Grand Port, Mauritius in 4K ( My birthday surprise, Thanks Riki)
Hi everyone it's my birthday happy birthday thanks Rik and Riki asked me what do you want to do for your birthday and I said let's go to grand port so welcome to grand port this is the actual spot the dutch arrived right here somehow they set foot on the mangrove landing area just like this and then they came ashore prince Maurits prince Maurits i don't know somehow that becomes Mauritius so out there the dutch boat would have been coming in and that I've seen here land must have been quite exciting but then they actually thought this was Rodriguez so they came in here thinking they were arriving in Rodriguez and as it turned out it was Mauritius unexpected Mauritius there's this old house here now you can't really make it out we can't go in because it is closed up but I wonder if there was a house that was originally put here as the marker is the symbolizing area of it just walking it'll be part of a montage hopefully okay there is a signpost but we drove straight past it so have a look out just behind me over there is where the dutch landed and then across the road is this tower quite badly there we are there's this tower i wonder what it is maybe it's like an old sugar mill tower let's grab a quick look fresh water okay inside it there's a little christian shrine it is really big but i think ricky was right it is a water tower they would have probably filled this with water and then men just over there is the river i'm going to have a quick look at it men would have been able to come up and then quickly get some water and do a quick prayer for a patron saint to help them on their way as their ship drove off voted off failed huh failed sailed off as their ship sailed off this is the kind of terrain that they would have found when they first got you thick thick mangroves undulating ways where water has has eaten away that and muddy swamps and they have had to push in to try to find some hard land and i think that's why they went to grand port let's head down there and have a look hi everyone and welcome to Fort fed fred frederick welcome to port frederick trying to get a thumbnail not quite sure how it should be but how awesome is this actual fort it's got a palm tree in it and it's a ruin i don't know i don't think we're going to get a thumbnail out of it but what a great little piece of video that's a point yeah the entrance that way entrance that way there we go thumbnail let's go as you can see the ruins are all around me here now this is the actual spot where the dutch fort was and they built two the wooden one first and then the stone one and we can just make out some of the stone from the dutch but it is it has been built on top by the french so a lot of what we see here is part of the french fort but if you look lower down you can see that the the stones are cut differently are piled together differently and that's the actual dutch fort some apt modern day graffiti wow i'm actually surprised at how big this is if you have a look it is huge there are rooms and rooms and rooms here okay just now so you can see it yes i i'll do the one where i get the small bit and ricky can hold the camera but we're just walking and it's huge this would have been a battle room there have been two guns one there and one over there and they'd have stuck out because obviously they were protecting something that's on the other side of that wall we can't actually see what it was that they'll protect him but there would have been two guns in there i'll show you from the other side you can see what i mean by they've built it up so that the guns are protected that if someone was firing at them they would be protected behind this wall those holes are really high up there we're going to do a fake drone shot hang in there you can't start recording now yeah fake drone shots require a spanner don't make fun of me yeah no i'm sorry it's your that one birthday no that one's fine now if i leave this in here you won't cut it so i'm gonna take it out through the hole let's see what the cannons would have seen so camera up up to where the hole was and i don't know i don't know what they would have seen hold it steady is your camera facing outwards yeah cool okay wait there wait there and that's what the cannons would have been seeing so when the dutch first landed here uh they realized that they needed people to help them so they brought some slaves across from asia and upon landing like 50 of the 100 slaves ran off into the mountains that brian will show you just now and they became the original maroons of mauritius as ricky was telling you the maroons were up there on the mountains and while the dutch were still here they would come on raiding parties and burn the place down and steal their whatever they had grains of rice or cows or anything like that i don't know what they had so they would steal that somewhere nearby this there was a settlement the actual dutch settlement and they came down three men and two women and they burnt it to the ground and one of the men in that was named bambooz and that's why this entire mountain range is named bambooz and quite a few other things in mauritius yeah they do quite name quite a few things because he was obviously a great fighter for the maroons for the mauritius people he chased out the dutch and chased out the dutch and then the dutch were gone what i find pretty cool about the maroon story is that there's men and women involved because they work side by side to make a go at living here and that's very cool oh what a great fort there's a lot of history here i was expecting a few cannons i think they're in the museum probably we're probably going to have to go into the museum and have a look there if you have a look at this room you can see there were never really any built up area on that side it does look like it's smooth there's a bit there and a bit here at the end but i think it is pretty obvious what this room was you were used for this was an indoor patunk room so the french soldiers after a hard day of battlement would come and if it was raining they could still play patunk or ball looks like something from the sea you can just make out across the river that was probably made by the french when they came and it's all about water control because the problem with mauritius is you get these downpours and you get this flash flooding and if you're uncontrolling that water you're getting swept away so water was very important in the history of mauritius just like the sea out there prevents people from coming in and you can just put guns on an island and prevent everyone from coming in so does the water you've got these little streams that suddenly become raging torrents they can sweep people away but what they've done is they've built up the edges so it prevents erosion to start with and second of all controls the water lets it spread out if it's coming too fast water control sea control you get mauritius control yeah although it's uh there's this impressive fort