This month’s Chasing Clouds takes the series to the Seychelles — a granite archipelago in the western Indian Ocean where the sky changes by the hour. Across two weeks on Mahé, Praslin, and La Digue, the clouds did most of the storytelling: low morning cloud over the inner islands, sudden afternoon squalls trailing rainbows across the channels, and the kind of pink-lit cumulus at dusk that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and just watch.
Home base for the Mahé leg was Blue Hill Guesthouse, perched on the slopes above Victoria with a view that ran from the granite peaks of the interior all the way down to the cargo port and the islands of Sainte Anne Marine Park. The light shifted constantly — clear blue mornings, low cloud snagging on the mountain behind the property, and long pastel evenings over the harbor.
From Mahé, the trip moved out to sea aboard the Sea Bird, a classic two-masted sailing yacht working the inner islands. Most evenings ended at anchor off the west coast of La Digue, near Anse Severe, with the sun dropping behind Praslin and the day’s last light running across flat water. These are the moments the Chasing Clouds series exists for.
The skies in the inner Seychelles never repeat. Crossing the channel between Praslin and La Digue, a single towering cumulus caught the last pink light of the day and held it. Other evenings brought softer pastels — grey and rose and pale gold layered over a darkening sea, with the silhouettes of small offshore islands breaking the horizon. On the wild east coast of La Digue, the granite boulders sit under their own weather, scoured by surf rolling in straight from the open Indian Ocean.
Back on the dive boats off Mahé’s northwest coast, the trade winds delivered their daily routine: a brief shower, a shift in light, and a rainbow dropping out of a passing squall over the granite shoreline near Port Launay Marine Park. In the Seychelles, you don’t really chase the clouds — they come to you.
Every Chasing Clouds trip eventually comes back to a runway. Seychelles International Airport sits right on the coast of Mahé, with the Indian Ocean on one side and the granite peaks behind. Even on the apron, the sky doesn’t stop performing — broken cumulus stacking out over the water as aircraft load up for the long flights back to Addis Ababa, Mumbai, and beyond.
The last frame is from the terrace at Blue Hill on the final night — Victoria lit up below, the harbor cranes glowing, and a heavy night sky pressing down over Sainte Anne. A different kind of cloudscape, but the same restless Indian Ocean weather that ran through the entire trip.
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