Is this paradise? was my first thought when my wife and I landed on the main island of Mahé in 1996. We had chosen the Seychelles as the perfect place to rinse the dust of the desert which we had collected in the weeks before on our voyage through Yemen, in those good old days when Yemen could still be considered Arabia Felix. We started in the ridiculously small capital of Victoria which did not consist of more than of a mini clocktower locals praised us as their „Big Ben”, a market which opened just once a week and some small shops mostly run by Indians. Banana trees were more numerous than houses. A ferry brought us to Praslin, the Seychelles’ second island. Our B&B on Baie Ste Anne had no beach but a private wooden porch from where we directly jumped into the Indian Ocean. All shades of blue and green, unbelievable combinations of colours we had never seen before. We bicycled to the northern tip of Praslin and first stopped at Vallée de Mai where Coco de Mer, probably the most erotic plant in the world, were growing in a cathedral-like forest of huge palm trees. Easy to see why sailors starved of female company, once considered it a welcome sight when they found one floating in the ocean: Its shape bears an uncanny resemblance to the human female pelvic…Rumour has it that even Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese explorer and my school time travel hero who led the first expedition that circumnavigated the world, had been turned on. We reached Anse Lazio and could not believe our luck. Framed by granite boulders, the sand was an incredible white, the water crystalline and azure. We swam with the rhythmic lull of the most gentle waves which I can still feel until today. At that time ,y travel career had just started and I had yet not seen many beaches in the world. But even nowadays, of all beaches I had the pleasure to splash, Anse Lazio is still my undisputed queen. I quickly learned hat paradisicial beaches like Anse Lazio or Anse Georgette which was just a short palm grove walk away from Lazio, were routine on the Seychelles. But for sheer photogenic beauty, they even were surpassed by another beach on neighbouring La Digue: Anse Source d’Argent, a surreal landscape where towering granite boulders contrast with green palms, pale-pink sands and turquoise waters. If I would ever suffer from visions of tropical paradise, the Seychelles would be my drug.