The Best Beach in the World?

Fly from Paris or London or Frankfurt to Seychelles' Mahe Island.

Change planes for Praslin Island.

Catch the ferry there to La Passe village on La Digue Island.

Rent a bike and ride south two miles.

Keep going past Big Rock. You'll know the beach when you see it.

How could you not? Anse Source d'Argent (French for "silver spring cove") is a miraculous meeting of sea and land, with all the necessary ingredients in perfect measure and arrangement. Huge pink granite boulders, smooth enough to climb barefoot and sunbathe on, separate the beach into a string of secret scalloped coves. Forty-foot palms defy gravity, arching over water so transparent you don't need a snorkel mask to see the fish and coral, and the sand is as fine as flour. Across the channel, Praslin looks as though it could have been created by Disney. Once you get here, you will also know why you came halfway around the world when there are so many other inviting beaches closer to home.

The Seychelles is a milky way of an archipelago made up of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles east of Kenya. Mountainous Mahe, home of the international airport, diminutive Praslin and minuscule La Digue are the main islands. Others are coral flyspecks populated only by giant tortoises and sooty terns. The sounds and smells are Caribbean, all exotic bird song and tropical spices.

Colonized first by the English and then the French, this country of 80,000 has become a copacetic puree of Indians, Africans, Chinese and Europeans who do not identify one another by race or skin color. The language is Creole, but children learn English and French in school to prepare for jobs in the tourism industry, which annually yields a quarter of the country's gross national product.

French, German, English and Italian vacationers fleeing the crowded, increasingly middle-class Mediterranean set the tone. But only 150,000 visitors are admitted each year, part of a less-is-more approach to an industry that seeks to attract only the most affluent visitors. This country, where few buildings are taller than two stories, feels more like a village. The treasury of flora and fauna has room to perpetuate itself; 42% of the islands' land mass is given over to ecological preserves--and a deserted beach almost as idyllic as Anse Source d'Argent is never far away.

The biggest islands in the chain, such as Mahe, are granite, thought by some to be the remains of the lost "super continent" of Gondwanaland, submerged beneath the Indian Ocean millions of years ago when the African and Indian tectonic plates separated. Granite mountains, cliffs and boulders give the Seychelles a sense of substance and visual singularity. In some ways, they are more reminiscent of islands in the Gulf of Maine than volcanic sputterings such as Maui or Bora-Bora.

But comparisons soon fall apart, because the lost, lovely Seychelles are too off-the-charts to be like anyplace else. If Noah's ark had landed on an islet in the Indian Ocean instead of on Mt. Ararat, it would have come to rest in these islands. With flawless weather, jungles and seas full of strange animals and plants, an educated, thriving populace and no neighbors to bring strife, the Seychelles seems like a place where a world washed clean could get a second chance.

The virtually pristine natural environment of the Seychelles and its opportunities for fantasy vacations on nearly deserted tropical islets have long been fodder for glossy American travel magazines. Presumably, visitors want and can afford the luxury castaway experience, a sort of "Gilligan's Island" with haute cuisine and hot running water. The islets of Silhouette and Frigate have just one lodge, with room rates of $500 to $1,500 a night. Felicite, a 680-acre private island near La Digue, with accommodations for 16, a tennis court, swimming pool, yacht and full staff, rents for $15,000 a night.

By visiting Mahe, Praslin and La Digue, the country's three most developed islands, staying in relatively modest places and walking or riding a bike when I could, I saw a different Seychelles, and, I think, a more real one.

I didn't plan the trip myself or travel independently, as I prefer. The Seychelles is not that kind of place. Two or three Seychelles tourist agencies apparently have a lock on visitor business; their vans are the most common vehicles on the roads. A small American tour company, Florida-based New Adventures, which works with one of these, booked my air, sea and transportation, transfers and accommodations for two nights on each of the large islands. When I arrived at the airport on Mahe, I found myself in the capable hands of Travel Services Seychelles, whose agents suggested organized tour options and ushered me around as if I were a VIP.

I flew last spring from Paris to Mahe, leaving Charles de Gaulle Airport at night, arriving as the sun burnished the granite cliffs above the town of Victoria the next morning. In the arrivals area of the airport, where an old woman was industriously sweeping the floor with a palm frond, I heard the patter of Creole.

Most visitors to Mahe stay at Beau Vallon beach, with its long strand and small, sleepy resorts, on the northwest coast, across the mountainous interior from the airport. But I had reservations at Valmer Resort, in the hinterlands near the island's rugged southern tip. A Travel Services Seychelles van took me to the little resort--a contemporary villa with a breakfast terrace, swimming pool and four comfortable rooms--close to stunning horseshoe-shaped Lazare Bay but little else.

Mahe has 90 miles of surfaced roads (unlike other islands in the chain, some of which have none at all), and my hotel was isolated from the sights I wanted to see, such as Victoria town, the mountains and Beau Vallon beach. So I had rented a jeep, which was waiting for me at the resort. It rode like a cement mixer, had a sticky clutch and turned my travels on Mahe's treacherously cracked and winding one-lane roads into wild, wonderful adventures.

After a time, I didn't mind the isolation. Artists' studios, sleepy villages and smashing beaches were hidden like scavenger-hunt prizes all along the island's precipitous southwest coast. I favored those that are hardest to get to, like Anse Intendance (anse is French for "cove"), about five miles south of my hotel, reached by the kind of road that persistently makes you think you should turn back.

Anse Intendance is a deceptive beauty: deserted, quiet, pristine. But watch the waves. They'll seduce you into the surf, then smash you up and leave you like flotsam on the beach. I pulled a hamstring muscle bodysurfing there, which made driving all the more challenging.

I toured the island the next day, driving up the west coast as far as Ternay Bay, where the narrow road clings to the cliffs and the driver of a van I met head-on waved me past, saying, "You've earned your pilot's license."

At the end of the road is a dilapidated military youth camp, a remnant of the country's experiment with socialism from 1977 to 1991, before pressure from the international community and the Catholic church made President France Albert Rene introduce a limited form of democratic pluralism.

From there, I crossed the island's mountainous spine, stopping to taste the brews at the Tea Tavern and tour the plantation and factory, where the fermenting and sifting machines look like something out of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Farther up the road, the ruins of a 19th century Anglican mission school for freed African slave children reminded me that slavery was abolished here more than 25 years before it was outlawed in the United States.