Travelog for: Vicky Mouseham

Hi,
I'm Vicky Mouseham and I'm a shopping mouse. I would like to visit fashion shops all over the world. My mentor loves rodents so I would like to collect souvenirs showing mice or rats from my further host's countries.



Of course a shopping mouse needs a lot of money so I would ask every host to give me a coin. As chlothes for such a small mouse are not too expensive, the smallest coin would do.

I'm carrying my shopping bag whereever I go to be prepared if I should see the nicest dress on earth.



Unfortunately I have flatfeet so I cannot wear high heels.


I will visit:
Apperveilchen - Germany
Michele one L - USA
minnihiiru - Estonia

Bye
Vicky M.

Hi,
before visiting Michele one L I will have summer vacations on the Seychelles.

I'm already off with Aquila.



Vicky

It's good that the box Aquila and I shared was so roomy, because we were stuck on a shelf at the postoffice for a few days. Today our new host finally decided to come and collect us. About time. She says they'd been having bad weather, though and that we haven't missed anything. Therefore we were directly taken out of the box at the postoffice and I got to do a little shopping. We went through the pedestrian zone and visited the bakery, a Weltbild shtore (usually they sell by mailorder but also have books, DVDs, CDs, deco stuff etc. in stores), Esprit and Vero Moda. Now let me go and meet the other tvs here. I want to pick my room mate for our vacation.

I am now in Essen and we're busy packing the suitcases and buying some small stuff we still need. Bye for now! I'll update again when we're back in Germany!

Our first flight was from Düsseldorf to Dubai. We could watch the plane being made ready for us.

Sebastiaan, Lucky Duck and I grabbed the window seats on the way there. Here we settled in nicely.

Out the window I could see the cloud formations and wave good-bye to Germany.

I regularly checked our progress on the monitors,

but it got boring after a while and we all went to sleep.

We landed in Dubai in the middle of the night but I had soem shopping to do! We didn't have all that much time until we had to report to the gate and wait for boarding.

I wanted to have a look at the night time activity at the airport.

We found our places and go wedged in tightly for take off.

The monitor changed between maps in English and in Arabic. Maybe I can get a necklace with my name in Arabic some day, it's so pretty.


A tired little shopping mouse:

Dinner on Seychelles is something different. There's not a lot on offer in the little shops: Milk only as instant milk, fresh fruit, fish and the little meat are usually bought directly from aquaintances or at the road, flour for bread has been rationed to the bakeries because there's a problem with import, so one can only get it around midday every day.


We had coconut (those are lying around everywhere),


breadfruit (instead of potatoes),


bananas and jambose.

We spend the day at the beach. This is the beach belonging to our house:

Today the weather is warm but not so sunny that we'd want to spend all day at the beach. We are going to explore the island a bit and drive to the west coast.
Here we are still on the east coast, doing our very own version of 'drive-by shootings'.
Here's one of the few roadsigns. You can't really get lost with so few streets.



There are abount 5-7, depending on which size you count, different mountain roads that allow you to traverse the island. They are very narrow and esp. the bus drivers drive them very fast and not only on their side of the road, either, so it was a bit scary because on the one side there are the huge granite rocks and on the other it goes down without guard rail or even a tiny side-strip.


The mountains go up to around 900m and have a real rain forest.




We're through! This is Anse Boileau.

We wanted to get to a marine national park at Port Launay so we took the coastal (not that there is any other) road north.

Grand Anse and Île aux Vaches:





Port Glaud:


the Sundown restaurant:


Finally, a boutique. I had to go and have a look! It's small, but that seems to be the case with all the shops here.

a very nice garden

In front of Port Glaud there's Thérèse Island and the smaller L'Islette.

The road led through some mangrove areas.



We drove up until Cap Mantoopa where the road ends at a youth village that borders on Baie Ternay, a nature reserve, on the other side. The children of the island all spend some time here in the summer.


We turned back a bit to find the best place to go to the beach at Port Launay Marine National Park.



We looked for a dry and not too sandy place in the shade to relax a bit. These roads are very curvy and narrow in places.



Then we made your way back. Days are relatively short this close to the equator. At 5 p.m. it already starts to get dark.



Back to the east coast.

We wanted to do some more shopping. Fresh fruit and also fish are often sold in small amouts (extras from the garden or the day's catch).


North again to the capital: Victoria

Victoria is the capital of Seychelles. It has ca. 60 000 inhabitants, the only traffic light on Mahé (Praslin has one at the airport that warns cars when a plane is landing, I rather doubt that there are any others), no parking garage and most shops close at 5 p.m.

This is the clock tower in the modern center of Victoria. It was erected in 1903, the year when Seychelles became a colony of the UK, instead of just a province of the colony Mauritius. It's a smaller copy of a clock tower that was built in London a few years earlier.


It has become the symbol of Victoria. It strikes the hour twice, with one minute in between.

the postoffice:


palace of justice, also called Victoria house, it was built as the New Oriental bank in the late 19th century:


Seychelles emblem in front of the ministry of finance:


There are a number of shops for clothes and a big supermarket (for these islands) but all in all the choice is very limited. 2 or 3 different kinds of instant milk, 3 different kinds of rice, 2 different types of pasta, 3 different kinds of totmato sauce, 2 different juices... Not a single dress in my size. For shopping I'll have to go elsewhere.

We watched the fruit bats today. In German they are called 'Flughunde' (flying dogs) because they aren't actually closely related to bats. They live in all the tress here and make holes into the fruit to eat them and leave the rind/nut.... They are very loud and seem to fight among themselves for the best places to sleep. They are most active at dusk.

We got some yellow-fin tuna tonight. It was really big! The man who takes care of us in the house also bought it for us and is taking it apart expertly. So nice!


First the fins came off.



In Germany we say that 'dinner has been saved'.

Today we had dinner at the Carefree Restaurant. We were the only guests, but we had great service and food.





We had the nice lady show us which fish she had to offer today.

A 3 D map of the island Mahé:

We are here:

Lot's of money, the official certificates and private photos.

The food:

fresh lobster

fish kebab

shark

caramelized bananas and vanilla ice-cream

We're full!