Port Louis on a Market Morning

The market is the reason to come, and you should arrive at it early. The fruit and vegetable hall is the loudest room in Mauritius: pyramids of lychee and pineapple and things you cannot name, sellers calling across the aisles, ginger and coriander and wet stone in the air. Upstairs is the other market: tailors, baskets, spice mixes bagged by hand, model ships, and plenty of souvenir tat that you are free to walk past.

Then you eat. Dholl puri is the national dish in the sense that matters: a soft flatbread rolled with split-pea filling, butter bean curry, rougaille and as much chilli as you request. You eat it standing up, off paper, for the price of nothing, and it is the best thing you will eat all week. Gâteaux piments come by the handful. Alouda, milky and cold, is what to drink afterwards.

Outside, the city keeps changing character every few streets. Chinatown has its own gates, its own shopfronts and its own noon rush. Colonial buildings sit under office towers. The Champ de Mars racecourse, which has run since the early nineteenth century, cuts a green oval into the middle of the whole thing.

Down at the water, past the shops and restaurants of the Caudan waterfront, is Aapravasi Ghat: the depot where ships landed indentured labourers from India after slavery ended, and where the population of modern Mauritius largely begins. It is a small site, presented without ceremony, and it is worth the half hour. Almost every Mauritian family you meet on the island traces itself back through those steps.

Then you drive back to the coast, or on north to the botanical garden: the north tour pairs the capital with Pamplemousses in a single day. Either way, the lagoon looks different for a day or two afterwards. This is the morning that stops Mauritius being a beach with a hotel on it.

Good to know

• Mornings. The market is a working market and it thins out as the day goes on, with shorter hours on Sundays.
• Take a driver rather than a hire car. Port Louis traffic and parking are a poor use of a holiday.
• Light clothes, closed shoes, water. The capital sits in a bowl below the mountains and holds the heat.
• Small notes for the market and a bag you can close. Haggling is expected upstairs and not downstairs.
• Opening hours, guide fees and driver rates are set locally and change. We confirm the day’s arrangements in writing before you travel.