Where Does Bear Grylls Go On Vacation?

Bear Grylls leaves tomorrow to start filming a new season of Born Survivor in the Canadian Arctic. Before subjecting himself to the harsh Arctic weather, he took his family on their annual vacation. Instead of visiting their townhouse in Phuket, Thailand, the Grylls family flew 12 hours each way, to stay at Four Seasons Resort Mauritius at Anahita in Africa.

Bear Grylls discussed his vacation in yesterday’s Daily Mail Online. Grylls said:

“As a family, we try to go abroad on holiday once a year. The other break we take is to our small Welsh island each summer. Friends joke that facilities on the island, which sits miles offshore, are a bit on the 15th Century side, with no mains electricity or running water. But I adore it. In return, though, I owe it to Shara to make sure we occasionally have a holiday to a place where everything works and she doesn’t have to flush the loo with rainwater.”

Grylls said they stayed in:

“an immaculate three-bedroom detached villa, sumptuously furnished and with its own veranda, garden and small pool. We tended to breakfast there as a family, then eat in one of the three restaurants, each of which had its own cuisine.”

This sounded like the hotel’s “Bed and Breakfast Plan,” so naturally I looked up the rates. I did not find anything that matched Bear Grylls’s description, but a “Presidential Two Bedroom Suite” costs €10,300 or about $7400 a night. Bear Grylls defended his extravagance, saying:

“I know that in these recessionary times we are somehow meant to feel guilty about any indulgences, but I don’t buy into that. I work super-hard in some true hell-holes for most of the year and I have no reservation about heading off with my family to get a little pampering for a few days. As we used to say in the military: work hard, play hard. It is a great ethic to live by and I do so unashamedly.”

However, this “article,” which praised the hotel, seemed more like an “infomercial,” so the hotel might have been free.

About Mauritius

Mauritius is an island off the south east coast of Africa, about 560 miles (900 km) from Madagascar. Mauritians speak English, have no Army, and live in a tropical climate. It was chosen as best governed nation in Africa, on the Ibrahim Index. E.g. it scored 80.71 on “Participation and Human Rights.” For comparison, Libya scored 20.36 in that category.

It sounds like paradise.

Historically, Mauritius is best known as the home of the Dodo bird which became extinct about 1700. Dodo birds, were basically 50 pound pigeons; too heavy to fly. They had no natural predators until humans arrived on the island. Although the dodo was not hunted, because it supposedly tasted bad — humans also brought dogs, cats, pigs, monkeys, and rats, which plundered their nests, while humans destroyed the forests where they lived.

Dodo birds are often used as an example by environmentalists, to remind us to treat animals better. The image above was taken from Extinct Birds published by Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild in 1907.