A hundred and fifteen islands. Three of them have the boats.
Which day trip actually lands on Curieuse, what the Cat Cocos crossing costs, and whether the Vallée de Mai earns a whole morning.
The boat day, the marine park, the palm valley, the crossing.
Four bookings a first Seychelles trip is built around. What each costs, and what the people who took it said afterwards.
01The big boat dayPraslin: Curieuse & St. Pierre Full-Day Boat Trip with LunchCurieuse for the tortoises, St Pierre for the snorkelling, lunch grilled on the sand between them.
02The park off VictoriaSt. Anne Marine Park, Moyenne & Cerf Island Tour with LunchMoyenne and Cerf inside Sainte Anne, a short crossing out of the capital. The easiest good day on the water from Mahé.
03The Praslin morningPraslin: Vallée de Mai and Anse Lazio Beach Full-day TourCoco de mer palms in the Vallée de Mai, then Anse Lazio for the afternoon. Both on one island.
04The Praslin ferryCat Cocos: Mahe to Praslin Island Fast FerryCat Cocos from Mahé to Praslin, an hour each way. Book it before the day you need it.
Mahé for the mountains, Praslin for the palms, La Digue for the bicycles.
Six starting points and the best day out from each: the airport island and its interior, two forest reserves, the marine park off Victoria, and the granite islets you can only reach by hull.
The reef starts about four metres from where you are standing.
Sainte Anne is a national park with six islands inside it and a shelf shallow enough to stand on. St Pierre is a single granite thumb ringed with coral. Reef safaris feed the fish while you watch. None of it needs a certificate, and most of it needs a boat.
Mahé is where you land, and it is not the island to skip.
Everything on Mahé →
Three quarters of the country’s tours leave from here. A granite spine down the middle with cloud forest on top, Victoria at the foot of it, and the marine park a short boat ride offshore. These three carry more travellers than anything else on the island.
The half-day out of Victoria
Beau Vallon and Victoria both put boats out to the marine park and the islets around it. Half a day covers the crossing, two snorkel stops and lunch, and you are back before the afternoon cloud builds over the peaks.
Six islands, one shallow park
The park was the first in the Indian Ocean and it sits twenty minutes off the capital. Moyenne has tortoises and two graves, Cerf has the beach, and the shallow water between them is where the fish are.
Morne Blanc and the cloud forest
The trail climbs out of the tea plantation to a granite bluff a few hundred metres above the west coast. It is short, it is almost vertical, and the view runs from Beau Vallon round to Ternay when the cloud lifts.
The Seychelles days out that book solid.
Every tour we have reviewed →More travellers take these than anything else in the country, and each one earns the slot for a different reason.
1
Praslin: Curieuse & St. Pierre Full-Day Boat Trip with Lunch
Review of Praslin’s Curieuse and St. Pierre boat trip, with snorkeling, giant tortoises, a Creole BBQ, mangrove hike, and hotel transfers.
From · $93
Read our review →
2
Curieuse Guided Tour, St Pierre, BBQ & 2 Snorkel Stops
from $112
3
St. Anne Marine Park, Moyenne & Cerf Island Tour with Lunch
from $92
4
Mahé: Customizable Private Tour of Island with Driver
5
Praslin: Curieuse & St Pierre Island Day Trip with Barbecue
from $88
6
Curieuse and St. Pierre Islands Day Trip with BBQ Lunch
from $85
7
Mahé: Saint-Anne Marine Park and Moyenne Island Cruise
from $166
8
Praslin: Curieuse & St-Pierre Boat Adventure with Snorkeling
from $56
Praslin keeps a forest that was old before anyone found it.
The Vallée de Mai is six thousand coco de mer palms in a valley the size of a farm, and the seed they drop is the largest of any plant on earth. Anse Lazio is twenty minutes away on the other side of the island. Most people do both before lunch.
Every Praslin day out →
Nothing here is far. Everything here needs a boat or a plane.
Cat Cocos runs Mahé to Praslin in an hour and carries on to La Digue. The inter-island boats do the short Praslin hop in fifteen minutes. Book the crossing at the same time as the tour on the other end, because the timetable, not the tour, decides the day.
- 1Cat Cocos: Mahe to Praslin Island Fast Ferryfrom $72
- 2Cat Rose: Praslin Island / La Digue Island Fast Ferryfrom $18
- 3Private Transfer from PRASLIN Ferry Terminal
Every Seychelles week has one big day on the water. Pick which.
