We didn't go to Kenya because of pirates. Yes, Pirates. I'm not sure of the whole story but it seems there's a lot of piracy off the east coast of Africa at the moment and the US government doesn't want anyone there. When they announced a change of itinerary many of us thought it would be Myanmar. Archbishop Tutu is trying to get international support for the boycotting of Myanmar because of its corrupt regime. He stated that had he known we were going there he would not have boarded our vessel. In fact a lot of students are considering boycotting and remaining on the ship during our six day stay in Myanmar. Personally I would have much preferred to skip Myanmar and go to Kenya, but those aren't really the choices. Anyway, our next question was "What the heck is Mauritius?"
 
It's a small island roughly the size and shape of Rhode Island. It's off the eastern coast of Madagascar at about 20 degrees latitude and maybe 57ish degrees longitude. It would be well known to importers of sugar, textiles and now technology. Here's the scope:
 
First the Arabs find it hundreds of years ago and they put it on the map. But they don't stay. Then the Portuguese visit in 1507, they don't stay either. Then the Dutch come by and find Mauritius, with no inhabitants and lots of flightless, fat dodo birds and tortoises to eat. So they decide to settle and use it as a provisioning station between Cape Town and Sri Lanka. They cleared forest land but were unable to grow the crops they wanted. Eventually they left around 1710 to colonize other places. (Pretty much they concentrate on settling in Cape Town which has land and local people to exploit. Eventually the Dutch settlers become the Afrikaans people who were the ruling white minority group of the South African Apartheid until 1994.) Anyway, Mauritius remains uninhabited again for a while til the French colonize Madagascar and find it. They rename it Isle de France and it becomes their center of operations in the Indian Ocean. They convince Frenchmen to move to this tropical paradise and import slaves from Madagascar and other places to grow sugar. (I should mention that around this time sugar was huge because it was a sign of wealth. If you had sugar on your table you were hot stuff. Remember when Nintendo first came out and there was that one kid on the block who had it? That kind of hot stuff, like diamonds. Sugar was in high demand in the European countries.)
 
Then the British came, who in my opinion were extremely over the top with trying to conquer the entire globe. They decided they didn't want the French to have Mauritius so they beat them up til they surrender. They leave the French language and people intact and just slap on some British rule and outlaw slavery (at least they did that right). So with no slaves to run the sugar farms they ended up going to India, promising the Tamils great wealth and bringing them in as indentured servants to crop the sugar. In the end a large population of Tamils end up in Mauritius farming for the Brits. Once their servant time was up they had no means of escaping the island; Mauritius becomes home. The Brits also brought in a fair amount of Chinese workers. In 1968 Mauritius is finally declared an independent country, overwhelmingly Indian with African and Chinese peoples who all speak French and Creole and some English. Mostly the cultures have retained their cultural identities although often times you may run into a few people who you can't categorize as one ethnicity. The mixing has created some really beautiful people. The most amazing thing however is the way they all live in harmony. I think there is no where else in the world where you find such harmony amongst different religions and cultures. Everybody is happy living side by side. They even get together once every 4 years to pray for the safety of Mauritius, for its protection against natural disasters… and so far they haven't had any devastating crisis.
 
To finish up… sugar is no longer the #1 export. The Mauritians moved to the textile industry and they were the leaders for a long time until about the 1990s when the Chinese kicked in and cheap textiles moved there and to India and East Africa. Now they do really high end textiles which is their main export, followed by technology and electronics. They are a cyber island. Their 3rd biggest industry is that of tourism… paradise with all the comforts of home. I guess that's more than you ever needed to know about Mauritius.