over there but the actual area around it is quite beautiful with its big old trees and lush green grass it's nice i wonder if you could come picnic here there are benches can't see your feet at all because my screen is so bright i've been complaining about the structure of the building and how they're just chucking stone together and rendering over it until i saw this ricky just kidding they actually do have good craftsmanship in the stonework so there is some good stonework here even though it looks like they just chucked rubble together here it is big blocks of of stone that they would have fitted together like they do with the modern structures and then they just plastered over it they still had to have good corners if you don't have good corners you know what brand noise yes i don't know what i always say but yeah if you don't have good corners this strikes me as a little bit odd it's almost like they've got stairs so if you want to attack just come and climb up the stairs go for it bro if you can hold on let's go you could climb them you could actually climb them it's not that hard probably not with a camera in your hand the easy way in okay now that's the hard way and the easy way is just go around the side where the sign says it even though there's no path you're allowed to go in that way keep your bakery away from your fort if you don't want it to burn down i'm sure they learned that lesson the hard way somewhere else but in this case you've got your fort on that side your bakery over there and just behind the bakery we'll go over look in a minute is the actual blacksmith you don't want to be without your bread yeah in case your bakery catches fire energy please and look at this beautiful little pagoda that you can come and sit welcome to my cozy pagoda it's a scorcher up there if you have a look here next to me this is all mauritian volcanic stone work which is fantastic but there's a little bit of evidence right behind me here we have a lot mine but if you have a look there's some red brick in here which means it was probably used by the british in modern times because they did some things with red bricks like this is probably an oven this was probably an oven to a chimney where they used the red blocks because they were cheaper than using the black stone cool looks like an oven as well it does there but it's weird to have those british redstone this building here as you can see was where the blacksmith was so they kept the blacksmith away from the the fort as well between the blacksmith and the bakery is some public toilets check behind you there's a cyclone bars on the windows those who are interested in more modern times as you can see i've got the shutter here which is pretty cool but you got the cyclone bar which means you close the shutter and you can put the bar down and that's going to protect you when a cyclone comes that's the modern way the old-fashioned way was put more stones in it you can see there's a tiny little what would have been a window up there and not much else that's how they knew this was the prison it's a little bit dark hopefully ricky can get a better image but this loose this was a sluice where they could just spray water in there or put water in there and it would actually run out they wouldn't give them a toilet or anything so don't be a prisoner in the 1600s unfortunately we can't get any closer than this but you can see two reasonable sized prison cells and this would have probably been the guard's office so the guards office there would have been a an entryway in there and they would have brought them in they would have probably had like drunks in the one and serious criminals in the other wow everyone ricky and i are gonna go into the museum now and have a look around as you can see no cameras and because it is the time of corona even though there is no corona in mauritius let's get our masks on and maybe that's the reason there is no corona mauritius see all the outside not a bad museum i must say i would rather go to the marburg one to actually see the history of this region but it does have a few really really great things in there and two of them are models one of the this actual site as it is now and they actually have some of the graveyards that they've been able to uncover using uh ground penetrating radar the other one is the original model of the fort and i thought that was pretty epic so go and visit the mall big one then come here and have a look at the fort it is that good so this is a surprising find it's a school from 1865 it was originally built unfortunately it was actually destroyed by a hurricane that came through here and they had to rebuild it not today in the grand pro school okay so this behind me is a bridge that ricky is standing on and if you look at the construction i really wouldn't i really really wouldn't be where she is standing with that tiny little pillar holding the whole thing up run rick run for your life no i'm just kidding it looks like it's just the the pedestrian walkway is made out of that tiny little piece of concrete the rest of the bridge is probably all right so over here we've got the notre dame church and the ruins of the fort this is a mammoth port this is all a port there's a tiny little narrow opening out there and the rest of this is a port it makes granbay look like well a bay this is a port this is huge we told you about the maroons and because of what they did they put the statue the monument to the abolition abolition of slavery right here because they were just in those hills and they came down they chased off the dutch and they kept the french at bay this is actually made out of railway this isn't like railway i wonder if it's like the last railway or if it was who knows it's actually made out of railway line pretty cool yeah that is pretty cool just had to change my storage to my device so i've got another 22 minutes this is the park at grand ports with some nice swings and public toilets and didn't look like a swimming beach more like where you can get boats and there's the monument to the abolition of slavery here there's pretty avenue with [ __ ] dogs there's a monument commemorating the introduction of sugarcane and mauritius feels spidery wow a monument to the bringing of sugar to mauritius it is just ridiculously green here so in a place that's impossibly green the memorial commemorating the introduction of sugar cane and sumerians wow behind me what a great little piece of nature and mosquitoes i should have put the spray on there are a few mosquitoes but i think you can clearly see the lion's head and the lion's back that's pretty cool but what we came here for what we've just walked on is the old bridge let's go have a look look at that it's an actual shaped bridge which means it was forcing the water in a direction so they were desperately trying to when the water came down force it in that direction to stop erosion onto what was probably valuable land over there where ricky's standing helicopter's back let's see if we can see the helicopter