One of the best features of this area is doubtless its wonderful climate. 350 days sunshine, glorious sunsets, a long and white sandy coastline, well protected by coral reefs, with all that, this is indeed one of the favourite and most exciting places in Mauritius. Flic en Flac is doubtlessly the busiest of its coastal towns, featuring many hotels and combining great beach life; myriad water sports activities and a breezy atmosphere with a budding nightlife. Further down the beach, Tamarin is also fast developing, the Tamarina Golf Estate and Riverside sports centre adding to the lifestyle in this once surfer and hippie-colony and nowadays gone posh environment. Dolphin watching is the magic activity and so far the poor bedraggled sea mammals have been surprisingly patient about it. Of course there is also some surfing going on and when the waves are big, a crowd comes watching the braves in the pounding waves.
As the vast West embraces various microclimates, it extends over the winding roads leading to charming mountainous Chamarel with pineapples, coffee fields and coloured earth, the dry, African savannah-like stretch between fishermen villages Case Noyale and La Gaulette, deep sea fishing paradise Black River, around towering La Tourelle Mountain, right to the Martello Tower in La Preneuse, the salt pans at Tamarin, the hotel-studded beaches of Wolmar and Flic en Flac, up the coast to Albion, where a red and white striped lighthouse warns seafarers from towering cliffs.
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With all its great features, the West seems to be just too good to be true. This is what some developers must have said to themselves when they started to develop the area. So they built hotels, developed shopping centres and malls, spattered once pristine mountainsides with houses and villas and threatened to even dig up the salt pans. Thanks goodness, the West is really so beautiful that up until now, they were not able to cause devastating damage.