Three shapes of the same day out, what it costs to get on board, and which island you sail from.
Seychelles is expensive, and the day trips are where it shows.
Every tour on the site grouped by price. Half of them land between eighty and a hundred and sixty dollars a head, which is the going rate for a full day on a boat with lunch on it.
Ferry crossings, the half-day snorkel runs out of Beau Vallon, and a guided morning in the Vallée de Mai.
The standard full day: Curieuse and St Pierre with a barbecue, or Sainte Anne with lunch and a glass-bottom stop.
A driver and a car for the whole of Mahé, chartered catamarans, and the long runs out to Sister and Coco.
Three things that happen in Seychelles and almost nowhere else.
Palm-fringed beaches are everywhere in the tropics. A nut that takes seven years to ripen, a hundred-year-old tortoise that walks up to you, and an island run entirely for its birds are not.
The Coco de Mer Palm
The coco de mer grows wild in two places on earth and both of them are on Praslin. The seed weighs up to twenty kilos, takes six or seven years to ripen and is the largest produced by any plant anywhere. The Vallée de Mai is a few hectares of them standing in a valley that has not been logged, and the guides can tell you which trees are male and which are female from a hundred metres off.
- 1Praslin: Vallée de Mai and Anse Lazio Beach Full-day Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 315 reviews
- 2Vallee de Mai Tour (From Praslin)★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 38 reviews
- 3Full Day Discovery Tour of Vallee de Mai and Anse Lazio on Praslin Island★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 10 reviews
The Curieuse Tortoises
Aldabra giant tortoises live loose on Curieuse, not behind a fence, and there are a few hundred of them. They were moved there from the outer atoll and they graze the coastal scrub where the boats land. Some are older than the country. They will walk straight up to a picnic and wait, which is the part nobody warns you about.
- 1Praslin: Curieuse & St. Pierre Full-Day Boat Trip with Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 1,352 reviews
- 2Curieuse Guided Tour, St Pierre, BBQ & 2 Snorkel Stops★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 983 reviews
- 3Praslin: Curieuse & St Pierre Island Day Trip with Barbecue★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 572 reviews
Cousin Island
Cousin was bought outright in 1968 to save the last Seychelles warblers, and it has been run as a reserve ever since. Landings are limited, there is no jetty, and you go ashore off the bow of the boat onto the sand. Warblers, magpie robins and fody all came back, and the whole island is now dense enough with nesting terns that you walk under them.
- 1From Praslin: Cousin, Curieuse & St Pierre Islands Day Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 152 reviews
- 2Island Adventure Cousin, Curieuse & St Pierre with BBQ Bliss★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 51 reviews
- 3Full Day Excursion of Cousin, Curieuse and St Pierre Islands from Praslin Island★★★★★★★★★★ 3.0 · 16 reviews
Four Seychelles bookings that will not wait for you.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast the day before. These four run on landing quotas, closed days and a ferry timetable that takes no interest in your flight.
- 01From Praslin: Cousin, Curieuse & St Pierre Islands Day TourCousin is a special reserve with a cap on daily landings and it is closed at weekends. The boat only goes when there is a slot.
- 02Praslin: Vallée de Mai and Anse Lazio Beach Full-day TourThe Vallée de Mai gates open early and the guided walks fill first. It is a UNESCO site on a small island with one road to it.
- 03Cat Cocos: Mahe to Praslin Island Fast FerryThe fast ferry runs to a fixed timetable and sells out in the school holidays. A tour booked on Praslin is only as good as the seat that gets you there.
- 04Praslin: Curieuse & St. Pierre Full-Day Boat Trip with LunchThe Curieuse boats leave Praslin together in the morning and come back together. Miss the departure and there is no second run.
May to September the southeast wind decides what floats.
The trade season is cooler and drier and the diving visibility is better, but it also puts a swell on the east coast, drives seaweed onto the beaches that face it, and cancels the longer crossings at short notice. The answer is the same every time: move west, or move inland and go up.
Three islands carry the whole country’s tour list.
Mahé has the mountains and the capital, Praslin has the palm forest, La Digue has the bicycles and the best-photographed beach in the ocean. Everything else is a day trip off one of them.
By island — and the water between them
By kind of day — hull, reef, forest or road
Mahé, Sainte Anne, Praslin, La Digue: the order almost everybody takes.
CousinThe newest Seychelles tour reviews.
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