Beyond the ordinary

Mauritius was our honeymoon destination in September 2025. We saw an Instagram reel of a golf and spa resort and because we had never heard of Mauritius, we decided why not go to a unique location for our honeymoon! Mauritius is literally on the opposite side of the world from where we live so naturally, the travel to and from took quite some time. We flew out of Cincinnati, with connections in Toronto and Dubai. Our first flight to Toronto unfortunately was cancelled which led to us losing a day in Mauritius due to the 24 hour delay to catch the next overseas flight from Toronto to Dubai. So we started our honeymoon in Cincinnati! When you are traveling this far with multiple connections, it is important to build a day into your itinerary for some wiggle room in case of cancellations. Thankfully, we didn't have any excursions planned on the first day but we did lose out on one night's stay in Mauritius. Not including the canceled flight, our total trip time to get there was around 32 hours.

Day 1: Drive to Cincinnati from Louisville, flight was canceled, so we stayed in Cincinnati the first night.

Day 2: Fly to Toronto, we sat in Toronto most of the day but thankfully had airport lounge access to pass the time and save some money on food. We took the redeye from Toronto to Dubai (about a 14 hour flight). We landed in Dubai around 8 pm and our next flight wasn't till 3 am. If you are able to get at least an 8 hour layover in Dubai, we recommend leaving the airport and checking out the city for a few hours- we really wish we could have done that! Instead we hung out at the airport lounge waiting for our next flight. We highly recommend you get an AMEX or some sort of credit card that allows airport lounge access because you can really save some money on food in the airports on these long layovers!

Day 3: Flight from Dubai to Port Louis, Mauritius (6 hours). We landed at 7 am and decided to push through our fatigue so our body clocks could get adjusted to the 11 hour time difference. So we ended up golfing at Heritage Awali's free golf resort, eating an early dinner and going to bed around 8 pm.

Day 4: Every day we were here, we started our day with a delicious breakfast at the hotel on the patio with a beautiful view of the ocean. We did rent a car (the driver's seat is the right side of the car and you drive on the left side of the road) while we were here but you can easily get away without a rental car. The hotel can set up a driver even for the day to drive you wherever you want to go. We ended up doing that for one day and only spent about $100 for the driver to hangout and take us wherever we wanted to go. This day we drove to Chamarel Falls and walked around the falls. There are signs to stay away from the monkeys, but we didn't see any monkeys while we were there. Seven Colored Earth is also in the same area. The soil is multiple colors due to the minerals from the volcanoes. They had tortoises there as well. We went to Le Chamarel for a drink before heading back to the hotel. This restaurant was on top of the mountain and had some breathtaking views. In the afternoon, we lounged at the beach at our resort and ate some delicious chicken curry wraps. That evening, they had a DJ at the hotel so we enjoyed the music and played some card games.

Day 5: 7 cascades waterfall hike. We booked a guide for this. They picked us up from the hotel and we went on this hike with some