Seychelles, Also Friendly for Backpackers – Part 1

YES – even with less than €100 a day, you can experience just about everything in the Seychelles except artificial luxury

Before long, my assumptions were confirmed, and even travellers, especially if they travel in small groups, can experience everything and more in the Seychelles with a daily budget between €50 and €100, than those who are ready to shell out up to €10,000 for renting a villa on one of the smaller islands, if as experiences we only understand exploring nature, communicating with the locals, trying the local culinary offer and using public transport or a rented car. With a little ingenuity, a group of four travellers can spend a day for an average of €200, including car hire, accommodation and food, if they cook their own breakfast and dinner in private accommodation. With a little internet searching, we can find apartments with a kitchen and two rooms with bathrooms already under €100 per night for four people, and a car under €50, considering the size of the "main" island of Mahe, where between the most distant points there are less than 40 km, so the cost of fuel is the least concern regardless of the price. If you decide to use public transport, you can reduce the daily cost even further, as you will only pay around half a euro for each trip, and buses run very often and cover almost every corner of both the "main" island of Mahe and the islet of Praslin.

Fish for four or beer?

If in the previous section I dispelled the fear of the high costs of accommodation and transport, I will now touch on the food to finally dispel the fear of visiting due to the proverbially high prices.

Not only in the Seychelles, but everywhere in the world there are restaurants where the prices are extremely high, but nevertheless you can have refreshments in the Seychelles at an extremely moderate price and in a significantly more authentic environment than in much more expensive restaurants for tourists, where the prices of the most basic dishes start at €20. At almost every corner, you will find small food places, which are not as kitsch as restaurants intended exclusively for tourists, but they definitely offer fresh and quality food, as they depend on regular customers, who certainly do not want to resent them. In these places, you will rarely pay more than €10 for a specific meal of delicious and varied food, which is a mix of Asian and African influences, but not English cuisine, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is somewhat different with drinks, as the prices of drinks, even in the store, are quite high. A half litter can of beer in the store costs around 50 rupees or €4, which brings me to the title of this chapter. In the fishing village of Bel Ombre, we came across a fisherman who was selling fresh fish, and considering that we had an equipped kitchen in the accommodation, he managed to convince us to take it. The price we paid was a kind of surprise, because we only paid 50 rupees for the fish, from which he made 4 large and thick steaks weighing a total of about 1 kg. To this we added another 25 rupees for cleaning and so we only seasoned the fish a little more and treated ourselves to a first-class fish dinner.

Now a few words about Seychelles itself

Such an introduction would otherwise belong at the very beginning of the article, but in the case of the Seychelles, I first wanted to break stereotypes about the inaccessibility for the average traveller precisely for the reason that I can now comfortably take you through the history of the Seychelles, and then through the main island of Mahe, and briefly also through the islands of Praslin and La Digue, which are a good hour away by passenger speedboat or catamaran.

The history of the Seychelles can be summed up in just a few sentences, as it was uninhabited until August 27, 1770, when 15 Europeans, eight Africans and five Indians disembarked in the Seychelles from the French ship Thélemaque. But the French period did not last long, as already in 1794, on May 16 of that year to be exact, the English occupied the Seychelles, who the very next day signed a document on the handover of the Seychelles to England, which also became a permanent English colony in 1811. Although the first political party "Taxpayers' Association" was created as early as 1939, Seychelles became an independent republic only in 1976, and a year after that, the socialists took power in a coup d'état and Seychelles was a one-party republic until 1993, President France-Albert René won the elections until 2004, and until 2020, Seychelles was led by his former vice-president James Alix Michel, followed by another vice-president Danny Faureod. The opposition candidate Wavel Ramkalawan took over the leadership of the country in 2020 with 55% of the vote. The Seychelles also have a darker history, as they have always depended on imports and were cut off from the rest of the world during the First World War, for example, which made crime rampant and caused shortages and diseases. But thankfully, all the dark times, including the COVID-19 pandemic, are behind us and Seychelles is breathing with full lungs again, including the capital.

The capital Victoria is also the administrative centre of both the "main" island of Mahe and the entire Seychelles. Just less than a third of the total of 100,000 inhabitants live in the capital. Unlike other capitals, you won't encounter traffic jams in Victoria. The inner city itself, which is definitely worth visiting, offers a variety of small shops, restaurants, cafés and some museums that are worth visiting. The fact that they only have two gas stations and one small shopping centre is the best testimony to the small size of Victoria. During a visit to Victoria, it is absolutely necessary to stop at the local food market, as this is one of the few parts that are not yet completely touristy.

The best evidence of how much the English invested in infrastructure is the biggest landmark that can be found on almost all postcards – the Clock Tower from 1903 in memory of Queen Victoria, who died in 1901. If you haven't detected even a hint of cynicism, let me describe this clock in a little more detail – it is a metal tower with a clock on all four sides, measuring about 6 metres in height, and the total cost was about 468 dollars, which in today's money would mean about €12,500. In addition to this, the main tourist attraction, it is also necessary to visit the national museum, where you will learn significantly more about the history of the Seychelles than in this travelogue, as well as the former Supreme Court, in which the museum is located, and is also worth a visit, as it is one of the best-preserved buildings from the times, when Seychelles was an English colony.

In addition to the centre, I recommend visiting two more attractions, namely the botanical garden, where you can compete in a 5-metre competition with a giant turtle or admire the Coco de mer, which was artificially planted in the botanical garden, as it is an endemic that in nature found only on the Seychelles islands of Curieuse and Praslin. Another attraction is a few steps from the very centre and shows the love between the French and the English in the most vivid way. It is the former French cemetery "Bel Air", which seems to have been abandoned since the handover of Seychelles to the English. Although most of the graves are quite damaged, the cemetery is a witness to the history of Seychelles and I recommend a stop.

We definitely did not come to Seychelles for the capital, and you will be able to read about what you can and even must experience in the Seychelles in the next issue.