Port Louis in a day, thirty minutes from the villa

The motorway from Grand Baie reaches Port Louis in about thirty minutes outside rush hour; between seven and nine in the morning add fifteen. Park at the Caudan Waterfront car park, central, covered and safe, and do everything on foot: the centre is a grid of a dozen streets between the harbour and the Champ de Mars. A taxi from the villa for the day costs about 80 to 100 euros including the wait; some guests prefer it to driving in the city.

Start at the Central Market on Farquhar Street, open from early morning. The ground floor is fruit, vegetables, fish and the herbalists with tisanes for every ailment; the upper floor is crafts and textiles with more insistence. Buy vanilla, Bois Chéri tea, curry powders and dried chillies here. Eat a dholl puri from the stalls at the entrance, the flatbread filled with yellow split peas that is the national snack, and a glass of alouda, the cold milk drink with basil seeds. Weekday mornings are best; Saturday is packed and Sunday half closed.

Walk up Royal Street into Chinatown: shophouses, pagodas, small restaurants, the smell of roasting. The Jummah Mosque, from the 1850s, is a few steps away with its carved teak doors; visitors are welcome outside prayer times, shoulders and knees covered. Saint Louis Cathedral and the Hindu temples complete the circuit within ten minutes' walk, a sample of the island in four blocks. The Natural History Museum, near the Company Gardens, has the famous dodo skeleton.

The Caudan Waterfront is the renovated harbour: shops, cafés, a casino, a craft market and the Blue Penny Museum, which holds two of the rarest stamps in the world, the 1847 Post Office Mauritius, and tells the island's story through maps and paintings. Next to it, Aapravasi Ghat is the immigration depot through which half a million indentured workers from India entered Mauritius in the nineteenth century, a UNESCO site, moving and short. Lunch at one of the waterfront restaurants with the ships in front of you.

The Champ de Mars, the oldest racecourse in the southern hemisphere, races on Saturdays from April to December; a Saturday afternoon there is a slice of Mauritian life. Fort Adelaide, the citadel above the town, has the view over the harbour and the mountains. The Photography Museum, in a small house in the centre, is a quiet half hour. Then back on the motorway, or through Pamplemousses if you want to add the botanical garden on the way home.

Saturday afternoon and Sunday, when most of the centre is shut. Public holidays, the same. Midday in summer, when the streets are hot and the market is closing. Rush hour on the motorway, which is predictable: leave the villa at nine thirty, leave the city before four. In the cyclone season check the forecast; the capital floods occasionally after heavy rain.