By SAM PHIRI –

IT’S exactly13:35 hours on September 1, 2015 at Lusaka’s Kenneth Kaunda International Airport (KKIA) … seated in the aisle of a huge relatively modernised fuselage of an aircraft anxiously waiting to be flown to a beautiful island of Mauritius via South Africa.
Suddenly there is an unnerving situation. For the first time in my air travel experience; I am slightly gripped with fear.
The Captain’s voice over a cackling microphone announces that the plane cannot take off as one of the aircraft’s wing flaps has developed a minor fault. The flight will be delayed to allow engineers to work on it.
Although many passengers tried hard to fold-in the visible expression of fear, it is certain from the mumbling and fidgeting that there is some rising degree of panic.
“What are these same flaps … are we safe?” some are heard asking each other, even though they knew that getting an accurate answer from a fellow passenger was almost like squeezing milk out of a lifeless cow!
One hour later …
We are still on the apron in a motionless plane as apologies and updates continue to flow through to the passengers, a professional way of calming down the situation.
The waiting, the moment of uncertainty is excruciating but thankfully the problem is successfully rectified.
I breathed a sigh of relief especially after the aircraft gets to the runway and smoothly takes off to attain the assigned flight level. We are now well on our way to the ocean island!
At the end of the two-hour flight, we had one of those exceptional smooth touchdowns where you barely feel it at South Africa’s Oliver Tambo International Airport as if to make up for the delay. The captain was on point.
We were booked at a hotel just within the airport area in readiness for the next morning’s connecting flight to Mauritius.
It was at this particular hotel, that I will not name, where I experienced one of the worst customer care relations by one waiter who constantly argued with the people who made part of my contingent.
One of them got so angry and told the waiter to stick to his job description rather than tell clients what they should or not order.
It was good that we were only going to stay for the night. Who would love to be subjected to such treatment especially at a very well-known hotel?
As if that was not enough, the following morning as we checked out of the hotel with much hurry than patience, we discovered that the truant waiter had actually misled our crew to order food beyond what was paid for.
Not wanting to spend another minute at the same hotel, I took out my visa card and gave it to the front officer to settle what was due.
Finally, we were out of the hotel’s bewilderments and heading to the real, well defined destination where only Africa’s Best of Entertainment content on DStv was going to be showcased for the next seven days.
Four hours of thought-provoking flight above the depths of the Indian Ocean with turbulences due to the ocean waves becoming commonplace.
Questions and imaginations of what kind of place my foot was to step filled my mind especially when the captain informed us that we had begun descending.
The fact that I was visiting this island for the first time made it more exciting. I started imagining a particular kind of infrastructure that I unfortunately did not get to see.
As we touched down, I was so amazed by the greenery. This is not ordinary greenery but a very huge money spinner for the island,  sugarcane and palm trees.
When we disembarked, I thought we had landed at one of the smaller less busy airports but I came to learn a few minutes later that it was actually the main airport. What would you expect for a country with a population of only 2.1 million people!
That does not even equal the current population of Lusaka alone! I mused as we were ushered to the VVIP lounge where we were given soaked and neatly rolled white facecloths to swab our hands, for health reasons I guess.
This is where I experienced the real hospitality-from the airport all the way to the Outrigger hotel and pleasure resort. The people we interacted with all seemed so receptive and ever smiling.
Having heard from so many visitors about my country, I thought Zambia had the warmest personalities but not after seeing the people of Mauritius!
I think that is why Commence Minister Margaret Mwanakatwe came back with the whole bag of praises during her recent visit to the island.
As we drove from the airport to the hotel, I was taken in by the road network cutting though kilometers of sugarcane plantations.  It is as if sugarcane is their grass of wealth!
It is in fact a criminal offence to take any sugarcane or fruits to Mauritius as they are more than capable of producing for consumption and export.
Off the sugar plantations, the single carriage road now cuts though the suburbs where houses and shops are built less than two meters way from the road.
The meandering of these roads due to the mountainous nature of the landscape has naturally given drivers a speed control.
