Pamplemousses and the North

The north is the flat end of Mauritius: cane fields, small towns and a coast of low headlands, with the mountains left behind to the south. A day up here strings together five stops, none of them long, and the roads between them are half the pleasure.

Goodlands comes first, a big working village in the cane country where the morning’s business goes on without reference to anyone passing through: shopfronts open to the street, a market, buses. Then the coast road round the top of the island to Cap Malheureux, where a small church with a red roof stands almost on the shore and Coin de Mire sits out in the channel. The name means the wedge a gunner used to aim a cannon, and that is exactly its shape. The British came ashore near here in 1810 to take the island from the French.

Somewhere on the way is a model-ship workshop, which sounds like a gift-shop stop and turns out to be one of the better hours of the day. Craftsmen build replicas of real sailing ships from their plans, planking the hulls strip by strip and rigging them thread by thread, and you can stand at their elbows while they work.

Château de Labourdonnais is the house of the day: a nineteenth-century mansion, restored and furnished, walked with a guide, in a colonial garden of old trees and orchard. The visit ends with a tasting of what the estate makes: fruit jellies, juices, and its own rum, in that order if you have any sense.

Then Pamplemousses. The garden was begun by the French in the eighteenth century, and Pierre Poivre made it the nursery for the nutmeg and cloves he had smuggled out from under the Dutch. Today it is avenues of palms, spice trees you smell before you find them, and a pond of giant water lilies with leaves the size of tabletops. Look for the talipot palm, which flowers once in its life, after decades, and then dies.

The capital is a short drive south, and some versions of the day finish there. Port Louis deserves better than the tail end of a day, though, and a market morning of its own is the way to see it.

Good to know

• The garden is flat, but big and hot in the open at midday. Hat, water and a guide.
• Cap Malheureux church is a working place of worship. Cover your shoulders to go in, and keep your voice down if a service is on.
• The day comes in more than one version, with or without lunch and with or without the capital at the end. We confirm yours in writing.
• Ask about packing before you choose a model ship, not after.
• Take a driver rather than a hire car. The stops are spread out and the back roads are narrow.