Today was tour the island day. Two hours into this I was prepared to write about a day of minor frustrations with rental cars, driving licenses and traffic. Now at the end of the day that has all faded into utter irrelevance. Ile del la Reunion is a jaw droppingly spectacular place and I am told we haven't seen the half of it.
We headed down the coast to St Louis, a multi ethnic melting pot. A good sized town of narrow streets filled with shops and busy with traffic, it is not a tourist town at all. We headed inland to Cilaos, and if you are inclined to, you will be rewarded by checking it out. It is about 10 miles from St Louis to Cilaos as the crow flies. It is about 23 miles miles by the shortest road route. The town sits in a volcanic caldera at 4,000ft above sea level, the rim of the caldera rises to about 10,000 feet. The road runs through the most vertiginous country I have been in. In places the view from the road shows a mountain wall miles long and thousands of feet high almost completely vertical and covered in vegetation. The road is a riot of switchbacks, both up and down. Most are barely two lanes and often single lane. The hairpin turns are tight and mostly taken in first gear.
There are a handful of bare rock wall, single lane tunnels that feel very tight in our modest European rental car. If you arrive at the entrance, you go through. If there is traffic approaching you, you wait. It works well enough, usually. The area is well served by buses and we saw heavy construction trucks. How they survive a career negotiating these goat path roads is beyond me.
The scenery is jaw droppingly spectacular from the get-go. The run in from St Louis is up a wide River valley canyon with walls towering above you. The river bed is a couple of hundred feet wide and rock strewn. Though generally fairly dry, these islands are known for prodigious bouts of rainfall the record being 73" in 24 hours in 1952.
The further you go, the better it gets. My vocabulary of superlatives didn't last long and I gave in to raw wonder.
Cilaos is a decent sized spa town of around 6,000 souls that grew up on hot springs, the visitors being carried in by porters before there were roads. It is one of three calderas that are linked by hiking routes, multiday affairs that are served by hostels that provide dinner bed and breakfast. The hostels are still provisioned by porters. Our guide, Ivan, has hiked extensively and we met another sailor who came for the hiking.
I am intensely annoyed that I am still unable to post pictures. I'll figure something out before we leave here. Google images has better images mine, and wikipedia has a decent write up of the island.
Our weather chap tells us that Monday is a particularly propitious day for departure, so we are back to prepping the boat, the larder and ourselves.
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