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106 OUR RESORTS THE ART OF BEAUTIFUL BEACHCOMBER RESORT & SPA SHANDRANI “Hush …The hands caress and relax my body, with the yellow canaries and the cardinals in attendance. I hear, and I feel, the rustle of the wind in the palm trees. I give myself up to Artee’s deliciously soothing open-air massage, under the cane roof of the straw hut.With my body free from stress, and smooth with amber oil, my thoughts take wing and the world extends its horizons. ” T There are those who choose the Shandrani Beachcomber to celebrate an engagement, a reunion, or a wedding anniversary – the first (cotton) perhaps, or the eleventh (coral) or twenty-fifth (silver). They prepare to experience the magic of special occasions celebrated in the Beachcomber resorts, officiated by the Mauritian Artisans. There are those who have come to the island for the first time and choose the Shandrani Beach- comber as a gateway to the unknown. You can easily recognise them by their amazement at so much beauty, somuch attention and refinement: there’s the hotel, its outbuildings, its round swimming pools like mirrors of the sky. There’s the garden ringing with birdsong and its paths that seek the sea. There are the bare creeks – not morning-after bare, but before-anything- ever bare. They line the resort and watch over the secrets of the undersea life in Blue Bay, the island’s most beautiful nature reserve. There’s the benevolence of the Beachcomber artisans, their unparalleled expertise – culinary, athletic, artistic, or therapeutic. But you have chosen the Shandrani Beach- comber as a last stopping-point before you leave. A break, a truce, before going back to the hyper- active western lifestyle. You, more than anyone, will savour the peace of this place, the calm, the contagious affability of your hosts. The word ‘fraternity’ seems to recover its meaning. A last motionless journey under a hut open to the mildness of a late afternoon. Hammam, a body scrub with crushed vanilla pods, a shiatsu massage. Now you are at peace, you are ready. Calmly – the airport is only fifteenminutes away – you prepare to say your goodbyes. It is not easy to leave an islandyouhave loved, or aplacewhere you have been made to feel so at home. Before you go, you take care to pick up a shell fromyour favourite beach – not those around the lagoon, a sigh from the sea, but the only one that is not protected by the coral reef and has no fear of the ocean waves. Instinctively you put it into your pocket. It’s your talisman. From time to time, you close your hand around the shell, as if to reassure yourself that the dream was true.