Seychelles Island: The Definition Of A Perfect Holiday

THE GHOST OF THE HEADLESS WOMAN HAUNTS a sea cave near the ruins of an ancient pirate’s fort. It is said she and her husband lived happily on the beautiful island until the day her brother-in-law came to visit. One evening, returning from a hard day’s work on the plantation, the husband found no one at home and so went in search of his wife and brother. He walked deep into the forest and stopped to rest in a place overshadowed by tall coconut palms and giant takamaka trees. There he heard the sound of his brother’s jaunty whistle and saw his wife emerging from the undergrowth. Blind with fury in the certain knowledge that they had been caught together, the husband spun his scythe and cut off his wife’s head. At that moment a nearby magpie-robin repeated its perfect imitation of his brother’s distinctive whistle, and took flight. From that day on, the ghost of his wronged wife has haunted the island, and she is still blamed for anything that might go wrong.

Apocryphal tales such as this abound in the Seychelles, frayed remnants of stories told for centuries, dating back to a time when French plantation owners cultivated many of these far-flung Indian Ocean isles with slave labour from Africa and India. Here you will find ancient graves and ruins built with coral rock thought to be the work of 17th-century pirates, and giant white crosses used to indicate which of the 115 islands are inhabited while also marking the safest spot for boats to land. The main island of Mahe – just 26km long – and its neighbours in the Inner Islands are stupendously forested and encircled with preternaturally beautiful beaches; some of those further afield are no more than windswept specks of coral, scattered like shotgun pellets over vast distances, or huddled together in tiny atolls as if taking comfort in each other’s company in the face of such terrible isolation.

A great number of the islands have never been sullied by human habitation and remain splendid reminders of how things were a million years ago, like miniature versions of the Galapagos or Madagascar, worlds suspended in time. Some are protected nature reserves, and the Seychelles has two UNESCO World Heritage sites. Others are in private hands and undergoing the lengthy process of rehabilitation, the scars and scabs formed by decades of degradation slowly fading with the eradication of invasive plants and critters, and their replacement with more kindly native species.

With a total population of less than 100,000, there is plenty of elbow-room in the Seychelles. Most of the current descendants of French and British settlers, Chinese merchants and African and Indian plantation workers live on Mahe. Next in size and population is Praslin, famously home to coco de mer palms, found only in the Seychelles. Smaller and a little further east is La Digue, recognisable to those with long memories as the backdrop for Christie Brinkley Sports Illustrated shoots in the 1970s and Bacardi rum adverts in the 1990s. Even today there is an air of chocolate-box perfection to these islands, although there have certainly been some troublesome moments in paradise. A former British crown colony – albeit a neglected and stubbornly French one – the Seychelles gained independence in 1976 with a coalition government formed by the pro-British James Mancham and the vehemently socialist France-Albert Rene.

The following year Rene staged a coup, forcing Mancham into exile Then in 1981, a group of mercenaries led by ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare, a British-Irish veteran of shady Congo shenanigans, were exposed at the airport. During a shoot-out, the men aborted their attempted coup and hijacked an Air India aircraft to take them home Rene, who From top right: the restaurant on Frigate Island Private; signs on the island. Opposite, a detail in the library at Villa North Island. Previous pages, from left: the bathroom at Villa North Island; Anse Victorin on Frigate would survive a second coup in 1986, continued to govern the Seychelles until 2004. He stood down that year in favour of his long-serving vice-president, James Michel, who recently handed the reins to his deputy, ensuring the same party has ruled this island nation for 40 years.

The otherworldly beauty of the Seychelles has long attracted curious travellers and fanned its reputation for both exoticism and elitism. Thanks to the islands’ remoteness – 1,600km off the east coast of Africa – they have never been cheap to visit, or, for that matter, on any cruise-ship itineraries. Unassuming guesthouses and small, locally owned hotels remained the order of the day until the 1990s, when the government adopted a more pragmatic approach to foreign investment. Which is when international hotel brands started to open on the main islands.

