(Appeared in The Times Magazine, 1994)

You know that holiday mood, when you feel at one with the world and half believe you are a citizen of a global village? Awash with it, I found myself strolling along one of the streets of Port Louis (it's the capital of Mauritius, which is a handy piece of general knowledge), feeling pretty well enchanted with the swing of the place. It was as I imagine the cajun States, with a little bit of Brick Lane, and even - as well - a touch of Guildford, as it might have been in 1930. In the fanlight above a bike shop door there was an ad for the Raleigh gents roadster which had painstakingly been copied in enduring oils from a poster presumably shipped out from Nottingham God knows how many decades ago. This is what helps you enjoy Mauritius so much: it is crummy, there is room for the decently unreconstructed. You can buy a length of angled steel within earshot of Government House. There is prim official English written everywhere, but the air is hot with French and any number of other gabblings.

The light of that morning was razor sharp. There were of course shady places. The portico of the Lunar Park, a pink and concrete confection of a movie house, which looks abandoned but was screening Basic Instincts, would have afforded comfort to anyone with time to linger under its cantilevered roofs. And there was a whole arcade of lawyers' shops - as informal and open to the alley as meat stalls in a market - where you could find cool and get a codicil done. The tall trees in the front garden of the Merchant Navy club offered their own dappled relief, and the building itself, clapboard Colonial, was soothing to behold, comfortably flaked paint offering its own invitation. Nearby, there was a first floor veranda on a bank built out of square-cut volcanic rock - across the grassy central reservation of the city's ceremonial main drag, with palms so tall they were holding the sky up - and a man on it caught me taking a snapshot of his siesta and leaned forward to wave.

So I thought I had found the kind of place I like, and was briskly stepping along for a meeting with the director of Economic Planning and Development, just to confirm that this air of well-being in the streets was not fake or fragile. A man fell in beside me, and smiled the official and unofficial Mauritius smile of welcome. A white-toothed tiger's grin as radiant as the sun warming our backs. How are you? Where are you staying? No! The Saint GÈran? [Five star, the prettiest hotel I've ever seen.] That's wonderful, you must have seen me there, working on the breakfast buffet?

Oh, dear. A stab of guilt. Surely these chaps really don't all look alike? Perhaps I had seen him, and had given him my best noblesse oblige Good Morning, on that cool terrace by the pool where the staff glide alongside to carry one's omelette back to the table?

The raffish, impertinent, sweet, polite, crook surfed my reluctance to be uptight, and I gave him 1000 rupees - about œ40 - to buy his mother an airline ticket for her operation on Reunion. This is what we're for. We jet to this igneous heap in the Indian Ocean, with its coral fringe and its white beached lagoons, and its wall-to-wall sugar cane, and its very good resort hotels (nice staff, and live cover versions of rock songs after dinner, all very tasteful), and our passing is a notch in the foreign exchange we bring to the budget. That man's smile had been a nice little earner for the economy, if all too informal. The great thing about money is to keep it on the move, working. That's my motto, when I've been conned.

The government official said, yes, tourism's not the best thing in the world for a third world economy, tends to corrupt people a bit, but Mauritius's hotels are often local-owned, and much of what they sell is locally-supplied. So you can spend and feel that you're doing more good than harm.

Besides, beyond the manicured surrounds of the hotels, Mauritius puts itself through few contortions to please the tourist. This is no Lamb's Bounty Rum Bar theme park. It's as well-adjusted a place as you're likely to find. Even its shanties are rather lovely. Driving or walking, you come across an excellent vernacular architecture in corrugated tin. There are acres of verandas and french windows, in that unplanned harmony which English people brought to their between-the-wars railway carriage seaside shacks. They are slowly being replaced by the concrete which toughs it out better against the typhoons. More hygienic too, as a public health inspector told me. I had wandered down a mud track just by Grande Baie and dawdled awhile with a man who was showing his baby daughter the early morning before going off to clean rooms at one of the big hotels. Further on, I made a rather bad job of photographing Mme Marie Anabelle Ayahcooty, who was cleaning her mother's step. The inspector confirmed that cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, malaria and hunger were things of the past. The kids get a good schooling, too, he said.

