Photos of the tropical Seychelle islands have intrigued me for years. Beaches lined with palm trees and massive boulders, plus large tortoises and the world’s largest coconut? Yes please. However, the Seychelles are quite far away from the US, at least 18 hours of flying, so I wanted business class flights. We have really liked the business class seats on Qatar Airways on previous trips (Oman and Namibia) and in 2022 we had enough American Airlines miles to book a trip on Qatar. So in 2022 I started planning to book a November 2023 trip as a surprise Christmas present for Leandra.
With tickets in hand (and Leandra now in the know) we had to decide on an itinerary. We eventually decided on 3 nights on the north end of the main island of Mahe, 4 nights on Praslin, 4 nights on La Digue, and a final 4 nights on the south end of Mahe. In addition, we had several days with family on each end of the trip, Chicago at the start, and New York on the end. Altogether it was a memorable adventure!
the larger red stars represent our hotel locations and orange stars are points of interest
Video Preview of the trip
Misc Notes
- Sugar ants are everywhere! You definitely want to bring a cache of sealable plastic bags to store any opened food – even those that come in a resealable bag (granola), or jar (peanut butter).
- Sand is also everywhere, all the time.
- There was a large supermarket in Mahe but most markets on Praslin (and La Digue) are small convenience stores with a mix of items. We had trouble finding milk or granola in a few places for example.
- All the coffee at our accommodations (if provided at all) was Nescafe packets. This doesn’t bother me but if you are a snob, bring your own coffee.
- Roads are narrow and often have a steep dropoff of at least a foot or two – and those along the water generally didn’t have a guard rail.
- So. Humid.
- Beaches are smaller than we expected. Often times there was only a narrow strip of sand at high tide.
- MCB Bank gave us a better exchange rate and no fee withdrawals on our ATM cards. ABSA charged a 10% fee for withdrawals.
- The visors in each car were always wrapped in plastic – not sure why?