Because there are no predators on Fregate (rats were eradicated in the early days), all the birdlife is remarkably prolific and curious: sleek, white fairy terns flutter within touching distance; red-billed moorhens scuttle on the ground noisily defending their territory; rotund Seychelles blue pigeons squat on the low branches of fruit trees surveying the bucolic scene, untroubled by thousands of Aldabra giant tortoises lumbering beneath them. At night, millions of giant millipedes come out to feed on decaying vegetation and leaf litter, cleaning up the forest floor.
Fregate’s many riches extend to its reputation as the site of buried treasure, hidden by 17th-century pirates, and its enduring stories and myths, such as the one about the ghost of the headless woman, of which there are many variations. It is criss-crossed with walking trails, the only real way to explore the island as roads are limited to the developed north. Hawksbill turtles nest on Grand Anse beach in the south, where there used to be a big pig farm, long gone amid concerns about the lack of an abattoir, but it’s still possible to see the outline of the old pens in the undergrowth. Simon Love, the island’s South African agricultural manager, recently returned to Fregate after 12 years.
He remembers herding the pigs onto boats in preparation for the rat exterminators, who dropped poison bait from helicopters. Now he’s back to refurbish ‘the old girl’, as he calls the hydroponic plant he helped build in 1999, and bring the farming side of things up to scratch. Earlier, I had noticed a low perimeter fence around Love’s orchards. ‘Oh, those are supposed to keep the giant tortoises out,’ he says, ‘but to be honest, they’re a bit like elephants; they just keep coming back to the same spot and batter away until the fence falls down. Still, you’ve got to admire their determination. I’ve grown very fond of them. Everyone on the island gets along fine.’
There is always a danger in going back somewhere you have fallen for, as I did when I visited North Island in 2003. At that time, like Six Senses Zil Pasyon on this trip, the lodge on North had yet to open and the rehabilitation of the island was just getting underway. North Island was bought in 1997 for about £4million by a group of investors, including Wilderness Safaris, the Johannesburg-based conservation outfit. A former copra plantation, it had been abandoned in the 1970s and was riddled with rats and wild cats; there were also a few skinny cattle wandering around and one slightly crazy caretaker and his dog. Wilderness asked the brilliant architects Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens to build the beach lodge of their dreams and the couple camped out on the island with their young children for two years to get a feel for the place.
