Seychelles & Dubai {Personal}

Traveling is something that I absolutely LOVE to do.  It just so happens that my sister is now a flight attendant for an amazing airline company, Emirates, and being related to an Emirates flight attendant has some perks!   By perks, I mean discounted air fare!   Back in July my brother and I were fortunate enough to use the family discount to fly to Dubai to visit her, and from there we took a mini trip to the island of Seychelles.  I can’t say I was very familiar with Seychelles before we started looking for places to travel to that were near Dubai, but it is such an amazing destination.

To give you a reference, here’s where Seychelles is located.   It is made up of an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean.  It’s main attraction would definitely have to be it’s beaches, with the turquoise waters and powder sand beaches it feels like paradise.  (Fun fact: Prince William and Kate must have thought so too because they honeymooned there on a private island after their wedding!)

While we visited for our SHORT trip, we stayed on the main island of Mahé.  I had wanted to visit some of the smaller islands but because of our limited time and the limited transportation to get to them, we opted to just stay on Mahé and I don’t regret that a bit.  Mahé was beautiful!

A view looking at Anse Royale.  Can you believe how blue the water is!?

Our first day in Seychelles we enjoyed lunch on the beach, accompanied by a cold Seybrew – the official beer made in Seychelles.

On our second day in Seychelles we took a tour with an amazing tour guide, Alrick.  He showed us so many parts of Mahé that we never would have been able to see on our own.  He also pointed out these creepy looking spiders, apparently named palm spiders because most of them were easily as large, if not larger, than your hand!  (and yes, all those specks are spiders!)

Alrick found us some fresh starfruit to try!  It was delicious.

One of the stops on our tour was in the capital city of Victoria, at the market.  There were plenty of interesting things for sale!

Salted fish anyone?

Couldn’t believe how much of the produce I had never even seen before!

We spent the rest of the day enjoy just a handful of the many beaches Seychelles has to offer….

Stud of a brother on the left, gorgeous sister on the right 🙂

And me!

Ricky learned how to crack open a coconut he picked up on the beach.

We took a drive up the mountains where some fog had come in.  Unfortunately we missed out on some views but it did make for some cool foggy photos.

Sunset was amazing.

Our last full day in Seychelles was spent relaxing at the beach.  Can you blame us??

One more killer sunset.  A storm was rolling in so the sky looked incredible!

After our short visit in Seychelles ended we flew back to Dubai where we spent one day seeing a handful of the sights in Dubai.  It was quite the contrast from Seychelles.  Not to mention it was right in the middle of July, I felt like my shoes were going to melt to the sidewalk.

The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa!

We spent the evening at the Dubai Mall and watched quite a few of the fountain water shows.

The fountain shows were set to music and so much fun to watch!

I decided that Dubai definitely reminded me of a city straight out of Star Wars.   Probably because of the desert and all the high tech buildings.  Our time in both places were so incredibly short – but hopefully with the family discount we will have the chance to make another visit soon!