They should bottle and export Mauritius's enticing equanimity. Wander anywhere and you see it. Here, a plump Hindu family - probably descendants of indentured plantation labour - are having a little wallow in the lagoon, under the eye of the sari-ed mother under an acacia tree. There, a Creole man parks his moped and stands for a while watching someone giving a Catholic church a lick of paint; engages you in small-talk, which comes with a hot blast of spicy food and alcohol on the breath. A boy in a T-shirt saying The Gigantic Lottery took us round a Hindu temple, not wearily, nor expectant: just available and willing. We hovered in a social interstice: not cast as tourists, not travellers, not strangers, not likely converts, just curious people with time on our hands.

We had a good dinner in the linoleum salon of the Kwang Chow in Port Louis, and then made a foray into the Chinese gambling den at the Amicale, where you could almost imagine that drugs and who knows what Oriental depravities were on offer. Actually, the security for the joint is provided by the amiable police. Of course, the Chinese do not bother to smile particularly: buying a padlock from one old crone in a lock-up in a backstreet, I did try a little courtesy and got short shrift for it. Still, an eighty year old with a lot of ballcocks to shift can't be expected to shower graciousness on every wide-eyed enthusiast who wanders in.

More obviously welcoming is Jacky de Maroussem, whose family connections include slave owning sugar planters. He and his wife have inherited EurÈka, a long low wooden palace of a house which is a miracle of relaxed grandeur and coolness. The descendants of the family's slaves now cook subtle but gutsy lunches for visitors: by far the best we ate, though the curry at the restaurant in a ravinous nature reserve at Domaine du Chasseur took some beating.

The cane industry has not wrecked all the interior. There is a rundown botanical garden which shows just how much of the island's flora and fauna came with successive waves of immigration (there was no indigenous human population). If you like wildlife, it's easy and interesting to check out the progress in conserving what little is left, especially the island's unique kestrel (which is also the star at Domaine du Chasseur), surviving in fragments of original forest, which are beginning to get the attention they deserve.

Most people stick to the watery fringes of Mauritius. Taken short in the docks area, a coastguard officer led me across the bent, somehow Conradian deckplates of a forty year-old Indian gunboat, to the more sanitary arrangements on the fairly modern Russian gunboat with which the service discourages drugs trafficking.

Only forgetfulness got me in the pickle in the first place: I could easily have "gone" whilst on board the chartered Balearics schooner, Isla Mauritia, on which we had spent the day under sail, lagoon-hopping and drinking and dozing. It's 140 years old and would make a pirate of the most unfanciful visitor. The whole island is a watersports paradise. You can give marlin a dose of their own medicine (worldwide, conservationists may put paid to this sport soon), scrape tender sunburn along coral reefs, swallow whole oceans whilst snorkelling, or - as I did - tip up racing catamarans. The hotels offer most of these free, however badly you do them. You pay, though, to walk on the ocean-floor with a sort of aquarium on your head into which ingenious men on the surface somehow blow more than enough air for your survival: I was told you could probably smoke in the contrivance, but I have given up living that dangerously on land or under the sea. I sang My Way instead. The fish seemed unimpressed, but stayed close anyway.

There follows information which was true in 1994:

The Saint GÈran is very elegant and lively and has the advantage of sharing a private island with a nearby hotel. The Royal Palm is regarded as a touch more sedate. The much cheaper Merville's Garden Court is very pretty, and the overall air is nicely relaxed, but not especially elegant. Le Brabant has the advantage of relative cheapness, offers pretty and quiet chalets and shares the posher and varied public facilities of Le Paradis: probably the best choice for the middle-budget.

All the trips mentioned above are easily booked from your hotel through White Sand Tours or Mauritours, who have reps in the hotels.

The Mauritian Wildlife Appeal Fund is doing excellent work and can show some of it. PO Box 58, 10 Dr Ferriere Street, Port Louis, Mauritius. Telephone 208 2811.

For all the hotels but also bungalows and other self-catering options, or anything out of the ordinary, try Sunset Travel Holidays (306 Clapham Road, London SW9 9AE, Telephone 020 7498 9922), who know the island really well.