Mauritius offers a taste of luxury

So this is how the other half holidays? - with an army of butlers, chefs and villa hosts. Ian Katz gets a taste of the high life on a family trip to Mauritius. There is a scene that comes to stand for every holiday and the one that endures from our trip to Mauritius unfolded on our first night out for dinner at an Italian-ish beachside restaurant called La Spiaggia.

A fresh breeze was starting to chill what had been a balmy evening and an attentive waiter wondered if our under-dressed children 'would like a pashmina?'.

My girls gigglingly accepted once they had decoded the novel offer but five-year-old Jake was unimpressed. "No, thank you," he declared with unusually impressive manners. "I ordered a cheeseburger."

The incident brilliantly captured the ludicrousness of combining young children and five-star luxury and there were plenty more during our two weeks at the Constance Belle Mare Plage resort.

A few days later over lunch at the same restaurant a waiter ceremoniously offered each of our party a choice of three different olive oils ('fruity, robust or delicate?') in which to dip their bread ('brown with five nuts or white with sun-dried tomato?'). My youngest son is two.

The Belle Mare Plage is the sort of hotel I have barely set foot in since backpacking round South America as a student. Back then we used to save up for an occasional blow-out in the buffet of the smartest hotel we could find and then live off it for weeks like a snake ekes out a good kill.

By the time my wife and I earned enough to entertain the idea of actually staying in one we had too many children to contemplate the economics.

For the first day or two I felt like an interloper who might be asked to leave at any moment, an impression not allayed by being denied entry to a hotel restaurant on the first night because my (smartest) pair of shorts were not deemed adequately formal.

Now, though, through the miracle of the posh package holiday, the sybaritic delights of the Belle Mare Plage have been brought (just about) within the reach of the middle-class wage slave: in the low season around BD1,000 gets you seven nights of half-board plus flights.

Sister of the more famous Prince Maurice, a few miles up the coast, on what the brochure calls 'the paradisiacal island of Mauritius', the Belle Mare Plage sprawls over 150 palm-shaded acres with two 18-hole golf courses, seven restaurants and an indeterminate and possibly uncountable number of infinity pools. (What is the collective noun for infinity pools? A deluge? An extravagance?)

No fewer than 650 impossibly solicitous staff tend to every whim of around 550 guests; each morning my youngest systematically demolished every meticulously arranged pile of cushions in the vast timbered foyer we had to cross to get to breakfast, and by the time I looked back the perfect piles had been meticulously reconstructed.

And if the Belle Mare Plage was the height of luxury, we were staying at its very pinnacle: one of 20 high-walled, shady villas at one end of the resort. Arranged tastefully around its own pool (or, strictly, collection of water features), the villa boasted three large ensuite bedrooms (each with a double bath) and - to the delight of the children - an outdoor bath the size of a small car. And, most excitingly, we would be attended to, explained the host showing us around the villa, by Pierre, our very own butler! "He will do whatever you want," she explained.

Pierre was an endearing figure who bustled about with a furrowed brow worrying about whether a massage appointment clashed with a snorkelling trip.

This luxury onslaught reached its surreal climax with an evening barbecue at the villa. A pergola was constructed by the swimming pool to shelter the hors d'oeuvres and Pierre was joined by a chef and two other staff who fussed all through the afternoon. Then the courses began to come . . . and come: carpaccio ("I want hard meat," declared the five-year-old), prawns, salads, fillet steak, more prawns (bigger this time), lamb, lobster (all the way from Madagascar several hundred miles to the east). It was all delicious but by the time Pierre appeared with a final crustacean flourish - more prawns and lobster! - we were in a state of hysteria.

Though most packages include half board, the peril of all five-star hotels is the incidentals. After picking up our first 100 euro lunch bill, my obsessively thrifty wife introduced a ruthless austerity regime: carbo-load at the lavish breakfast buffet then get by sharing three kids' meals between the six of us at lunchtime.

By the second week she was taking the free bottle of water she had managed to secure on the beach with her to dinner to avoid having to buy one, and coffee in the villa had been banned - only the tea was free.

The shocking thing is how quickly you can get used to a preposterous level of luxury - and just how enjoyable it is.

Money can't make you happy, they say, but whizzing through the warm evening breeze on a golf cart you have to wonder. And though I've felt claustrophobic in just a few days at other "resort hotels", the scale of the Belle Mare Plage and the huge range of activities on offer conspired to make the idea of venturing beyond the perimeter wall feel like a chore.

Though the children, predictably, boycotted the perfectly inviting kids' club, they were engaged in a constant whirlwind of activity, most of it free: waterskiing, wakeboarding, snorkelling, parascending, mini-golf, sailing and a brilliantly turbulent banana boat.

You're probably wondering what the rest of Mauritius was like but I'm not sure I'm the man to tell you.

We ventured out of the resort a total of twice, once to ride mini-submarines off the west coast and another to swim with dolphins. The island is home to a population of over a million from a mixture of Indian (mostly), Chinese, African and French backgrounds.

Refreshingly, thanks to several decades of high-end tourism, the locals (and the roads) are considerably better off than their counterparts in similar holiday destinations in the Caribbean, for instance, with the result that there's a bit less of the 'them and us' guilt you feel living it up in more impoverished surroundings.