At that time, there were just a couple of simple lodges on small private islands owned by prominent Seychellois families – the Savys on Bird Island and the Masons on neighbouring Denis – but soon the way was clear for something altogether grander, if not in scale, then most certainly in ambition. I first visited the Seychelles 16 years ago, before there were any big-name hotels on Mahe and the earliest of the new batch of private-island lodges had just opened. Handsome Fregate Island, owned by the German industrialist Otto Happel since the 1970s, was first off the block in 1998, closely followed by tiny Cousine, owned by the South African granite billionaire Malcolm Keely.

Both men declared that the restoration and conservation of the fragile eco-systems were paramount, and would be financed by profits from the lodges, a position they maintain to this day. Three years after that trip, I flew out to report on the opening of what has become the Seychelles’ most famous private island, North, a serious player in the conservation firmament, and peerless celebrity hangout (the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge chose it for their honeymoon). There have been a handful of hotel arrivals in the intervening years. The Four Seasons Seychelles on Mahe, which opened in 2009, is still at the top of its game, with 67 villas secreted among 69 hectares of wonderfully landscaped grounds.

But, at least up until now, there has been no single private island to match either North or Fregate, joint favourites for exclusivity and rivals for the world’s happiest honeymooners and princes, the wealthiest eco-warriors and oligarchs. In October, the new six senses ziL pasyon was unveiled on Felicite, a dramatic 264-hectare island off La Digue It’s been a long time coming. Nine years ago, way before the Bangkok-based Six Senses hotel and spa group signed on, it was announced that Zil Pasyon (creole for ‘island of passion’) would open in 2008… and then 2010. It was a couple more years before a new owner was brought on board with deep enough pockets to bring this mammoth development to fruition. During this period of uncertainty, Steve Hill, the environmental consultant responsible for the restoration of Fregate back in the 1990s, was quietly at work on the island, identifying and removing invasive species, and replacing them with indigenous and native plants from his vast supply of seedlings and saplings.

By the time I arrived on Felicite earlier this year, just a few weeks before the official opening, Hill had disposed of vast tracts of cocoplum trees, introduced during what he describes as ‘man’s occupation of the island’ (Felicite had once been a coconut plantation, and then briefly a small private retreat). So far his team has planted 40,000 replacement trees and shrubs to help recreate habitats for rare birds such as the Seychelles white eye and Seychelles paradise flycatcher. Felicite is a real beauty, dominated by massive, grey-black granite outcrops weathered into deep pleats by centuries of rainfall and pounding surf. Mast of it remains completely inaccessible, at least until walking trails can be hacked out of the jungle. Yet with so much still to do, Hill is fantastically optimistic. ‘Given time,’ he says, ‘what we did on Fregate will be totally eclipsed by our work on Felicite, which is on a much bigger scale.

It will be incredible.’ For the last couple of years, the focus has been on getting the hotel up and running. The French general manager, Edouard Grosmangin, has built an impressive launch team, all beaming with the kind of infectious enthusiasm born out of shared experiences and adventures. They have come to the island from around the globe – Kenyan landscapers, and builders from Mumbai, Balinese spa therapists and British chefs – and every day new recruits arrive. There will eventually be 180 members of staff running the island and its restaurants and taking care of guests in the 30 villas, immense and beautiful spaces with private pools, hardwood floors, vaulted ceilings and deep bathtubs set in front of picture windows. Due to open in January, the spa promises to be the most dramatic in the Seychelles.

Set on a rocky promontory with superb sunrise and sunset views from the yoga and meditation pavilion, it will have five double treatment rooms balanced on those massive boulders high above the crashing sea. Chef Richard Lee, originally from Birmingham, is a brilliant leader as well as a talented cook. Over three days I watch his Island Cafe restaurant transform from a dust-blanketed building site into a relaxed, free-form dining space serving mango and avocado salads and creole-spiced crab curry. The open-air Ocean Kitchen will serve dishes that tie in with the various wellness programmes for which Six Senses is so well-known. With La Digue a 15-minute boat ride away, and Praslin just half an hour, it’s incredibly easy, and even encouraged, to connect with Seychellois life from the hotel.

