Greetings from halfway around the world.

When both our kids were still in grade school, Paige and I told them that in the summer between their junior and senior year in high school, we’d go on a family trip anywhere they’d like to go, as long as they planned it. The idea was three-fold:

1) to broaden their traveling horizons beyond camping trips to the Olympic National Forest and visits to Disneyland

2) to teach them how to research and plan a big trip within a certain budget

3) and, finally, to sneak in one more shared family experience before “college” began to inevitably loosen the ties that bind.

Our older daughter Kate chose to go to Europe, but her idea was nothing like the traditional “grand tour” of the major European capitols that most first-timers go on. Something of a student of family genealogy, Kate plotted out a trip that included obscure towns like Vyborg, Denmark (where some of Paige’s ancestors came from) and small countries like Luxembourg (where I have some roots) along with extended stays in Spain (she studied Spanish in high school) and Rome (hey, we’re Catholic!) It was a highly idiosyncratic and highly memorable trip.

Six years later, it’s daughter Madeleine’s turn. Having already had a taste of Europe and Japan (thanks to her middle school Japanese class), Maddi was looking for something ambitious and exotic. After seriously flirting with Australia for years, she eventually zeroed in on Africa (thanks to an inspiring history teacher.) Due to serious budget and time constraints – in other words, it takes a very long time to get to Africa AND it costs a lot to travel around there – Maddi soon realized a cross-continent trip was out of the question and that we’d be better off settling on a single country. Ultimately, she made the agonizing choice of Mauritius over Egypt.

Mauritius??????Mauritius???!!!!! I like to think of myself as a pretty well-educated and well-read guy but I have to admit not only didn’t I know where Mauritius was in the world, I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. And yet, here I sit, six months after Maddi’s choice, writing from a hotel balcony overlooking the Indian Ocean 500 miles east of Madagascar in Pointe aux Piments, Mauritius, a tiny tropical island Mark Twain said God used as a model for Heaven itself.

PS – In case you doubted the reach of Michael Jackson’s worldwide popularity, even on this tiny dot of land south of the Equator and just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, news of his death and impending funeral is the talk of the town. His music is ubiquitous everywhere on the island, and so is his image.

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For a little taste of heaven, I’ve included a few photos from our first couple of days in Mauritius.

More….

(I’m squeezing in one more week of summer vacation, this time at Whidbey Island. So, no film review. But since I’ve gotten so many follow-up inquiries about my trip to Mauritius, I thought I’d do another column on that, in place of a review. )

As I outlined a few blog entries back, my family went on a big trip to Mauritius last month. It was a years-in-the-planning vacation that was left up to our 16-year-old daughter Madeleine. She could choose to go anywhere in the world and she chose a small island hundreds of miles off the coast of Madagascar, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I still can’t quite believe we pulled it off, but I’ve got the photos to prove it.

It takes two full days to fly to Mauritius from Seattle. We flew from Seattle to Denver, Denver to London, London to Dubai, and finally Dubai to Mauritius. And since this was perhaps our last big family trip, we decided to flesh it out a bit by spending a couple of days in London and a couple of days in Dubai before a 10 day stretch on Mauritius. Conveniently, it also broke up all that flying time into more manageable bits.

Our first stroke of luck came in the air – thanks to some injudicious overbooking. we were bumped up to first-class for our flight to London. Maddi decided she was to the manor born,

London was a sweltering 86 degrees with high humidity for our two days there but that didn’t stop us from roaming our Kensington hotel neighborhood, including stops at the Kensington Gardens and Palace, so my wife Paige could satisfy her Diana obsession. We also visited Notting Hill where we checked out the Travel Bookstore that inspired the movie NOTTING HILL.

Our time in London also corresponded with our anniversary, so Paige and I celebrated 25 years of wedded bliss by trying to recapture our youth.

If London was overly familiar to us, Dubai felt like another world. None of us had ever been to the Middle East, so naturally the desert expanse and the 120 degree weather stunned us into submission.

And it wasn’t just us who thought it was hot. While we were there, 18 citizens had to be hospitalized for heat stroke and a handful of companies were being sued for making their employees work between 12:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon, Apparently it’s against the law for outdoor workers to have to work those hours in the summer months. Our hotel insisted we not even walk the half-mile or so to the enormous Mall of the Emirates, because the temperature was so high.

And speaking of malls, all of Dubai seems to be on display at the malls. They are gargantuan shopping centers that pride themselves on catering to your every need. From mammoth grocery stores to the highest end of fashion, Dubai malls, like a lot of the other buildings in town, are architectural wonders. The Mall of the Emirates, for instance, includes an indoor ski resort with its own man-made mountain, SKI DUBAI!

