Seychelles: Press
Tim Ecott takes his family to an exclusive island resort that welcomes both big celebrities and small troublemakers.
From the Jacuzzi in the garden of our private villa I watch a pair of snow-white fairy terns cruising through the cloudless Seychelles sky.
The bright light makes their tail feathers seem translucent as they descend, ferrying insects to their offspring perched on a low branch in the undergrowth 20 yards from where I sit. I don’t think of myself as a Jacuzzi type but I am supervising my three-year-old son, Morgan, who insists on swimming in “the pond”. During the hottest part of the day on Frégate Island he is happiest there, occasionally retreating to the sitting room of our villa for a cool drink in the air-conditioned lounge.
For a moment, the tranquillity is interrupted by the gentle “whump whump” of a helicopter’s rotor blades, the tell-tale sign that more guests are arriving on the island. In a few minutes the chopper takes off again, and it’s clear that my son finds peering at it through the trees less exciting than I do. So young and so blasé. He is keener on the private golf-buggy with which each villa is provided, and persistently demands to be allowed to drive it on the short pootling rides to the main hotel area or down to the marina when I go diving. Morgan’s transportation fetish is well catered for on Frégate, as he has also been provided with a smart tricycle from the hotel play-riim, for which the marble and teak floors of our villa lounge make a highly suitable race-track.
In my experience, Seychelles can be awkward with small children; the temperature can climb to 33°C or 34°C, with a strength-sapping humidity of 80 per cent. On the flight from London we spotted other couples with tiny babies manhandling their push-chairs through the lounge. Were they going to push them along the beach? When my daughter Ilona was a baby we lived here, and my wife found herself imprisoned indoors for much of the day because it was simply too hot to venture out. This trip was, in part, a chance to show Ilona the place where she spent her first two years, and which she barely remembers. Now, with two children in tow, we expected it to be fairly hard work.
The accommodation on this privately-owned island is decidedly, and genuinely, child-friendly – an uncommon quality in a luxury hideaway. Frégate is, after all, where Paul McCartney and Heather Mills came for their honeymoon, and where Pierce Brosnan hired all 16 villas after finishing one of the James Bond films. Reputedly, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston have been considering a booking; Bill and Melinda Gates were recent guests. It may attract the rich and famous, but Frégate is not glitzy or precious. Tasteful, comfortable and secluded, yes, but it is also an island devoted to nature.
Ilona, who is now seven wakes my wife and me with tales of how many giant millipedes she has found on the sun deck, picking them up fearlessly and placing them in the safety of bush where the birds will not spot them. She has made firm friends with Beate Sachse, the island’s resident ecologist, who has taken her into the forest in search of one of Frégate’s unique endemic insects, the giant tenebrionid beetle. The beetle is about two inches long and a sort of armour-plated scarab. Beate also shows her terrapins, baby giant tortoises and the difference between a Seychelles skink and a bronze-eyed gecko.
Keen to show me what she has learned, Ilona takes me into the forest one morning and picks up a stick with which she scratches a line in the leaf mould that covers the ground. “Watch this Daddy!” she whispers proudly, and a few seconds later a small black bird with white flashes on its wings hops down to where the scratch has uncovered some juicy insects. Just like the English robin, the Seychelles magpie robin has had to be rescued from the edge of extinction – largely by the owners of Frégate Island. Five years ago there were fewer than 40 individuals of this species left; now there are almost 100.
Frégate is about 40 miles – 20 minutes by helicopter – from Seychelles’ main island, Mahé. One of the picturesque granite islands, it is no more than a mile square with seven bleach-blond beaches, acres of thick tropical forest and good offshore diving. The 16 villas are all built of teak, have huge bedrooms and a separate living room, two bathrooms, Jacuzzi, sun deck and outside garden showers. Everything has been designed to maximise the guest’s privacy, and if you choose to hide in your villa for your entire stay, all meals will be brought to your door. But few can resist the temptations of a private dinner by candlelight on the beach. This is not a place for the budget conscious, but Frégate is and all-inclusive island resort. A charge is made for alcohol but not for nightly baby-sitting – in our case and offer too good to miss.
