We took the ten-minute boat journey across the shallow coral lagoon and as we stepped ashore we were greeted by an army of uniformed Robinson Crusoes, marooned there solely to attend to our every whim and fancy. I have always had a thing for islands, from the year I spent marooned on Taransay, to the time I proposed to my wife on a small uninhabited islet in the Caribbean. We decided to spend the first day of our holiday on the hotel's own private island, Ilot Mangenie. The contemporary room was about the size of my pre-marital London bachelor pad and included a bath 'menu' and its very own butler. A breathtakingly beautiful baobab tree stands over Le Touessrok's grand entrance, beckoning weary travellers into paradise.Ī footbridge connects the main hotel with Frangipani Island, home to the resort's Givenchy spa and a number of suites, including our room. If it was good enough for a record-breaking polar pioneer, I thought, then it was certainly good enough for me.Ī 12-hour flight had transferred us from the hell of Gatwick Airport to the very gates of heaven. I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to relax in such opulent surroundings but my concerns were soon abated when I bumped into my friend, the polar explorer Tom Avery.Īs we arrived, he was leaving the resort after a two-week holiday with his new wife, Mary. It is nearly 6,000 miles from the UK and about as far from a standard Fogle holiday as you can get. Mauritius is an island most famous as the last habitat for the now extinct dodo. Nearly eight years, and lots of no-frills adventures, later I decided to take my wife on a two-week holiday there. Maritius was the last habitat for the now extinct Dodo I was a lowly picture editor back then and it was a place I could only dream of visiting.
'Don't you know the difference?' I certainly did by the end of the day. Back then, the hotel was the destination of the rich and famous and I still remember the wrath of Victoria when I confused a picture of Le Touessrok with that of another hotel. I first came across the hotel while working for Vanity Fair travel editor Victoria Mather. A swanky refit has only bolstered the reputation of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson's honeymoon destination. Le Touessrok, on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, is a hotel steeped in celebrity history a place where the famous are reputed to outnumber 'civilians'. Given that I spend most of my nights abroad surrounded by clouds of mosquitos, I didn't really know where to start. While Marina has certainly never complained about my long absences and bizarre holiday ideas, I wanted to impress her this time with a super-luxurious break. It was time to make amends and take Marina to a rather more conventional paradise. I have also recently finished filming a new series, Extreme Dreams for BBC2, in which I take inexperienced adventurers on extraordinary journeys.Īnd so the long and short of it is that I spent eight months of my first year of married life alone and sleeping under canvas in the bush, while my wife remained at home.
#Castaway paradise stocks tv#
I lived for a year on the remote Scottish isle of Taransay for the TV show Castaway, have visited the remote islands of St Helena, final prison of Napoleon, Pitcairn, where the Bounty mutineers ended up, and Tristan Da Cunha, and have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean - naked. In my capacity as a travel writer and broadcaster, I have been to some unusual places. My wife, Marina, discovered this when I whisked her away from our balmy Portuguese wedding to a honeymoon on the gale-lashed Outer Hebrides.Īnother recent 'romantic' weekend involved entering my wife into a 60-mile ice-skating marathon across Sweden's frozen fjords, and on our last summer holiday, she and the dogs joined me on a ten-day trip drifting down a Scandinavian river in the pouring rain on a homemade timber raft that eventually sank. When it comes to picking holidays, my taste has always been a little alternative. Ben Fogle and his wife Marina savour their luxury break
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