Today we headed south to meet our guide Ivan in his home town of Le Tampon. We had the now usual climb up from the coastal plane through the cane fields then unexpectedly lightly wooded pastoral grassland. Cows, sheep, hay bales, pungent farmyards and so on. It could have Constable’s England and certainly Vermont.
On and up to a national forest of evergreens, dense and dark.
Up again to what I can only describe as heath land; endless moors of low growth that should have been heather, and then we landed on Mars. The road dropped down to what appeared to a Billiard table flat red plain. No growth at all, and a couple of miles wide and crossed by a dead straight dirt road carrying a few cars, each streaming a tail of dust in the wind. It was eerie, and struck us all the same way. Graffiti proclaiming “Matt Damon was here” would not have been out of place. I stopped to collect a sample - it was all volcanic cinder globules around a quarter of an inch diameter.
On again we went on up to La Fournaise volcano, the only active volcano on the island which last erupted, fairly calmly, in 2007. We parked on the rim of the caldera that rises about 500 feet above a relatively flat basalt floor. It is a few miles in diameter, and opens on one side to the sea. The active bit is a geologically new cone set within this older caldera. The rim rises a modest 500 feet or so above the floor. Also on the floor is a very cool 150 year old cinder cone maybe thirty feet high and a couple of hundred feet across the base. As volcanic features go, it is as cute as they come. We hiked a goat path down to the floor and climbed all over it, then tackled the inevitable panting crawl back up to the rim.
We stopped for lunch at what can only be described as a greasy spoon restaurant for lunch filled with locals. A broad menu offered hot and robust choices. Goat masala got the most votes, though some of us settled for the pork version. It took a while to get out of there as said locals wanted to know who all these anglos were and telling our story took a while. It was very sociable and welcoming.
A quick dash back to the boat to clear customs for an early departure tomorrow, impressive that Les Douanes came to us, and on a Sunday too.
Our Weather Walla has told us the outlook could not be better and that we should leave for Durban as soon as we can.
And so, to borrow a line from Lord Of The Rings’ Thorin, “Now is the time for Bilbo to perform the service for which he was included in our company; now is the time for him to earn his Reward”
I’ll be back online in a couple of weeks. Hopefully with some pictures.
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