A trip aboard a private jet to Seychelles proves restorative and the perfect prelude to a stay highlighting the true reward of travel I nearly missed my flight from Mumbai to Dubai—airport chaos reigning across India. Wading through a crowd of disgruntled passengers, overworked airline staff, and the general din of commerce at the international terminal left me exhausted and sleepy. I exhaled on landing in Dubai, from where I was leaving for the Seychelles: an island I’ve dreamed of in every colour of blue.
Al Maktoum, Dubai’s private jet terminal, accessed by a 40-minute ride out of the main city, sits in dry, flat terrain; I dissolved into my book allowing the page to do its work. It was the first time in weeks I felt briefly unfindable. And when I arrived at the ExecuJet terminal at Al Maktoum, it was as if I’d crashed a cocktail party hosted by someone dauntingly smart and much minted. Noise stood cancelled. Low voices. Large rooms with floor-to-ceiling glass. A sofa, deep enough to disappear into, as the plane prepped for our departure.
Travel has become a mildly degrading experience—the dismissal of personal agency as you walk into a security check, the insulting removal of shoes and belts, the jostling that makes you feel like cattle in a truck. But here, at Dubai’s ExecuJet terminal, dignity reigned: belts belonged around my waist as the security team finished their work as discreetly as a sigh. A few nods and we were on the plane, which stood on the tarmac like a mythic creature engineered to seduce: a winged beast, radiating voltage, and golden confidence.
People talk about the Gulfstream G650 for its speed, pedigree, its appetite for flight. Up close, I noticed other things, chiefly, the restraint. The cabin didn’t glare at me with self conscious airs of “design.” Standing upright didn’t require dodging the ceiling. As we took off, without jolt or jeopardy, I felt safe. It is an error to fail to equate safety with luxury. Commercial cabins are riddled with a constant hiss, an anxious, needling hum that keeps the brain in fight mode; the silence here—this G650, part of Flexjet’s fractional fleet—was a silken thing. It calmed me.
Of course, there was vintage champagne and endless rounds of appetisers, but I was impressed mostly by how the flight restored a sense of elegance to the sky.
We were 47 decibels on the inside—“whisper quiet”—and silence felt tactful, like someone who knew better yet never spoke over me. As I settled in, I heard my own small sounds again: the soft click of a latch, the placement of a cup.
Flexjet invited me on this trip; what struck me onboard wasn’t glamour but competence. If you’ve flown enough, you sieve the service out of the performance. Up in the air, Spyros, one of two flight attendants made me a fresh Greek tzatziki, served with warmed pita, set on white dinner plates. He along with Joanne—from Ireland—spoke to me. I found myself responding as if it were a conversation and not the transactional cheerfulness of cabin-crew chatter.
“If you’d like,” Joanne informed me, “we have very nice cashmere eye masks.” Instead, I returned to my book. Somewhere over the Gulf, I underlined a line from Proust: “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” A book is one socially acceptable way to disappear. Privacy isn’t secrecy; it’s the right to be unreachable for a while— without apology. Flexjet’s ride to the Seychelles felt like practice—a rehearsal in what the island would perfect. A row of tall trees lined the drop of a hill near the airport; the water, like in my dream of it, was blue—so translucent the ocean bed was visible even as the plane touched down. The air held its heat.
The sky was brilliantly blue as we drove into the snaking driveway of Cheval Blanc Seychelles. The same competence was waiting here, too: a choreography of discretion— present when needed, vanished when not. The competence I’d admired in the air had simply changed uniforms at the resort: a continuation of the same music, different instruments.
On Mahé, where Anse Intendance is less like a beach and more of a long, white-sand sanctuary, Cheval Blanc Seychelles is tucked into a slope. Here, among ponds and trees, 52 villas were dreamed up by celebrated architect Jean-Michel Gathy, some were set right on the sand, others lifted into the green, so you gazed through palms toward the Indian Ocean. My own villa sat high, giving me a clean view of water; a papaya plant over the deck, and several bright-winged birds treated it like a fruit platter. The pool felt as if it spilled into the sea below and then the sky beyond. Three days passed too quickly.
Dinner at Mizumi, the Japanese restaurant, is exceptional— especially the fish, handled with a quiet confidence. Le White, the all-day room, made the most sublime chicken tandoori I’ve ever had—the best Delhi kitchens might whip up a dithering second (I say that with affection).
The spa is like a garden; the masseur’s fingers yielded into my shoulders, relieving pain, introducing lightness. As I walked through the shrub lined pathway, I felt beauty can be a kind of medicine—not because it distracts from our private damage, but because it teaches the nervous system to trust again.
On the morning I was leaving, my butler—barely able to contain his excitement—told me that a hawksbill turtle had been seen coming to shore. By the time we got down to the beach, we saw her coming out of the surf
On land she looked heavier, negotiating the white sand with her front flippers, pausing only to catch her breath. A waiter at Sula, Cheval Blanc’s splendid beachside restaurant, leaned in to say that turtles come back to the same beach to nest where they were born. I surprised myself by how moved I felt—not by sentiment, exactly, but by the plain fact of the ritual: a hawksbill returning to the shore she had been born on, and where her hatchlings would return to nest and bring into being their own young. Briefly, my mind soared back to the previous evening, when the fading sun dazzled me as I swam in warm blue water; the sky flannelled with bold strokes of orange and grey slowly dissolved into a milky violet horizon. To imagine I had been in the same stretch of water as this great, elusive being filled me with gratitude and a clean, quiet delight. Bit by bit, the two images fused— the dusk sky and the mother hawksbill laying her eggs on the white sand—until the reward of travel came sharply into focus: to see something that reminds you how life, in spite of its everyday terrors, is still a thing to behold.