Réunion mon amour, part 1 of 2.

 

 

The original plan for July's holiday was a safari in Tanzania. That fell through because it turned out to be extremely expensive and rather difficult to organize. Plan B was a trip to South Africa with P, visiting Johannesburg, Kruger National Park and hopefully the Drakensburg mountains. No luck there either, as P changed his mind and cancelled the tickets at the last minute. So I looked around for something interesting to do, and found a cheapish plane ticket to Reunion Island.

Reunion is a popular mountain hiking spot. It's basically one huge hotspot which has created three cirques in the middle of the island, one of which leads to the highest summit this side of the Indian Ocean. There's a slightly smaller but still active volcano in the south-east as well - and by active, I mean its last eruption was in June, and it'll blow again before the end of the year. Therefore, I decided I wanted to go hiking. I looked through the guide book and phoned the most promising tour guide, who promptly informed me that she had stopped her business in 2006. Oh. However, she said, if I would send her an e-mail with my travel dates and general hiking level (zero, but I wasn't telling her that), she would ask around and see if any of her colleagues could come up with something. My idea being that if she found something for me, I would do that, but if nothing came up, I would buy a map and go off on my own. The next day, a chap called and offered me an eight-day trek through the three cirques and up the two volcanoes. Yes please.

This trek was scheduled to start three days after my plane arrived. Asking around, it turned out that one of the Blue Mango musicians would also be on holiday in Reunion Island at that time with his family, and could not only pick me up at the airport but also put me up for the night. That sounded like a good plan. Two nights left to sort out, so I went onto a website called Couchsurfing and found a girl to put me up in the south of the island for the second night and another in the north for the third night. From then on, the trek organisers would book the hostels for the group as a whole and include it all in the final price.

After the first night with the musician friend and his family in St Leu, to the west of the island, I hitchhiked back to the capital, St Denis, where I rented a car at the airport and took off to the nearest Decathlon, a chain of huge sports shops where I wanted to buy hiking shoes, a backpack, a miner's lamp and a seemingly enormous heap of other stuff I had been advised to take along. From there, I started driving halfway round the island. Got a bit lost, started again, hit huge black clouds about ten minutes in and saw a lot of sugar cane and huge lava trails which had come down from the south-eastern volcano, arrived at the girl's house about nightfall and was instantly welcomed in. As it happened, she had organised a big party that evening with thirty or so of her friends, so I met loads of people who live in Reunion. Unfortunately, travellers don't seem to be the best guests: I was absolutely knackered and fell asleep halfway through.

 

 

The next morning, I headed off to the St Pierre outdoor market, which I'd read quite a bit about in the various guide books. A lot of pineapples and vanilla, a few rather strange clothes, plenty of Malagasy craftswork... pretty similar to the markets in Mayotte, actually. I had read about a pastry chef who had turned traditional French Câlissons d'Aix - little pieces of marzipan flavoured with chocolate, apricot, lemon, strawberry, that sort of thing - into dodolissons by changing the flavours to match traditional Reunion tastes such as ginger, combava and vanilla, found him at the last minute when he was busy packing up and didn't have a lot left, and bought a small pack of dodolissons to bring back and share. The dodo bird is the symbol of Reunion island: originally from Mauritius, apparently, it is now plastered all over the local beer, aptly named Bière Dodo.

Had something to eat and then continued round the other half of the island, along the route du littoral which took me right down by the sea. The route is in red on the map at the top, the black is the trek. A huge expanse of water on the left and tall craggy volcanic cliffs on the right, with chicken wire all the way up to protect drivers from falling rocks. I preferred the other side of the island, closer to the volcano and more dramatic, but this side was pretty and seemed more touristic. As I hadn't had a reply from the girl I was supposed to stay with in St Denis, I parked the car in the town centre and found the tourist office, who booked a hotel for me and told them that I would be there in about half an hour, the time it takes to walk down the main pedestrian street. Walk down I did, looking around as I went, for Reunion is much more developed than Mayotte and there are a lot of shops I hadn't seen for a long time. The island is renowned for its fresh fruit, and there are small stalls scattered along the pedestrian street, all selling fruit slices or smoothies. There is a fruit here that I didn't know, called goyavier. It is about the size of a cherry, red and fairly sour when not quite ripe, and you eat the lot: these were sold in small punnets along the street. Found the hotel, went in and explained that the girl from the tourist office had just booked a room for me. The man behind the desk didn't seem to know about this, saying that his shift had started half an hour ago and that if she hadn't talked to him directly, he couldn't possibly know what had or hadn't been booked. There was a room free, however: number four. Unfortunately, he had started work in the hotel last week and didn't know where that particular room was, so we went on a hunt for room number four, which turned out to have its door on the hotel terrace.

