LeisureClassy

Thank you, beautiful photos!
In school I had a friend whose mother was from Reunion. He made the most delicious food for parties...

arlflyer

Great report so far! I would love to get my hands on some of that food...

In your post #15, the third plant shown looks to be a type of lantana. They are semi-invasive in parts of the Southeastern US (and elsewhere) and can poison livestock.

kaszeta

But no rest for the weary. By the end of the day we needed to be in Belouve for dinner, so after hiking back down to Gite de la Caverne Dufour (aghast at the trail conditions we had climbed up during the day), our next destination was the next Gite to the south: Gite de Belouve (here below the clouds). 12000 m horizontal, and 2000 m vertical:



The trail to Belouve *looked* easy on the map. It's actually steep, since those are *metric* contours. Very steep (more on that later), but at least it's downhill:



As we descended, we went back into the clouds, so the picture quality drops again, but here we're about 9km down the trail, looking back at the Piton des Neiges:



The hike down to Belouve had us in clouds most of the time, and the trail is pretty brutal. Most of it is either boardwalk (shown), steps, or ladders (more on those later):



But after some cussing and swearing, we arrived at Belouve as it was starting to get dark. Alas, no pictures yet of the Gite de Belouve (I borrowed Carol's camera for the evening, and it got stolen 5 weeks later in Montreal with the photos still on it), although we did loop back to Belouve much later in the trip. It was a splendid little guest house, with a wonderful dinner of carri (surprise, surprise), quiche de chouchou (that was a pleasant surprise), and two different rum drinks. But alas, those pixels are lost to history.

But the next morning, the view was splendid:

kaszeta

The next morning had a similarly awesome view of the Cirque de Salazie as we had breakfast:



You could also see Piton des Neiges through the clouds, where we had been the previous morning (and we were going most of the way back that day):



And soon we found ourselves climbing into the clouds, gazing back at Belouve:

kaszeta

And when I said "climb", I meant it. The trail from Belouve to Caverne Dufour is.... stairs.



(the careful viewer can see that the path for these stairs was chainsawed out of the dirt and rock!)

And stairs:



And stairs:



And.... more stairs:



Mind you, while it was a lot of stairs (5 km of them!), it wasn't all stairs... Sometimes it was too steep for stairs:

kaszeta

The good news is that after all that stair climbing, we got to the rim of the Cirque de Cilaos
However, we had also arrived in the cloud layer.



When the trail wasn't steep, it was muddy.

You could tell from the signs that the trail from Belouve to Caverne dufour was done by two different trail crews (there are little signs telling you which crew did the work)

Trail Crew 6 did the part with the stairs, and were basically laying siege to the mountain, with excellent stairs resulting.

Trail Crew 8, however, appears to have addressed similar challenges by just tossing the wood on the ground:





The bulk of the climb ended with our arrival at the rock formation called Cap Anglais.



Somewhat appropriately, this is where we met some of the few English speakers of the trip... during a back and forth conversation in broken French with another set of travelers (whose French wasn't much better than mine), I said something accidentally in English, and discovered that the other hikers all knew perfectly fluent English... they had come over from Mauritius.

Past Cap Anglais, the trail goes above tree line again...



...and we could soon see up back to the Gite de la Caverne Dufour

kaszeta

One the way back, we got a decent shot of the namesake cavern for the Gite, which has apparently served as backup shelter for hikers for a looong time.



After a long grueling hike, Cilaos finally came back into view through the clouds.



But we missed the last bus by 10 minutes. So we had to walk another 3 km into town. Here's Carol walking down the steps in front of the abandoned hotel from the old Cilaos spa (hey, look, stairs!)

kaszeta

After several days of hiking in the mountains, we were rather pleased to have a day of relaxation back in Saint-Pierre on the Southern coast of Reunion.

The island doesn't have a lot of beaches, but Saint-Pierre's Grande Plage is quite a nice one:

kaszeta

And Saint-Pierre was also a return to actual restaurants. The entire beachfront in town is filled with a variety of food trucks, cafes, and restaurants, and we ended up settling on Le Moana, a Tahitian restaurant (Tahiti being yet another French island...).



But, being Réunion, rum drinks were in order to ease our tired muscles from all that hiking, with these Boucaniers (rum cocktails with citrus, peach, and pineapple... as I'm writing this, I'm finding myself seriously jonesing for a good Victoria pineapple).



