Le Morne

Le Morne is a mountain before it is a beach: a basalt monolith five hundred and fifty-six metres high on a peninsula at the south-west corner of Mauritius, whose caves and summit sheltered the maroons — the slaves who escaped the sugar estates — through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose legend says that when a party climbed up in 1835 to announce that slavery was abolished, the maroons, taking them for a capture, threw themselves from the cliff rather than be taken. UNESCO listed the mountain and its landscape in 2008 as a monument to that resistance; the International Slave Route Monument stands at its foot since 2009, and the village of Trou Chenille, where descendants live, keeps the sega tipik, the drum-and-song of the island's African roots. Around it lies the other Le Morne: a lagoon that is the kitesurfing capital of the Indian Ocean, the One Eye wave on the reef, the sand runoff that from the air looks like a waterfall falling into the deep, the public beach and the resorts along the peninsula's shore, and, in the hills behind, Chamarel's seven-coloured earth and its rum, and the Black River Gorges. It is the island's most photographed profile and its most serious place, and the Guide holds it in that order.

The traveller comes down from Port Louis or over from the airport in an hour or so, and takes the mountain first: the climb with a licensed guide, three to four hours up through the forest and the rock, the last stretch a scramble to the plateau and the view of the lagoon and the whole south-west, and the guide's telling of the maroons' story where it happened; the monument at the foot, at the hour when the light is on the mountain, and Trou Chenille if a sega is being played; and then the lagoon — a kite lesson or a morning watching them, the boat to Île aux Bénitiers with the dolphins off Tamarin on the way, the public beach in the afternoon with the mountain over the shoulder; Chamarel for the coloured earth and the rum tasting; and a table of the island's Creole food, octopus curry and dholl puri, at the fishing village.

The Guide's honesty: Le Morne is a place of memory before it is an outing — the summit is climbed with a guide by rule and by respect, and the traveller who reads the plaques and hears the story climbs a different mountain; the resorts are among the island's most expensive and the public beach is free and lovely; the trade winds that make the kites make the afternoons blustery from May to October, and the cyclone months are real; the sun on the lagoon burns through cloud; and the sight of the mountain at dusk from the sand, black against a red sky with the reef breaking white beyond, is why the island puts it on its postcards and why the Guide asks that it be seen for what it was first.