oh it's a military helicopter it's a little bit hard to see i attempted a thumbnail with the mountain that's the lines no that that's attempted a thumbnail that's the lion it actually looks like a lion now that i look at it and silhouette that's pretty cool welcome to the lion feed him i'll rub his little his that's that pimple his back leg scratches barely wind whistling through the trees oh what is with me getting in my branches wow okay so this is le fernie eco lodge they have conservation everything and we're going to get to all of that it's so exciting but it's actually built on the site of the first ever sugarcane factory in mauritius well this is the actual view from the lodge let me just get a little closer ah this is me at the lodge with those beautiful views no i'm just kidding this is a replica of it it actually is open now so come and have a look you stay in the little cabins and this is the view from your lounge the actual view from your lounge oh wow i want to be there wow wow wow oops don't show the wall to show ah how great is that so i'm leaving my lunch now we're going to go and explore the sugar cane the first sugarcane farm in mauritius she became processing plant in mauritius oh and this is the guys they are they are conserving it wow so through the main door as you can see they have an arch system which is pretty cool but what's a little bit weird is a little bit further down and i know this is really hard for me they've got wood lentils these are actual wood lintels so where they make the main doors they've done an arch but on other doors they just have a wood lintel but the stone work wow the stonework is fantastic that is impressive it is a huge building i wish we had a small little rick to make this stand next to it because this is mammoth i'm gonna go stand next to it ricky will do some camera work from there and you'll see just how huge it is this is a door but this is not a door for people this is a door for ogres i couldn't even get the whole building in and look at the stonework beautiful double cut rocks and it is huge okay now i can get the whole building in it is and who said in the old days they didn't have entertainment beautiful fire pit with shade and the palm trees they've planted really nice palm trees around it so you got your beautiful palm trees then your fire pit and of course a corn grinder i don't know why i said of course because of course not a corn grinder isn't it well maybe looks like a watermelon grinder who knows mystery mysteries still to be solved this little building here is not the manager's office because this one is the manager's office wow did the manager of the sugarcane have a really nice office or what okay i'm not sure if it was the manager's office after all or maybe he kept money in here that probably makes sense that's why you have these huge big iron bars you probably kept money okay so maybe the manager was also holding the funds to pay the workers yeah that would make sense they have these glass windows and i'm sure they were original but look up there there's the chimney we're gonna go have a look at that but for right now i've just spotted a river and you know what rivers have where the rivers have fry look at that bridge no look at it that is an awesome bridge how do you get down to it i don't think there's any way to get down to it but look at that bridge and the lily pads what a picturesque perfect spot you can just see the size of wall that you need to build sometimes to withstand the water flow especially the closer you get to the coast better than the bridge the sluice we're gonna go see the sluice these are not the giant water lilies like you get at the national botanical guards these are just regular water leaves but we've got a great bridge and we've got a sluice now i'm going to show you something that is how you tame a river what is that that wall is epic they've really done something special there this is obviously a place where you can build up water wow this is the sluice i promised you right here looking a little bit a little bit modern on top of this beautiful rock work maybe the old one got washed away but wow look at that wall just beautiful you can see where the original sluice was this is the more modern one with the the crank handle and then that beautiful stonework going next to the sugarcane field is like a field factory it's like one of the biggest purple trees i've seen in mauritius brian disappeared and i'm not walking through all of that clouds rolling in over the mountain i will pause now and let ricky catch up still want to go and see the the tower but then we have to make our way to the next place wow what a great what a great place yeah and they do hiking and mountain biking and and reintroducing species including the kestrel and a type of pigeon the pink pigeon yes the pink pigeon and they are removing things that are not endemic so they pulling out a lot of plants that shouldn't be here and planting them with plants that should so that one day we can maybe introduce introduce some of our old friends who knows maybe de-extinction will work and we'll get a dodo back and if they do it will happen here oh look at those dramatic black clouds we stick around we might get to see those rivers fill up i'm sure it's stormy out there yeah all around us whatever our place is the way home everywhere else has the black storm i think ground port is telling us go home time to go you've been you've been here for hours now you've seen enough the only place left is home yeah it appears sugarcane is more important than deer this is the monument to the introduction of deer and mauritius well everyone surf's up but that's really funny that's really funny because surf means deer in russian you get it anyway they were introduced by the dutch in 1639. seems like uh there's a monument to everything in grand port but i suppose it makes sense because the dutch came in and introduced so many things and that's the first we're on pause i just see something over here hey everyone look it's the it's the monument to brian discovers mauritius i need to put a monument up for everything in ports grandpa in grand port including me and you got two ears growing out of you wait let me reposition a bit two ears okay now you don't have that's better i'll take a photo like this and add it to google maps okay okay video shot welcome to brian discovers mauritius without the ears coming out his head and this is exactly how i want the monument in grandpa to look toady love grandport thanks rick for my birthday present best ever can't wait till my next birthday because we just learned that the dutch arrived here in 15 something or other 68 1598 which is so long ago but there's a secret mauritius is holding and i get to find out what it is soon there's a pyramid an actual pyramid and it's not the only one there are more there are more pyramids we are coming to find out what happened with the pyramids next birthday present i promise wow wow wow that is so cool i can't wait you
2021-01-13 05:34