There are other families here, too, calming our fears that in such an “exclusive” resort we would become pariahs as invaders of the peace for which people had paid a premium. After one attempt to join the other guests for breakfast in Frégate’s dining room we opted for room service. We somehow didn’t feel it was fair for honeymoon couples fondly contemplating procreation to witness Morgan scattering food from the immaculate buffet and screaming when we attempted to restrain him.
According to Patrick Brizio, English manager of the Frégate Island resort, making the island child-friendly is just one more challenge in a place where anything the client wants, the client gets. Whenever possible, families with small children are allocated villas 1 and 2, because they are set in large gardens rather than perched atop Frégate’s spectacular granite cliffs.
“We don’t have a “kids’ club” as such, but there is a lot to do on the island”, says Brizio, “and youngsters really love the nature side of activities. At Easter we put egg hunts and at Christmas there are carols in the island chapel.”
Of the 16 villas, five contained families with children during our stay, and as far as we could tell, none had brought their nannies. In the heat of the day we had the option of installing the children in front of the television, with a wide choice of DVDs from the hotel library. Banish all visions of a few dog-eared German novels from your mind; this library has a serious collection of fiction from Margaret Atwood to Marcel Proust. About a hundred music and movie DVDs for children and adults are also available, although I noticed with some alarm that the price of forgetting to return one is $25.
My son usually finds a way of testing the sanity of his parents on holiday, and of testing the reserve and patience of hoteliers. At a luxurious New England cottage he once managed to “hide” two TV remote controls and the infra-red garage-door control. In south Africa it was keys to the security gates. All of these items disappeared. Permanently. Car keys and credit cards routinely go missing for shorter periods. I now expect to spend at least part of any holiday trawling through the contents of noisome dustbins in search of vital items.
On Frégate we almost got away with it. When we left, the Jacuzzi still worked, as did the television, DVD player and stereo. Apart form a small scare with the remote control for the air conditioning, which turned up in a waste-paper basket, we thought we were off scot-free. But at the last minute we had our chance to put Patrick Brizio’s team to the test. While Ilona and I were off on a nature walk in the forest, my son locked himself in the ladies’ loo in the sumptuously designed main lobby area of the hotel. The chamfuta-teak door was four inches thick, and the lock and handle were solid brass. No spare key could be found and it took precisely an hour of hacking, chiselling and hammering – and screaming from within – to break down the door. Bearing in mind that everything on the island has been imported from thousand of miles away at exorbitant cost, the resulting carnage wasn’t a pretty sight. Could we offer to pay for the damage? “Not at all” came the reply. “We’re just sorry it happened”.
As our helicopter took off to return us to Mahé there was a delegation from the hotel staff to wave us away. I can’t be sure it wasn’t a relief I saw on their faces at our departure, and I couldn’t linger on the view as I was frantically trying to restrain Morgan’ s life-jacket, which he was releasing from its fastenings. Surely the manufacturers knew that six metal poppers and a canvas rip-cord would be child’s play to a three-year-old.
- Air Seychelles (01293 596 656; www.airseychelles.co.uk) flies Heathrow to Mahé via Zurich every Sunday from £535 in February
- British Airways (0845 773 3377; www.ba.com) flies twice weekly via Nairobi from £670 in February
- Seychelles Tourist Office (020 7202 6363; www.aspureasitgets.com)
- Frégate Island Private (00 248 282282; www.fregate.com). A villa for two costs from US$2,070 per night full board. A minimum of five nights’ stay is required. Additional charge for children up to five years of age, US$115 per night; 6-11, US$230; 12-18 US$390. Baby-sitting US$10 per hour.
- Seasons in Style offers seven nights at Frégate including economy-class flights on BA via Nairobi, from £6,075 per person full board, excluding alcohol. Holidays can also be booked through Elegant Resorts and ITC Classics.
Seychelles is warm all-year-round (24°C - 30°C) but the ideal time to go is April or October in between the monsoons when there is little rain and the sea is likely to be very calm. The south-east monsoon wind blows from May to October making humidity lower but seas rougher; the north-west wind blows between November and April. Offshore islands such as Frégate do not experience as much rainfall as Mahé.
Rainbow Tours offers six nights at Frégate including economy-class non-stop flights on Air Seychelles and private helicopter transfers, from £4485 per person full board, excluding alcohol.
Seven nights, including economy-class flights on BA via Nairobi and private helicopter transfers, cost from £5225 per person full board, excluding alcohol.