OCEANS APART

Six resorts, nine days, countless white-sand beaches and 150 giant tortoises. On a whirlwind visit to the Seychelles, where conservation and tourism are finding a way to coexist, Marcia DeSanctis revels in what might be the world's most quintessential island paradise.

- Marcia DeSanctis

THERE'S AN OLD SAYING you might hear when you arrive in the Seychelles-that if you eat the breadfruit there, a return trip is guaranteed. A few hours after I arrived, I was nibbling on a plateful in the restaurant of Le Jardin du Roi, a spice plantation on Mahé, the country's largest and most populous island. The fruit tasted like a delicately sweetened sponge. But as I ate, coming back was the last thing on my mind; I was focussing on how to stay positive. After my plane landed in Victoria, the capital, I was met with the kind of slashing wind and rain that dislodges coconuts from palm trees, flips umbrellas inside out, and dampens the heart of a writer who has just travelled 15 hours from gloomy, Omicron-ravaged Paris (a stopover on the journey from New York).

On a map, the 115 islands that comprise the Seychelles are tiny dots in the Indian Ocean, about 1,609 kilometres east of Kenya. (More than a third of them are formed from granite, indicating that the country was once part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which later broke apart to form South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and parts of Asia.) This extreme remoteness means that the country remains a mystery to most American travellers. But even in a downpour, I was beginning to see why 24 hours of air travel was worthwhile.

An aura of sensuousness struck me as I checked in to my first hotel, the Four Seasons Resort Seychelles, where the entrance was dominated by what appeared to be wooden sculptures of the female derriere. In fact, they were the dried fruits of the coco-de-mer, a species of palm found only in the Seychelles. The fragrance of cinnamon, frangipani, and which grow mango, wild on the property, drifted in the air.