That’s right. You can go from a sweat-dripping 120 degrees outside to a chilly below-freezing experience within minutes. And all it costs you is the price of a lift ticket.
Talk about sensory whiplash!

Dubai is a study in contrasts in so many other ways too. It’s a city that seems to rise out of nowhere. In the midst of endless desert, a giant metropolis of post-modernist skyscrapers suddenly appears, followed by miles and miles of more desert, before another downtown of skyscrapers appears. This pattern continues another 3 or 4 times before we hit the Dubai city limits. This all makes for an impressive but rather disconnected city, a disconnection that may be remedied by mass transit, which debuts this fall.

But the most startling contrast of all is the bizarre juxtaposition of cultures. I was mesmerized by the number of people wearing traditional Arab garb. Men covered from head to toe in white, and women in black.

I was stunned by the number of women who were so covered up that only their eyes were visible. But I was also caught off guard by how stylish these body-length clothes could be. The women’s outfits, who to Western eyes might seem only oppressive, were remarkably fashionable with elaborate colorful and bejeweled accents in their headdresses and veils that picked up similar patterns at their waist and ankle.

The bizarre juxtaposition of cultures I’m referring to is best evidenced at the food courts of the many Malls. In fact, the most telling image from all of Dubai is that of all these traditionally dressed men and women (with their kids in tow) standing patiently in line for Kentucky Fried Chicken, the KFC or McDonald’s or Subway Sandwich. Ancient religious culture meets contemporary secular culture and breaks bread! Globalization indeed.

We only had two days in Dubai, but they were two very full days. We wrapped up our stay with a Desert Safari, a trip over the dunes that combined 4-wheel drive Range Rovers and camels.

From Dubai, we caught a 3 am flight to Mauritius, that touched down about 9 in the morning. A 45 minute taxi ride whisked us clear across the island to our upscale resort hotel in the northwest.

We were clearly living beyond our means, but as Maddi points out, what’s the point of traveling to a tropical paradise if you don’t take advantage of the high-end amenities? And so we did, as much as possible. Thankfully most of it was included with the price of the room. (I could write a book on how to live the high life on a low life budget.) So we snorkeled for free, kayaked for free, paddle-boated for free, and played tennis -under the lights, no less – for free. And I stuffed myself on the enormous free breakfasts.

Many people might be more than content never leaving the premises of the resort, But that’s not for me. I had done so much research on this relatively unknown but fascinating island that I couldn’t wait to go exploring.

For such a tiny dot of an island in the middle of nowhere, Mauritius has an incredibly rich history. First off, it’s the land of the famously extinct dodo. It existed nowhere else but Mauritius and now it exists absolutely nowhere. The dodo flourished until the 17th century when the Dutch arrived. Having never known predators, the rather large. ungainly and flightless bird was clueless as how to defend itself and before the century was out, dodoes were extinct.

In fact, being such an isolated island, Mauritius has lots of endangered animals and plants to worry about. Extraordinary efforts in the last two decades have saved the Mauritian kestrel in the Black River Gorge and the famous pink pigeons now thrive just off the coast on the Ile aux Aigrettes, a nature reserve whose mission is to return the islet to its natural state. So of course we had to visit.

The island’s Botanical Gardens with its signature massive lily pads and giant tortoises are also justly famous.

After the Dutch abandoned the island in the early 18th century, the French took over and set up a thriving society, albeit one whose economy was based on sugar cane and thousands of slaves to work the fields. Sugar cane fields to this day dominate much of the Mauritian landscape.

A famous naval battle between France and England took place in the waters off Mauritius in the early nineteenth century, a battle immortalized on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, since it was Napoleon’s only naval victory over the English. But not long after, the English defeated the French once and for all and Mauritius came under British rule.

200 years later, English is the official language but most people still prefer French. All Mauritians speak Creole, although it is never taught in schools.

Speaking of schools, Paige is a school psychologist and she was lucky enough to spend a day at a Mauritian elementary school. She got a chance to talk to a lot of the teachers about their jobs and interviewed the students about their hopes and dreams. She even taught one class how to do the HOKEY-POKEY!

By the way, not many of the kids at the Pointe Aux Piments Government School (above) knew who Barack Obama was but they ALL knew Michael Jackson.

We spent our final day on the island on the stunning beaches off the Ile aux Cerfs, where the turquoise blue waters take your breath away. I was metaphorically pinching myself my entire time in Mauritius, but especially on this day: Here I was, on this most gorgeous of days, on this most gorgeous of beaches swimming in the warm warm waters of the Indian Ocean. I never would have imagined…