The next day, I had been given instructions to arrive at the airport for ten a.m. in order to join the hiking group, so I checked out, filled up the car with petrol, did an about-turn on the main road, drove in the bus lane for five minutes and tried to follow the airport signs, which were a bit confusing as the airport apparently has two names, Gillot and Roland-Garros. Naturally, the signposts indicated one of these two names, then abruptly changed to the other. Found the airport, gave the car back to the rental agency (little bit worried that they would find something wrong... there's a first time for everything!) and headed to the arrivals gate to join the group. As it happened, their plane was late and I had been given slightly wrong information by the guide, so the group joined me.

 

   

Once the group had assembled, the guide took us on a bus to Salazie, which is the first of the three cirques in the centre of the island. Our first couple of nights were to be at Hell-Bourg, named for the governor Louis de Hell and not for any particularly awful event some time in the past. We arrived at about midday on Sunday, discovered our hostel and our rooms (eight of us per bedroom), dumped our bags and regrouped to have something to eat and get to know each other. The guide quickly found out I was from Mayotte, asked a few questions and realized that although I didn't know that much about Reunion Island yet, I did know about Mayotte, and most of the fruit and vegetables for example are common to both islands. As we were conveniently seated at opposite ends of the table, he entrusted me with the mission of explaining what we were eating to the people at my end... two of whom turned out to have spent ten years in Martinique, and therefore also knew about tropical food.

Our first visit was to the Maison Folio, a Creole house and botanical garden situated in the centre of the village, where a guide showed us round and told us about the flowers, plants, wood and other equipment used in the twentieth century by local people. That took up a good part of the afternoon, then we went off to have a look at the village. Of course, this being Sunday afternoon, two or three out of a grand total of five shops were closed, but I still managed to pick up a t-shirt that is only sold in that particular cirque. There are three such t-shirts, one for each cirque, and my grand mission was to buy all three. This was when I discovered that Reunion was extremely similar to Mayotte in that you can't just go into a shop and expect to find the thing you want, exactly the way you want it. You take what there is. The first t-shirt was therefore a man's size M; the second a woman's size XL, the third a man's size L.

 

 

 

On Monday morning, we set off from Hell-Bourg on foot towards the Bélouve endemic forest. Our guide was crazy about anything botanical, so we stopped every few hundred metres to look at a tree fern or to guess the Creole name for a plant. The idea was to show us the plants and trees that grow only in Reunion Island. We wanted to go and see the Trou de Fer, which is a big 600-metre-deep hole with waterfalls cascading into it, but it was closed for work, so the guide took us to the workers' car park, explaining that if there were workers there, we wouldn't be able to go any further, but if there weren't, we could climb over the construction site and have a look around anyway. However, we needed to get going right now, because the clouds were coming in. We took off like rockets, clambered over the construction site, navigated around (and, in my case, through) quite a bit of mud and arrived on a small platform overlooking the hole about five minutes before the clouds filled the whole area up with impenetrable whiteness.

We came back the way we had gone, through the forest and down the steps. At that point, I had come across as a good hiker. It later turned out that as I didn't know what I was doing and was full of energy, I had stayed near the front of the group for the whole circuit. That didn't last long. Back at the hostel, the guide told us all about the next few days: we would be going into the Mafate cirque, where there are no roads, and crossing it entirely on foot over four days and three nights. Got the backpack ready, had a good night's sleep, and off we went.