Interestingly, I found that many, many places on Réunion served up one or both of the French classics: steak frites or a steak tartare. This surprised me a bit for an island, especially when I noticed that most menus called it out as "a la pays" ("native"), since while we had seen a lot of agriculture (particularly sugar, vanilla, pineapple, and bananas), we hadn't seen a lot of farms or ranches. Turns out, we just hadn't been to that part of the island yet, but I'll have to say, a tartare made with island beef was quite delicious, and served up with some wonderful fries:



Carol did pretty good as well, opting for some pasta and shrimp (shrimp being another item intensively cultivated in the region, although I never did find where either the ocean or freshwater shrimp farms were). This was some excellent shrimp in a delicious cream sauce (sorry about the dismal lighting for these photos).

kaszeta

The next morning, we had one of our most pleasant experiences on the island. One of the pieces of advice we got from the few people I was able to talk to that had been to the island was to tour a coffee plantation. And I discovered that this was a bit harder to set up... most of the plantations are very small family farms, and you have to set up the reservation via phone, often with a member of the farmer's family who speaks no English and doesn't understand my French.

But it's worth doing: the plantations all focus on a single variety of coffee: the Bourbon Pointu coffee bean. Bourbon Pointu was grown long ago on the island (back when it was Ile Bourbon), and was a highly-prized variety, and thought lost when the island shifted to a sugarcane economy.

But starting at the turn of the last century, an enterprising agricultural engineer discovered small plantings of the plant that had been maintained in a Japanese horticultural greenhouse, and was able to successfully reintroduce the plant to the island.

The result is a small but growing industry of coffee producers on Reunion producing one of the world's best-regarded, and most expensive, coffees.

So we set out one rainy day in search of La Maison du Laurina, a small coffee grower on Le Grand Coude on the Southeastern corner of the island (a very odd little plateau accessed via a single-lane road driving along a literal knife edge ridge), with whom we were eventually able to secure a reservation via email:



The first part of the tour at La Maison du Laurina is the coffee brewing museum, which was a neat collection of everything from coffee urns to alembics to vacuum brewers. This was rather interesting, since our host spoke exactly zero English, and this was a severe challenge for my French, but between my knowledge of coffee and technical terms (like "alembic"), we did surprisingly well:

kaszeta

The next part of the tour was touring the farm fields. I was expecting to be taken out to the coffee plants right away, but instead, we got a phenomenal tour of their entire farming operation, which involved cultivating quite a few of the local products on various terraces on the side of the hill.

Like this entire two acre field of.... chouchou:



Passion fruit, which have awesome flowers:



Guava:



And palm:

.

And earlier I discussed an unusual tomato variety common on the island: the Tomate Arbuste ("Bush tomato", also known as a Tamarillo in Spanish). We finally found the plant at their farm:

kaszeta

But the soon enough found ourselves in the actual coffee plantation, viewed through the misty rain:



And seeing the odd little pointy beans of Bourbon Pointu coffee:



Then they took us inside for a formal coffee service:



Which involved several pastries, all made with the Bourbon Pointu coffee:



And several cups of the famous coffee all served up formally:



How was the coffee? It was easily one of the best coffees I've ever had, and that includes Jamaican Blue Mountain. Rich, robust flavor, smooth and not very bitter, and a nice tanginess, this was a very nice coffee. I bought several 250g packets for 11 euros each, which made this "expensive", but not crazy. (Getting back to Paris, I found several places serving it for 15 euros a cup, and you can find several places online selling the coffee for $250/lb!).

The owner, Jacques Lepinay, and his wife (I've forgotten her name), were wonderful hosts, especially since the language barrier was substantial (at one point, Jacques wandered off and came back with a French-English dictionary), and we had a great time... our 11 euro tour fee got us almost two hours of tours, coffee sampling, and a lot of pastries and coffees.

Thunderroad

Wonderful trip report about a place I've long wondered about! I look forward to the rest.

kaszeta

Our next stop was the Saga du Rhum, a museum of Rum. It was a very, very interesting museum, since (a) it's actually a working distillery for Isautier (as a result, you can't take pictures in some areas due to the high alcohol vapors making an explosion hazard), and (b) it was actually one of the better sources I had of the history of Reunion.

Here's the sugar mill (still working, with some parts dating from the 1800s):



And they have a really cool distillation column running, but you can only grab pictures of it from the next room (I geek out about this stuff, since one of my day job activities is designing custom distillation columns):



Here's an older version of it, opened up to show a distillation tray:



But they also showed the old school way of doing it:

kaszeta

But aside from the great history lessons, the other great attraction was the tasting room. Basically, they had samples of pretty much every single rhum made on the island, both traditional (made from refined sugar) and agricole rhum (made from the cane sap directly), straight up or as rhum arrange, from every distillery. Basically, it was "all you can drink". Not bad for 11 euro admission: