This post is the third and final in my review of the Four Seasons Mauritius at Anahita. If you couldn’t tell from the other two posts, we found the overall experience to be fantastic, and this was augmented further by the fact that we had some of the best dining we have ever had before. This final post will just help to fill in some of the blanks.
Trip Report Index
- The Grounds, Garden Villa, and Service
- The Food
- The Conclusion
We really enjoyed the amount of complimentary activities the resort had. Paddle boating? Free. Boat ride to the nearby island? Free. Waterskiing? Free. Certainly this resort is not inexpensive, but you never feel like you’re being “nickel and dimed,” something that I have often felt while being at other nice resorts.
I went waterskiing on our last day, and the resort has a great ski boat. There’s a floating platform in the lagoon where skiers wait so there aren’t more than a couple people on the boat at once. I usually ski at Lake Mohave in Nevada, with my father being my driver of preference :-), but I was excited to be able to say I’ve been skiing in the Indian Ocean! The lagoon is perfect for a few runs, and there weren’t any waves at all.
Another one of the activities we did was take the free boat shuttle over to Ile Aux Cerfs, a small island on the other side of the lagoon. If you want to get off the resort and explore without going too far, this is a great way to do it. This island has a few touristy shops and restaurants, but it mainly has a beautiful public beach, as seen below.
Of course being a public beach, this is also a great place to get plenty of offers for day trips. We actually took one guy up on it. We negotiated a reasonable rate to get a private speed boat trip down Mauritius into Blue Bay. The snorkeling in Blue Bay was good, but it was nothing like the snorkeling we did in the Maldives a week later (posts about that in the works!).
After Blue Bay, we drove to a moderately impressive waterfall that was made more fun by the fact that our driver accidentally drove all the way into it. Driving away from the waterfall, we spotted bats in the trees, and after fixating on the bats, we noticed monkeys playing on the hillside. A driver of a nearby boat threw an apple on the hillside and it was fun to watch the monkeys chase down the apple and have a snack!
So you can do a variety of complimentary watersports right from the resort… and if you want to venture out a bit more, you can take a complimentary boat ride to Ile Aux Cerfs. If you want to explore even more, you can arrange a variety of day trips from the resort around the island (these are obviously not complimentary). My wife and I did a day trip to Port Louis, the primary city of the island, and after Port Louis, we went to an old sugar plantation / mill turned into a museum. The island of Mauritius is big enough that it’s not really feasible to do a trip around the whole island in a single day while seeing things. Port Louis and the sugar museum are in the northern part of the island. If we had a couple more days in Mauritius, we would probably have taken a day trip to the southern part of the island as well. In any case, we didn’t find Port Louis too interesting, and if you go visit the island, I’d say skip it. However, we did find the sugar museum to be a great way to spend an hour or two! The best part about the sugar museum was that it’s actually a pretty thorough museum about the history of Mauritius. For example… I had no idea until visiting that museum that Mauritius was an uninhabited island unitl 1598! Sigh… and that’s when humans came and killed off the dodo bird, which is a native of Mauritius.
My wife and I don’t typically like spending too much time in one place, but after four nights at the Four Seasons, we weren’t quite ready to leave. We really could have used another couple of days! The staff was so accommodating, the food was awesome, the grounds were beautiful, and I hope to return some day!
