Big Pete has a habit of creeping up on you when you least expect it. The 90-year-old is a natural flirt and the closest thing to a celebrity on Desroches Island, in an isolated archipelago in the Indian Ocean. But I’m not talking about a nonagenarian of the human kind, rather a giant Aldabra tortoise.
Desroches is one of the Amirante Islands, which make up the Outer Islands of the Seychelles. It is a wild and windswept place; door to door, it takes some 24 hours to get there from London, but once you do, you instantly forget the long journey. Your shoulders drop, your shoes come off and it’s like you’ve stepped into the pages of .
While the Seychelles is already known for a handful of smart hotels found on its far-flung islands — such as Frégate and North Island — Desroches still feels firmly off the tourist path, with an unpolished essence about it, despite it being home to a sustainably minded Four Seasons resort. For many years, the skinny island, which stretches to just 5.5km long and 1km wide, was simply a coconut plantation, producing around 20,000 of them a month for coconut oil production.
Nowadays, other than the resort, there’s a small Creole village and not much else, apart from Big Pete and his companions — 150 giant tortoises — who potter freely around. Big Pete (Photo: Angelina Villa-Clarke) “Big Pete is the most outgoing and the largest of the tortoises,” says Nasreen Khan, one of the conservationists working with the Island Conservation S.
