Reunion

29th March 2014. What a BON SURPRISE!  After a rough overnight passage from yesterday’s disappointment, Reunion, from which I expected little, delivered in spades!

So, let’s start with today’s P&O facts. I know you are all waiting for them. Reunion is the same size as Leicestershire, the highest point is 10,069ft and has an active volcano. (Actually, between you and me, the whole island is one big Volcano sitting on the seafloor!!!.)

The Island is French and one of the world’s best kept secrets, even the French themselves don’t know about it, apart from some department somewhere deep in the heart of the French government that has been poring money into the Island. So the population of just 700,000 have a first class motorway network, and paved side roads, modern schools with running tracks and swimming pools, modern housing and all the comforts of a modern French region.

Turn around, open your eyes and you could be in the South of France overlooking the Mediterranean. Ok, so there are one or two downsides, wade too far out to sea and your feet get nibbled by sharks, there is high unemployment and the odd passing cyclone hits the island once or twice a year. Also, you just can’t get here from the UK direct. BUT if you want some winter sun, you like French holidays, want to go somewhere different, try REUNION and I promise you won’t be disappointed. But remember, tell no-one, it’s a secret.

So what did we do on Reunion, well actually, not a lot. We took a bus ride to the top of one of the old craters, looked into it, and came back down to the ship. End of story.

But WHAT a bus ride! Remember, the whole island is really just one big volcano, which by the way last erupted only in 2010 through a new vent at the south of the island. So, we started our journey in the sweltering heat of sea level and through the sugar cane fields travelling on the best motorway yet on our travels.

Then, we turned a gauche (left), and started to climb up the ever steepening sides of the volcano. As we climbed the vegetation became greener and lusher, the temperature cooler. People had lawns, grew vegetables, were walking back from the Boulangeri (baker) with their loaves of bread. (Stick Francais!)

But, still we climbed up the mountain. Through a village called Petit France, and then into the mist and the forest, where suddenly the temperature dropped and I remembered that I was told to bring a jumper….whoops!

And as we still climbed ever upwards, hairpin after hairpin, we overtook cyclists, rocking side to side as they gasped their way up steep incline, and overtook the sensible one’s who had had their cycles trucked up so they could ride down the mountain tracks.

And as we climbed we passed by geranium farms, a cottage industry here, where the geranium oil is distilled to be sent to Grasse as a fixative. (I think)

And then, suddenly, after what seemed like an hour but was in fact only 55 minutes, we broke through the treeline and the clouds, but STILL we climbed, up across an Alpine landscape with small flowers and daisies and buttercups. Ahhh.

And then, after a further climb through the bracken, we unexpectedly rounded a final hairpin bend and arrived at the top. Behind and below us were the tops of the clouds in the bright sunshine obscuring the sea, and before us, was the old crater, and, standing on the lip of it, at 7000ft up you could look down a vertical drop to the crater floor thousands of feet below with seemingly no way down. In fact so far below, you lost your sense of perspective.

The floor of the crater, in fact is inhabited (see houses bottom left) by the descendants of runaway slaves, but there are no roads down and everything has to be carried in. In fact the whole area now is full of hiking trails for the adventurous.

My pictures don’t give you any true feeling of the the scale, but we are talking of a drop of twice the height of Table Mountain in Cape Town and we were so lucky to get it on such a bright clear day.

Next stop, Port Elizabeth.