Read Around the World March 2023 – Seychelles

Map link 

March and we are off to the beautiful islands of the Seychelles….

Fun facts from this website 

• Some of the rarest species of birds can be found in Seychelles, including the bare-legged Scops Owl or Syer.
• The native Coco de mer, which is also known as the sea coconut or double coconut, produces the heaviest and largest seed in the world. The seed is about 15 kilograms in weight.
• Ian Fleming, the famous James Bond author, came to the Seychelles Islands in 1958 to find inspiration for the next chapter in the James Bond saga, and ended up naming one of his character Milton Krest, after a tonic and ginger beverage that he tried during his stay.
• Bird Island is home to the heaviest living land tortoise in the wild, called Esmeralda. The tortoise weighs about 670 pounds.
• Pirates used to look for the islands as a hideout and it’s believed that a treasure worth about $160,000 was hidden by Olivier Levasseur at the time on one of the islands.
• It’s believed that Moyenne Island has buried treasure on it, but no one approaches it because the locals believe that the island is haunted by a spirit that’s guarding the treasure.
• Seychelles is the smallest country in all of Africa

I chose to visit the Seychelles via Spaghetti in a Suitcase by Felice Soru an autobiography of a young man from Sardinia who leaves home to work in the Seychelles where he falls in love. The story covers the 1970s to the 1990s and I learned a lot about the political situation in the Seychelles during this period. From gaining independence from England, the military coup that made Socialist France-Albert René president creating a one party state to various attempts on the life of France-Albert René and the curfews and repercussions that this assassination attempts visited on the ordinary population.

This was an interesting book from the point of view of recent political history but I did find some of the personal reveals just a tad cringeworthy.

Over readers visited in the following ways:

TorieStoriesS from Litsy – Treasure Island by Robert-Louis Stevenson this was rated a Pick and I must say I enjoy this when I read it years ago.

Currey from Litsy – Voices by Glynn Burridge a short story collection that was rated so-so and Seychelles Idyll by Ronald Austin that was also rated so-so. A bad reading visit for Currey.

Did you join us on this trip? Let us know what you read.

For April we are off to Ecudor let us know your reading plans for this visit.