Le Morne Brabant is a 556-metre basalt monolith standing at the southwestern tip of Mauritius, with a calm lagoon at its foot and an illusion in the water beside it. For decades the mountain was a hiding place. Through the 18th and early 19th centuries, people fleeing slavery — maroons — built shelters in its caves and on its near-inaccessible summit. UNESCO inscribed it in 2008 as a cultural landscape for that history. Off the peninsula below, seen from the air, pale channels of sand appear to pour over the rim of the island's shelf and cascade into the deep like a waterfall on the ocean floor. Nothing is actually falling: strong currents drag light lagoon sand over an edge that plunges toward a 4,000-metre abyss, and the contrast of turquoise shallows against dark water finishes the trick.
A short drive inland, the land turns just as strange. At Chamarel, the Seven Coloured Earths rise in bare dunes of red, brown, violet and green — clay left as ancient lava rotted in the tropical heat. The iron and aluminium in it repel one another, so the bands never muddy, even after rain. Minutes away, the Chamarel waterfall drops about 100 metres off a basalt cliff, the highest fall on the island. Down on the coast you can swim in a calm turquoise lagoon fringed with coconut palms. Just beyond the reef a wave called One Eye peels for hundreds of metres and draws expert kitesurfers from around the world. Its name comes from a gap in the mountain that lines up like an eye. The summit trail is steep and rocky near the top, best climbed with a guide, and it lays the whole island at your feet.