It is practically impossible to drive above 60 kilometres per hour on most of these roads or you find yourself in a ravine, house or shop!
Now as we slowly passed though these suburbs, what caught my attention was the penchant idol worship.
Almost each house had two small red flags on either side of a cage where each family according to their religious belief would have put in an idol or a god they believe in. It was anything from a cow, a frog to a human being with six hands.
After an hour’s drive, we finally reached the beautiful hotel, Outrigger Hotel resort in Bel Ombre just at the coast of the Indian Ocean.
This place proved even more welcoming giving me an impression that it was only like that on the first day not knowing that I had not seen anything yet!
I thought I was the only one who was amazed and impressed with the excellent hospitality shown by the hotel management and staff until I heard it from others in our group.
“What kind of people are these? They really know what they are doing. They are so professional and embracing and it’s like they don’t get tired … this is one of the best hotels on the planet,” I heard some say.
On the second day, we veered away from the “Content showcase” as we were taken out for a tour of some tourism sites one of them being the sacred lake where more idols as gods were put up.
Just by the lake side is a temple which is frequented by devotees to ‘Lord Shiva’ to seek blessings or get some water from the sacred lake for spiritual home use.
This is one lake which has perhaps the largest number of fish as fishing is a very serious spiritual offence, they say.
Close to the temple, is a vast place of pilgrimage with a giant monument of lord Shiva where thousands would converge for special almanac worship.
From a ‘spatial’ tour, we drove to the Back River gorge with amazing features that include a waterfall on the banks of the hundreds-meter deep gorge.
In a deep green forestry of the gorge, the narrow drape of a waterfall is seen falling from almost the top of the gorge banks. This is a tourism site where monkeys are so friendly to a point of even taking selfies with tourists!
Our second-last stop was at a sugar processing factory where we saw more than 10 commodities being produced that include sugar itself, soft drinks, different grades of alcoholic beverages and electricity!
Forty per cent of the islands electricity is actually produced from the dry sugarcane fiber after extraction of the juice.
It seems these people hardly put anything to waste! They have another interesting use for the sugarcane shrubbery; they use it to make decorative roofing for most lodges and hotels. Part of Outrigger is actually thatched with the same.
Sampling especially the alcoholic beverages was fun for some of my colleagues who said one brand was just as good as the Zambian local brew known as “Kachasu.”
We then drove to the final destination of our tour – an interesting place where optical nutrition came to reality. It was at Cameral where we saw one amazing wonder called the “7 Colored Earth”
This is a place which is believed to contain up to 15 metre-thickness of remains of ancient geological activity.
According to our tour guide, the basalt from the intermittent period lava flow 3-1.7 million year ago has been leached by the hot and humid climate leading to gullied clay.
The profound and ultimate decomposition has now left on-site iron and aluminum oxides.
Iron and aluminum repel each other and gather spontaneously in colorful stripes with the ferric oxide giving the land shades ranging from red to brown.
The aluminum gives the land shades ranging from blue to violet blue.
The leaching of the basalt has resulted in depleting the soil of nutrients that are necessary for the vegetation to grow.
This is why no single plant can grow in this beautifully coloured piece of land.
Meters away from the seven coloured earth are three giant tortoises that are said to be 150 years old. It is believed that at the beginning of the 17th century, a large number of giant tortoises inhabited Mauritius.
It is believed that when the Dutch people arrived on the island they over consumed these tortoises and drastically reduced their population.
These giant tortoises reach up to one meter in length and hold a record of longevity as the oldest is said to have died at the age of 250 years old!
After seeing the beauty of Mauritius, it was back to business of enjoying the DStv Multichoice Biggest content showcase for a good five days.
Sweet experience I said to myself as we took off from the two year old airport but soon the reality of home and load shedding began to hit.
From the mumblings on the plane as we started our descent on KKIA, it was clear I was not the only one thinking about the load shedding after all as others brought it out loud.
Despite the massive load shedding amid other economic challenges in our beloved country, there is always one realenergising fact that just excites you- “There is no sweeter place like home!”