No luxury
Rodriguans understand what we should all know (6 minute preview, 10 minute read)
One of my favourite activities in an unfamiliar country is to visit a supermarket. It provides a fascinating way to see inside the lives of the local people – through their diet. There are so many unfamiliar and enticing products, I find it hard to stop myself buying too much. I discovered an app for my phone which translates unfamiliar words, even if they aren’t in the Latin alphabet.
In countries where supermarkets aren’t the main place people shop, such as Mauritius, they still give insights into the culture. I remember my first Mauritian supermarket, in the town of Black River. I was very conscious I had a limited budget to last me for three months, so I was buying the cheapest coffee, pasta and tinned beans. When I found the aisle for alcohol, I didn’t even consider it, but I did notice that they sold a lot of rum. The one they had most of, filling a long stretch of the bottom shelf, had a red and blue label I can still see in my mind. The brand name was Goodwill.
Once I’d been in Mauritius a while, I was told that this was the rum of last resort. It was the cheapest, and if all you wanted to do was to get drunk, you’d buy Goodwill. If you wanted to enjoy what you were drinking, you’d get something like Green Island.
On Rodrigues, things were different. Rodrigues is politically part of Mauritius, but semi-autonomous. At the time I was there, it took 1 ½ hours in a fairly small plane to get there. It’s much smaller than Mauritius, just a little larger than Waiheke Island. Economically, it’s much poorer, but I was also told it was more equal. Nobody on Rodrigues was particularly rich.
On Rodrigues, if you wanted to buy rum, you bought Goodwill, that was the only option in the shops. When you finished the bottle, you took it back to the shop. There, they’d fill it for you, from a barrel out the back.
What was in that barrel? I’m not quite sure. I know it was some sort of rum, and if you dilute it with enough Coke and lime, it’s drinkable. I ended up drinking it on my first night on the island, and it didn’t seem too bad. It got better, too. The third glass of rum and coke with a slice of lime was definitely better than the first. I stopped at three, though. I still had to hang my mosquito net before I could sleep, and that involved standing on a fairly soft mattress and reaching up to attach it to a hook on the ceiling. I did manage, and a good thing too, because the mosquitoes at Solitude, the place I was staying, were fierce.
Solitude was an odd place. It was an older house which had been offered to the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to use for volunteer accommodation. As the name suggested, it was in the middle of nowhere. It was outside the main town, Port Mathurin, up a steep hill and then down a dirt road through forest. There was a stream which, like almost all Rodriguan streams, ran only after heavy rain, but there was usually stagnant water about, hence the mosquitoes.
At one point, I think, the house at Solitude had been quite fancy. It had at least four bedrooms and what had once been a nicely tiled bathroom. However, everything was in a state of decay. There was running water in some but not all taps, and only cold. There was a spacious shower in the bathroom, but the head didn’t work (fortunately the toilet was fine and there was a working tap over the basin). The technique we used for showering was to fill and boil the kettle. We’d fill a couple of old Coke bottles about 2/3 full with cold water, and then add boiling water. The boiling water distorted the plastic, so they were oddly-shaped. You did not want to add boiling water first, because that would destroy the bottle completely.
If I had to shower out of Coke bottles in a New Zealand winter it would be miserable, but in a tropical climate, it was just fine. Two 1.5 litre bottles were considered sufficient for a shower, anything more was wasting water.
As well as the mosquitoes, Solitude was also infested with small millipedes. The floor was always covered with them, even though we swept them up at least twice a day. It wasn’t clear to me at the time whether these were native or introduced, but they were certainly abundant. I was told that they’d stain your feet if you crushed one with your bare feet. I wore my sandals inside.
Solitude’s location posed the occasional challenge. One night, I joined the other women who were staying there, a couple of students doing PhD research, along with their local boyfriends, having dinner in Port Mathurin. I can’t remember how we got there, but we were always scrounging lifts from the local staff. After dinner, we had to get home to Solitude. I wasn’t sure how they planned to do this, so I just tagged along. The answer turned out to be that they stood beside the road at the junction of the coast road and the road which went up the hill to Solitude, and put out a thumb when a car passed by.
In all my life, I had never hitchhiked (and I haven’t since). But there were five of us and the others apparently made a habit of it, so I decided I was probably safe. But there weren’t many cars. After a while, a small white car passed us, but they were not heading up the hill, they were going along the coast road. Nonetheless, my companions grumbled about tourists. It turns out that cars which don’t pick up hitchhikers are not locals. But after about a minute, the white car re-appeared. A conversation in Kreol followed. We got in. The car was smaller than my Honda Jazz and the two Rodriguan men with us were tall, one at least six foot, but we jammed ourselves in and up the hill we went. By the end of the journey, one of the local men had established that he was some kind of cousin of the driver.
I’m told that was how Rodriguan hitchhiking went. Whoever was passing would pick you up. Anyone who didn’t was not a local and didn’t understand the local rules. And everybody was connected to everybody somehow.
My work in Rodrigues was mostly focused on doing an inventory of all the invasive plants there. The last time anyone had tried to list everything had been decades earlier. The Mauritian Wildlife Foundation knew about the catastrophic ones, like the viciously spiny acacia which had been introduced for firewood, or the rose-apple which formed such dense undergrowth that native species couldn’t grow through it. There was an active programme of weeding and replanting with native species, but was there anything which nobody had noticed and was waiting to take over? That was my work – see as much of the island as I could, collect the weeds and then try to identify them.
For someone concerned about conserving biodiversity, Mauritius was a disaster, but Rodrigues was ground zero. I was told when I was in Mauritius that Rodrigues was the most degraded tropical island in the world. The deforestation had been almost total. The island had nearly 300 species of plant found nowhere else in the world, and 80% of them were threatened. Of those, 96 species had fewer than 50 wild plants, and 40 species had fewer than 10 wild plants. Since the Rodriguan native plants were so slow growing, the forest service had replanted with quick-growing exotics like the thorny acacia, eucalypts and mahogany.
