With fairways forced to follow the natural contours there are blissfully few signs of the bulldozer, ensuring minimal disruption to the island’s status quo.
Deer aside, the One&Only Le Touessrok Golf Course remains a haven for fauna such as mongoose, turtle, heron, pheasant and Mauritian Parakeet, and flora such as the leggy banyan trees, and hibiscus and ficus flowers – not forgetting the exotic scaviola beach plant chosen as the emblem to adorn the golf merchandise.
Behind the scenes a vast team of 60 greenkeepers and landscapers wield $1 million of maintenance kit while sticking religiously to organic fertilisers and chemicals under Audubon Society management practices. There is even a special nursery cultivating rare indigenous plants to prevent the threatened ebony trees and gastonia plants from extinction.
The course’s remote location, both locally and internationally, will ensure that it will remain one of golf’s best-kept secrets, while immediately joining the A-list of truly cult far-flung classics such as Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island and Sand Hills in Nebraska.
Certainly there will be those who, after dispensing a sleeve of Titleists into the canyon fronting (and indeed backing) the 18th green, will argue that this layout will overawe the average player that Le Touessrok is attempting to attract. In that respect, there are plans to widen three greens whose putting surfaces are barely ten paces wide in places. Others will curse the ‘lava lottery’, where shots can kick cruelly into beds, banks and gullies of exposed volcanic rock from which there is no local relief (as at, say, the desert courses of Arizona). To avoid racking up a cricket score by playing ping pong, it’s a case of taking your medicine: stroke and often distance, too.
One&Only Le Touessrok Golf Course has already earned a reputation as the toughest, as well the most beautiful, of Mauritius’ five courses. It will be intriguing to see how the slope raters formally quantify it when they visit later this year, and how the world’s top tour pros (not least Langer himself) fare when the first big money is on offer. A high-profile skins game organised by IMG (who, incidentally, have the course maintenance contract) is a possibility for late 2004, while even the European Tour may well be tempted within a few years. In the meantime, the finals of the World Corporate Golf Challenge will be held here in
June, although you can bet there won’t be much business
done on the golf course that week.
As you recuperate later on Ilot Mangénie after a spot of ferry-hopping, you will surely reflect on the sensory

overload, just as Langer predicted, with the course’s simultaneous mix of heady seduction and technical drama likely to leave you a chastened, but wiser, golfer. And on your inevitable return, you’d be forgiven for imagining your friendly Mauritian boatman as Charon, the mythical ferryman, rowing you ominously across the River Styx to this tropical golfing Underworld.
It certainly is another world.