February 13-15
OK – so I’m not sure I’d ever heard of the Seychelles before this trip. But Michael had and he knew it was fancy. Like Bali fancy. He wanted to make it happen and I had no reason not too. I like fancy beaches. So we booked just 2 days there. Now I’m pretty sure people are seeing a pattern right now in our travel. We are staying in places for 36-48 hours and it’s exhausting! But when we booked all of the flights a month(ish) ago, it made sense. That’s the problem with booking in advance – you might not know what you want. But the truth is that we really don’t know what we want until we get to a place. Once in Dubai and Zanzibar, we knew we wanted more days, but didn’t want to pay to change flights. Now that we’re in the Seychelles we know that we don’t want more days and we’re glad that we we’re leaving after two. Let me explain.
Seychelles – uninhabited until the 1700s when the French colonized and put people here. So French – 90% Catholic, but for some reason they drive on the wrong side of the road and their capital is “Victoria” so there are some British influences that we don’t understand. They speak a Creole language which when I’m reading just looks like phonetically spelled French. When I hear it, it’s not recognizable. But they all speak English as well. So… super easy for us.
We flew in on Fat Tuesday but were told not much was going on… the big holiday that everyone was excited about was Valentine’s Day. Hmm. Michael and I don’t typically celebrate that one.
We drove to our hotel – and got gouged by the taxi driver. We know we need to google how much it costs in advance, but it’s hard to stay on top of it sometimes. So we paid almost twice as much and even without the data knew we were getting hosed. So we started on a bad foot. The hotel was nice, but the wifi wasn’t working and dinner/drinks were SO EXPENSIVE. Beautiful scene though:
And the view from our balcony was nice too – note how please Michael was that I was taking this picture. You could actually see both the sunset and the sunrise from our balcony. Pretty incredible.
Besides hanging at our hotel, we also walked into the small beach town and spent the better part of a day laying out and wading into the crystal clear waters. It seemed like you could walk out forever and still see your toes.
Note: that island out there on the left in the pictures always had a cloud hanging over it. For days. I don’t understand what would cause that, but I swear – it always had a cloud.
So the island is beautiful. The food is delicious. William and Kate had their honeymoon here. That said… not our favorite. It was too expensive. And it wasn’t that special, in our opinion, to cost that much more. It was convenient that we stayed on a Catholic island that had open churches on Ash Wednesday… but otherwise, I preferred Zanzibar and it was much cheaper. Also we can get crystal clear waters in Culebra, Puerto Rice, with a shorter flight. Definitely not a place we ever have to come back. But can’t debate that the view is gorgeous.
