut and pineapple, through a range of yummy samosas and rotis with various fillings and finally to what tasted very much like an ice-cream-based milkshake with a fruit flavour that I simply cannot describe and haven’t encountered anywhere else.
The final two food stops on the walking tour took place in the Port Louis market, which is a bustling and noisy place often thronged by tourists. At least, that was our previous experience when we went there. It appeared to be a complete tourist trap filled with locals vying to attract visitors to their stalls to buy the multitude of Mauritian curios on offer.
But on this visit, we saw a different side of the market, where locals go to buy fresh produce and enjoy local snacks. It was less frenetic than the main market and there wasn’t a curio in sight, which was something of a relief.
I think you have to visit the main market at least once, to experience all that it has on offer. The energy is completely electric! If you are a skilful bar gainer , you may well find some great mementos to take home with you. But I have to admit that visiting that side of the market at the end of a three-hour walking tour just didn’t appeal to me.
Our very last stop on the walking tour was in the Company Gardens to see the baobab trees and hear the sound of the numerous sleeping bats that were hanging upside down from the branches of the trees. I was amazed at how noisy they are even while fast asleep.
Then we walked back to the Port Louis waterfront shopping centre where we had parked and returned home to contemplate all we’d seen and heard on the tour. I would definitely recommend a tour like this to anyone visiting Mauritius, if you are able to manage a three-hour walking tour in the warm weather.
Turning to the question of the disability access of the tour, sadly, I felt that the tour might be difficult for wheelchair users in its current form. There were numerous steps into restaurants, and curb cuts are scarce. Finally, there were several flights of stairs that we encountered when walking back to the waterfront where the tour began. It may well be possible to adjust the route to make it more accessible, and you would need to contact the tour providers to ask their advice. From my perspective as a blind tourist there were few problems.
In contrast, I thought it was a feast of different sounds, tastes and scents and I loved every second of the tour.
Next time, a visit to a museum to learn about the history of the sugar industry in Mauritius.
