Chris Saul's Blog

Sunday November 05, 2006

Fitness woe to fitness joy

Running on the treadmill here at the thrilling Holdiay Inn just now was pretty depressing at first.

Despite a Ramadan of regular gym visits and healthy eating (which saw me lose 3Kg), why was I feeling that running at only 8Kms on the machine was pretty much my comfortable limit today, when I'm used to a good 20 minutes or so at 12Km?

Simple answer - the machine's set to use miles for some reason, so I was actually running at 12.8Km. Much better.

Musandam by dhow

We had an incredible weekend floating around the Musandam peninsula on a dhow.

I'll post some more pics shortly, but for now here are some fish celebrating our arrival in a small inlet by jumping out of the water for joy. Later on I snorkelled through the shoal, but they didn't seem to like that and swam off in a huff.

My Sony N1 is a stills camera, but takes some very nice little videos. I just need to find some nice tools to start editing them a bit, as well as exporting them at a lower resolution to make them more web compatible. This one was taken on the 'fine' setting, which meant a 47MB file.

Mesdames, messieurs, aider danser...

...at least that's what I think I heard the Creole singers singing during our Mauritius visit.

This is the only example of written 'Morisyen' that I saw -

I suppose that it runs along the lines of 'a good driver him respect pedestrian'. Time to read up on Kreol Morisyen.

On the road again

Vienna today, off to Bratislava on Monday evening, back to Dubai on Weds, then South Africa on Sunday.

My itinerary's getting full again...

Mauritius for Eid

The week before the Eid holiday I was in Mauritius for a partner event. Mrs Saul flew out to join me for the Eid weekend after the conference had finished so we could spend a few days together exploring the island.

I was surprised that Mauritius wasn't more developed. Given its weather and location I'd expected to see a local population that was a bit better off thanks to tourism, but that wasn't the case. I need to read a bit more about Mauritian politics to see how the economy's been run over the years since independence, but I'm presuming that a more left wing economic policy meant more reliance on traiditional sugarcane production, underfunding of tourist attractions and zero desire to make the island a more Jersey or Isle of Man style tax free, banking and busineess haven.

I was also surprised to see how dominant the French language still is, considering the British arrived in 1810 and that the ethnic south Indians that now make up the majority of the population came in the mid to late 1800s. Staying francophone has clearly helped with business and tourism in modern Mauritius, but why did French keep its foothold during British rule? From the conversations I overheard, the hotel workers' French seemed better than their English, although people were fluent in both. I couldn't understand their creole at all, aside from the odd word here and there.

The island's an interesting mix of cultures. It was strange to be spoken to by someone in English with a French accent who looked Indian but also a bit Chinese. Some people's ethnic origins are very clear, but most people I saw were a subtle blend of various African, Indian, Chinese and European parentage.

Some things are very obviously British, like this fantastic ice cream van.

People also drive on the correct side of the road and the hotel used proper plug sockets. Elsewhere different cultures shone through - we had a drive through a village whose houses were all lit up in celebration of Diwali and I saw some creole dancing at the hotel.

There's some stunning scenery. As with other holidays we've been on recently, we were driven around in small Japanese cars. Nissan and Toyota are now responsible for me and Mrs Saul having seen Jordan, Sri Lanka and Mauritius.

Our hotel was excellent - the Meridien Ile Maurice.

The chambermaids appeared to be involved in a competition to see who could make the best bathroom towel sculpture.

Emirates have affected the island's toursim in a positive way, something I'll write about later.

We had a very relaxing four nights and would have liked to stay longer. Definitely a very pleasant way to spend Eid. Some more of our photos are here.