The People Who Made Us Book This Trip

Every big trip has a starting point.

Not the day you booked the flights. Not the day the deposit went through. Not the day you told your parents you were leaving. The real starting point is the moment somebody, or something, put an idea in your head that would not leave.

The trip we take in November started with an Instagram post.

Nothing more. Nothing louder. No conversation. No article. No friend telling us "you have to go." Just one page, one drone shot, one beach, on my phone, a couple of months ago.

That was enough.

1. The Instagram Post That Started Everything

I was scrolling in bed one evening. Not looking for a destination. Not planning anything. Just the usual end-of-day scroll where you stop caring what you're looking at.

Then the algorithm did what it sometimes does. It served me a page I had never seen before, in a region I knew almost nothing about, of a beach I couldn't have located on a map.

A drone shot. Turquoise so light it almost looked white. Sandbanks that seemed drawn rather than natural. Nobody on them. No footprints. Just water, sand, and sky.

I stayed on that post for a long time.

I saved it. I opened the page. I scrolled ten, twenty, fifty more posts. Same drone. Same clarity. Same absence of any of the usual signals you get from "tourism content." No influencers in swimsuits. No "swipe up" links. Just place.

I fell for it. Hard.

The verdict : the best trips don't start with a plan. They start with a single image that won't leave your head.

2. The Phrase That Stayed With Me

Somewhere in the captions of that page, I read a sentence that lodged itself in my brain.

"One of the most beautiful regions in the Indian Ocean."

That was the line. Short. Specific. Untested. Maybe generic to some, but to me, sitting in Mauritius, on an island literally in the Indian Ocean, the phrase felt like a challenge.

Because if I lived in the Indian Ocean and somewhere else in the Indian Ocean was described as one of the most beautiful, I wanted to know. Whether the claim was true. Whether the drone lied. Whether the sand was really that colour.

I spent the next two days reading everything I could find on the region. Blog posts. Reviews. Google Maps satellite views. Every image search I could throw at it.

Everything confirmed the same story. The place was real. The colours were real. Almost nobody was talking about it.

The verdict : sometimes the most powerful travel motivator is a phrase you read once and cannot stop testing.

3. The Night I Told Nim, and He Said Yes

The moment we tipped from "peut-être" to "on part", I remember it exactly.

It was an evening at home. Nim was scrolling on his phone next to me while we watched a series with a good wine, as usual, hah. I paused the show. I opened my Instagram. I showed him the page I had been saving for weeks. That same beach. That same drone. That same impossible turquoise.

He put his phone down. He looked at the screen for a long time. Then he said one small sentence :

"OK, on y va."

That was it. No debate. No spreadsheet. No pros-and-cons list. Just three words on our couch, at maybe 9:30 in the evening, that turned a saved Instagram post into a trip we would take.

The next morning, I was already searching for flights.

The verdict : the biggest decisions in a couple's life sometimes happen in three words on a couch.

4. The People Who Quietly Built the Dream

It wasn't just the drone. It was a whole ecosystem of storytellers I didn't know I was reading.

Once I started researching seriously, two travel blogs became my daily reading for weeks.

thattravel.co.uk — for honest, deeply reported destination guides. Not fluff. Not highlight reels. Real information about what to do, where to stay, and what to skip.

bravefreetravel.com — for the courage to write about places that most travel media ignores. Their content on lesser-known destinations across Africa and the Indian Ocean is exactly what I wanted to read.

I've never met these writers. I probably never will. But I want to name them here because their work made this trip possible for us. They wrote about the region long before it was easy to find information on it. They took the trips first. They came back with the words that made me confident enough to book.

Every trip has invisible authors. Ours are them.

The verdict : the writers you read before a trip are as much a part of the trip as the people you meet during it.

5. The Strangest Part : Nobody I Know Has Been

The realisation that has stayed with me through the whole planning.

Here is what surprised me most in the last few months of preparing this trip.

Not one person in my entourage has ever been there.

Not one friend. Not one cousin. Not one Mauritian traveller I know. Not one colleague. The people I usually turn to before a big trip, the network of "oh you're going there, let me tell you," has been silent on this one.

For a Mauritian, that's unusual. Our travel network runs deep. Somebody has always been somewhere. Somebody always knows a hotel, a guide, a "friend of a friend who lives there."

Not this time. This trip, we are going in with no personal referrals. No inside tip. No family member who came back last year and told us what to eat.

We are figuring it out ourselves.

The verdict : the trips nobody in your circle has done yet are often the best ones you'll take.

The Real Answer

There is a version of travel where you follow the crowd. Where you go where your friends have been. Where you copy an itinerary somebody sent you. That version is safe, well-documented, and often lovely.

There is another version. Where a single Instagram post turns into a five-month planning journey. Where two blogs you'd never heard of become your travel bibles.

Where the man you married says three words on a couch and a trip is born. Where nobody you know can tell you what to expect, and you walk into it anyway.

We are choosing the second version this November.

Sometimes the best trips are not the ones your friends have taken. They are the ones you find on a phone at 9pm and cannot stop thinking about.

The drone. The phrase. Three words on a couch. Two bloggers I've never met. A trip nobody in my circle can prepare me for.

That is who made this trip. And I owe them all a proper thank-you.