Imagine a breezy, palm-fringed island in the Indian Ocean. There’s no money, no Internet or TV, and a single phone line to the outside world. Only a handful of people are allowed to visit each year. Tempted? The author was, and he tells what he found.
The island of Agalega is forbidden to the casual tourist and off limits even to curious citizens of the nation that claims it. Proscription makes it all the more enticing, of course, to the diehard adventurer. Agalega is actually two small islands (27 square miles in all) narrowly separated by shallow tidal waters and sitting by themselves off the southeast coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, about 1,000 miles due east of the border between Tanzania and Mozambique. Agalega’s closest neighbors are the southern group of the Seychelles archipelago and the northern tip of Madagascar. Yet the island has ties with neither. It belongs rather to Mauritius, an island state more than 600 miles to the south. And the government of Mauritius has decreed that no one—Mauritian or foreigner—may set foot on Agalega unless sent by the government on official business. Because the only approved way of getting to Agalega is with the Mauritian Coast Guard or by government-chartered ship, the travel ban is easily enforced. (There’s an airstrip on Agalega, but there are no commercial flights to the island. The Mauritian Coast Guard uses a small, noisy, unpressurized plane to get to and from the place when necessary.) Anyone alighting by other means would be energetically interrogated by a police force whose main duty it is to assert Mauritian sovereignty over the remote outpost. Not that any other nation contests Mauritian sovereignty.
Agalega’s most precious natural resources are modest amounts of coconut and octopus, the former shipped off as copra, the latter dried into a local delicacy. Mauritius, in contrast, is an economic dynamo. The size of Rhode Island, it has a population of more than a million, exports millions of tons of sugar, manufactures tens of millions of dollars’ worth of textiles, and is visited annually by half a million tourists. The place is overcrowded and polluted, which may help explain why it regards distant Agalega as paradise and is determined to keep unspoiled this bit of Eden accidentally bequeathed to it by history.