The night before our scheduled arrival in Port Louis the captain announced that he got news from the owner of the vessel that we will bypass Mauritius and proceed directly to Cape Town.

That was a major blow to the entire ship board community. Especially my family, because we had been planning to get off the ship and stay for seven days with the Chapman family. My mom, dad and aunt had been working really hard to get all the details pulled together.

If we had entered the port in Mauritius their government would have seized the ship, and it is possible the ship would have not been able to leave for thirty days. We wouldn’t have minded though because we wouldn’t have been on the ship.  We would have been on vacation and then flown to Cape Town to meet the ship again.

The executive dean decided that the day everyone was supposed to be in Mauritius for would be a “Snow Day”. It was a huge shock to everyone, because we didn’t even get twelve hour notice. It took a few days to take it in and realize that this wasn’t a joke and we weren’t going to Mauritius.

The snow day was fun but I would guess that Mauritius would have been more. One of the things that a lot of people found very annoying is how far it is to Mauritius from the U.S. and how long it would take to travel there.

We later found out that the owner of the ship had passed away in January.  There was a bill that had been left unpaid since the prior June.  Apparently, the contractor who had yet to be paid decided to serve legal papers on the ship in order to collect the money he was owed. The money he was owed was due the day we were to arrive in Mauritius.  Semester at Sea was not able to take the risk of the ship being delayed in port while this was being sorted out.  So, the skipped stopping there.

We have been told the bill has been paid.  We did manage to get in and back out of Cape Town, South Africa, since that time.  I guess the bill was paid.  We missed our vacation.  But, we keep moving to the next city.  It was a huge surprise that we could not stop on this island.