Seychelles
in Africa

There are 115 islands in the Seychelles and the photographs of all of them are accurate. The granite boulders of La Digue and Praslin piled against beaches of white sand and water that shifts between turquoise and deep blue depending on the cloud cover are not a digital exaggeration. What the photographs cannot convey is the particular quality of the place: the giant Aldabra tortoises moving through the Vallée de Mai on Praslin with the unhurried authority of creatures that have been here considerably longer than we have, the frigatebirds riding thermals above Bird Island, the underwater silence of a reef that has been protected long enough to recover its full complexity. The Seychelles are expensive, genuinely remote from most of the world, and entirely worth both inconveniences.