La Digue still maintains the salty aura of a long-lost Caribbean outpost, with Rasta stallholders, beach-shack restaurants and old colonial houses with wide verandahs. A Six Senses speedboat will also get you over to magnificent Anse Lazio beach on Praslin for a prawn-curry lunch at Bonbon Plume restaurant and a drink at the ramshackle, help-yourself honesty bar. A full 55KM from mahe, Fregate Island is a world unto itself with a hydroponic farm and orchards that produce 80 per cent of the hotel’s fruit and vegetables, and even supply markets on Mahe. It is also a conservation success story of global repute. But it looks – and at first feels – nothing like the Fregate I remember.

Back then, just a couple of years after Otto Happel opened his private island to paying guests, the roads were surfaced with rushed coconuts and primordial forest virtually encased the guest villas, which were slathered in dark-treacle varnish. Since then, the vegetation around the 17 villas has been cleared and replaced with landscaped gardens scented with frangipani and coloured with bougainvillaea. After a recent refurbishment, the villas are altogether more cheerful affairs and have the best private pools in the Seychelles. Yet the old primeval heart of the island beats on. Fregate was home to the last dozen magpie-robins left in the world until Birdlife International started a recovery programme in 1990. There are now 137 of the feisty black-and-white birds on Fregate, and they have even been translocated to other islands in the Seychelles, bringing their number up to about 450.

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.

Rech and Carstens ended up working on the project for five years. In fact, they were just finishing off the last of their extraordinary, handcrafted villas when I visited all those years ago. Set back in a forest and fronted by a long, wide stretch of white-coral sand, everything about those structures still feels thrillingly elemental: the shaggy thatch roofs, the enormous twisted trunks and branches of takamaka trees, the hand-peeled gum poles, weathered rosewood and sand-blasted pine. There are very few doors, and even they fold back to create open spaces at one with the environment.

Although North Island has since been sold to the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov – reportedly for about £28million – it is still managed by Bruce Simpson, who recently left Wilderness Safaris to work for Prokhorov, and by all accounts remains committed to keeping it true to its conservation-led roots. The lodge has been recently completely refurbished for the first time since it opened, and there are plans to build another two villas on the undeveloped west side of the island.

There is no doubt that the new interiors by designer Maira Koutsoudakis – who also developed the original look – have notched up the glamour quotient by introducing super-smart elements such as soft silk rugs and hand-beaten brass headboards; the sunken, polished-concrete baths I remember have been replaced with elegant, white ceramic versions and there are shiny new brass fixtures and fittings. But the whole place has weathered beautifully and now sits happily in its setting; the laid-back spirit is still very much the same as it ever was. In the past 13 years about a quarter of the island has been successfully rehabilitated. Like Fregate, North Island employs full-time environmentalists and landscapers, and takes on volunteers, to improve the luxurious forests. All their backbreaking work has paid dividends with the return of the Seychelles blue pigeons and shearwaters.

It is hoped that before long it will be possible to introduce the magpie-robin, the holy grail of the Seychelles’ endangered wildlife. North’s new executive chef, Jeremy Hunt, has recently been planting up the kitchen garden with leafy greens, dill, broccoli and heritage tomatoes. He also forages in the forests for ingredients – small wild mangos or the golden apples much loved by the island’s giant tortoises – and goes fishing for fresh tuna, snapper and grouper. ‘I can land 12 species in one trip,’ he says, clearly in awe of the plentitude of the surrounding seas, where he surfs in the evening after a day in the kitchen producing dishes such as creamy gorgonzola, rhubarb and walnut gnocchi.

Right from the start there has been a North Island policy of employing interesting people with a positive attitude rather than polished products of corporate institutions. Not that the staff don’t know what they are doing; quite the contrary, they have worked at some of the world’s top hotels and lodges. But there is also a real sense that everyone is here to enjoy the experience. One of the young bartenders, a former child actor from Canada, likes to play the saxophone in the forest; his Balinese neighbours in the staff village strum the guitar and sing ballads from their homeland. ‘It’s a pretty cool place to be,’ he says. Which just about sums it up perfectly.