Albizia Lodge Reef Estate

We accommodated for one night at Albizia Lodge Reef Estate. It was our most expensive accommodation and also only one without kitchen. Missing kitchen was OK, because we did not want to cook for the last day. And we could not find anything cheaper close to airport and with possibility of convenient bus connection to Anse Royale.

The best thing, actually a surprise for us, was that Manager did not have problem to prepare our breakfast at 4.30am, because we were leaving at 5am. She was very kind and helpful.

Location is very nice and quiet, but it is quite far from main road and shops. It is slightly uphill, so it is not ideal for visitors without car. But that is OK for one night.

Some photos follow.

View from our window.

This is actually panorama from 3 photos, so it is skewed a bit.

Anse Aux Pins

We did not spend much time in Anse Aux Pins. Actually I am going to show too many photos for time we spent there - just going down from Albizia Lodge, finding a shop to buy water and then find a bus to Anse Royale :-)

Golf club

Some random property next to main road.

Anse Royale

Finally a place in Mahe that matches with its beauty what we have seen in La Digue and Praslin. I know there are more, but this was only one we have visited :-(

Anse Royale is quite long beach (and also town). We were lucky to get off the bus at the beginning of it (northern end), because that was the place we wanted to see. Wonderful boulders sticking from the sea.

While it satisfied my needs for stunning location it was quite bad regarding quality of beach. Beach was the worst we have seen in Seychelles. Water was muddy (sand) and quite dirty. That could be because of its proximity to town. Entry to water was not ideal, with lots of broken sea shells. Regardless, we (at least me!) did not arrive to bath, but to enjoy natural beauty.

Closeup of boulders. It is not as pronounced from this side, but when I swam around (opposite of this view), I could not get rid of idea they were erected by crane :-)

It was Saturday afternoon and it was full of locals. So I had to be patient with children to get out of my view to take photos. I have realized quickly it will be probably better to merge more photos to remove people, but fortunately there also were occasions when all of them left.

Weather changed shortly after we arrived, sun hid behind thick clouds. It was not good for photographing, but quite good for swimming.

We were lucky that sun started peeking out from clouds later at about 4.40pm. It was quite low in the sky already, so it painted those boulders with nice colors. If it peeked out only short time later, it would be too low and trees would start to cast shadows, obscuring those boulders in dullness again. Pure luck.

I needed to remove a few people from other photos, but these 2 boys were good addition so I left them there.

Early morning at airport

No, I am not going to show photos of airport. But there are wonderful mountains next to it and I did not get a chance to take photo of them earlier. To compensate for that I got an opportunity to take photo of them shortly after sun started to shine at them in the morning. It was also good satisfaction after getting up at 4am...