This Global Walk Outside | Day 6: Mauritius
Hello, from the beautiful, tropical island of Mauritius tucked away in the Indian Ocean just east of Madagascar. If you’ve never heard of our island, I encourage you to Google it. Yes, it’s as beautiful as the pictures suggest. My husband of 10 years, Adam, and I live here with our two boys – Noah (3 years) and Josiah (1 year). We’ve lived in Mauritius for nearly 6 years. A large portion of my time these days consists of diaper changes, feeding our boys, cleaning up from feeding our boys, playing with toys, cleaning up the toys, and trying to remember every minute of it as they’re growing so fast.
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I absolutely love our big space with grass. Previously we lived in a house with a large pool surrounded by concrete tiles, a set up that’s all too familiar in Mauritius. I was always worried about our boys falling in the pool or scraping their knees on the hot tiles. Here our boys love to play with balls in the grass or dig in the dirt. It’s also much more beautiful to look at than concrete.
I absolutely love our house. I was first drawn to the architecture because it’s unlike all the other concrete boxes that most commonly fill the streets of our country. The long driveway is a highlight for our vehicle-loving first born. And that garage is dreamy with so much space and storage.
One thing I was surprised to not find outside our house was any representation of a Hindu god. Typically, an Indo-Mauritian (like our landlords) would put a Hindu god outside their home for protection. Our house had nothing of the sort in the yard.
This garden just about sold me on this house. Almost all day long there’s a space that’s shaded to help us during the tropical summers. It’s big enough to have space for so many things. It’s unique for our island because there’s no pool. But for everyone with small kids, you’ll understand that it was a sigh of relief for me to not have to constantly watch to make sure my kids don’t fall into a pool.
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This is my beautiful view from our front door. We live at the end of a narrow street, so it’s mostly quiet with minimal traffic. Sugar cane fields are just down the road and we have the sweetest neighbors.
We might have found one of the quietest streets in all of Mauritius when we found this narrow little road on the edge of a village. We love to go on walks down neighborhood street. This road became particularly sweet to us during an almost two month strict quarantine as it was our only reprieve from being at home day in and day out.
On days where it doesn’t feel like you’re swimming just by stepping outside thanks to the humidity, we like to eat lunch outside at this table loaned to us generously by some friends. The boys love watching for different birds or the joy of a neighbor driving by (did I mention my oldest loves cars??). I like that I don’t have to clean up whatever food makes its way to the ground!
The beloved sandbox turned “construction site”. For Christmas, we had a local guy build this sandbox for our sons out of pallets. It has a parking lot and roads painted on the top, but it mostly stays open as our local construction site.
Our house is surrounded by a variety of vegetation. We have several giant coconut trees on our property.
The skinny tree with large fruit growing on it is a papaya tree. We rarely make it outside to get a ripe one before birds have taken to eating the papayas. Next to the papaya tree is an avocado tree. Around March we have a very large amount of avocados falling to the group. Cue the guacamole!
We started our family overseas, so we’ve never had a home of our own as a family in the States. We’re from Texas, so we’d likely have an even larger, grassy yard. The vegetation on our island is almost ridiculous. Anything grows here. The Texan summers can destroy almost anything you plant.
It wouldn’t be an international house without at least one quirk! This small gate leads to our neighbor’s backyard. Of course we can’t find the key in mass of keys we were handed when we moved in, so we pass goodies back and forth over the gate.
If just in front of our house there are fields of sugar cane, behind us we have a gorgeous view of the volcanic islands that made our island thousands of years ago.