Salazie to Cilaos, Réunion
There’s one word that initially comes to mind for all of…this: why?
Why does this place exist? Why is this actually France? Why are all the roads so twisty? Why do people live so isolated?
Also, why did I choose to rent a car and have my first drive in three years be one after a marathon overnight flight to Paris, a 9 hour airport change carrying all my things in the city centre, a second overnight flight to La Réunion, and a couple hours up an incredibly twisty and narrow mountain road all the while trying to function entirely in French? Hey, at least I’m still here to tell the tale.
If you’re at all in tune with the francophone world, you’ve heard of La Réunion. There’s a not-insignificant number of Réunionais living in Québec. To everyone else, given the very low amount of English speakers around, this is France’s admitted best-kept secret, much to the chagrin of the ministry of tourism: everyone else heads to placid, romantic, English-friendly Mauritius next door instead. (And so will I, soon.) Here, the beaches exist too (with shark attack warnings!), but the true gem is in the mountains. There’s a reason they call this l’île intense.
A volcanic island, with the very active active Piton de la Fournaise (“furnace peak”) erupting every few months in the southeast, the centre of the island is dominated by three cirques: jaw-droppingly dramatic calderas, green in all directions, replete with countless waterfalls, and dotted with villages.
Two of them, Salazie and Cilaos, are accessible by some very precarious roads, the latter with the infamous Route des 400 virages (Road of 400 Turns). They lead to some quaint towns dotted with Creole homes, ringed by ridges, often clear in the morning but yielding to a literal wave of cloud by mid-afternoon that’s just mesmerizing to watch. The hikes in the area are predictably sublime, occasionally demanding with lots of climbs and descents, and Cilaos is also blessed with some hot springs. Given that I hadn’t expected such an active week with several full-day hikes, a soak in a hydromassage tub with that ugly brown hot spring water piped in was a surprising refreshment.
What’s more unexpected is that the third cirque, Mafate, is accessible only on foot! Multiple villages continue to exist in this modern day and age with all the fixings: internet and network reception, electricity, running water from nearby sources, markets, playgrounds, churches, health clinics, and even some fancy restaurants (as long as you call ahead!)…but no roads. The nearest village to the rest of civilization, La Nouvelle, is a two hour downhill hike from the end of the road at Col des Bœufs. (Leaving is obviously more strenuous, especially after rain.) Where supplies and even mail (with French standards of daily service) used to be delivered on foot, nowadays there’s a supply helicopter, paid for by residents and the region. Given the expense, any trash carried in must be carried out.
It’s a stunning idyll of a peaceful life, and impressive that it’s still maintained today. But again…why does it exist in the first place?
It comes down to a poorly preserved history of slavery. Slaves who escaped ran off into the cirques, where they established the villages that continue today. Unfortunately for them, they were eventually pursued and killed, but their legacy remains in the form of a nature-lovers’ playground, even if visiting hikers may not be aware.
Locals of the cirques call the rest of the island “les hallelujah”: virtually every coastal town is named after some saint. On the coast is where the vast majority of the population live. Here, the Creole and African population gives way to a mix that leans slightly more white, from Metropolitan France.
The coast is, of course, lined with beaches, though swimming areas are rather limited due to shark attacks. Seaside towns like St. Gilles feel ripped right out of the French Riviera.
But further south, there’s a large area of coastline conspicuously devoid of towns. A volcano eruption in 1994 left devastation in its wake, destroying towns, and the lava flow remains, bisected by a new road lined with entrances to giant hidden lava tunnels. In one town though, since reconstructed, the lava spared one church. Perhaps you could call it a miracle.
The moonscape continues on the long drive up the volcano, with plenty of views to spare, including at the crater formed in the wake of the last large eruption. With an unseasonably unstable week of weather, it took two separate visits (and on the second one, a little company with Cris from Spain doing the drive for me) before I was able to see it in all its glory, though there were some incredible moments even amidst the fog, clouds, and rain.
That weather also led me to improvise my entire 9-day stay, picking new places to stay the day of, while stumbling around with barely-sketched out plans, driving back and forth to avoid the worst of the rain. Choked with frequent traffic through the coastal towns all bleeding together into a single-highway-linked mega-urban ring, if it weren’t for the palm trees and the twisty roads, you really may as well be in France. And again… why?
Like neighbouring Mauritius, Réunion doesn’t have an indigenous population. The Portuguese arrived in the 1600s but didn’t do anything with the place and so the French came, naming it Bourbon Island (referring to a royal house in France) before renaming it La Réunion after some completely unrelated event related to the French Revolution. The French turned the island into a base for growing coffee, sugarcane, and eventually vanilla, importing indentured labourers from China and India as well as slaves sold from Madagascar and other parts of Africa. (It was a slave, Edmond Albius, who figured out how to fertilise vanilla by hand without the bees that typically do it! Tiny little Réunion at one point became the world’s largest vanilla producer.) The population is a mix of descendants of all these groups, and the food also reflects that.
Long after the abolition of slavery, it’s interesting that Réunion remains French — partially for French strategic reasons in the region, but it seems like they’ve won over the population by some giant public works projects. In an era of decolonization (a word I’ve heard mentioned here with a different accent), where fellow overseas department New Caledonia continues to be convulsed by a highly disruptive independence movement, Réunion runs counter to the prevailing narrative.
That’s the thing — from my impressions, Creole people have their identity, but they also feel French. Just as the metropolitan French flock here in droves as tourists and often move here, they move to the metropole. The French taste for the finer things is evident in the excellent food and drink, but with a local twist of ingredients: vanilla’s in a whole lot of things, for one. Vanilla duck, vanilla chicken, vanilla rum… There’s some different spices too, but even local dishes like massale and saucisse rougail (both stews) taste refined. And speaking of rum, almost every dinner or even conversation in a guest house involves a shot or two of rhum arrange — local rum infused with anything the host desires, often a combination of vanilla and fruits like pineapple and orange — or ti’punch, which feels more like a big hit of rum than punch.
As visitors, the metropolitans blend right into the local joie de vivre. Florian and Marion, who I met on my flight, ended up picking me up mid-week for a nice hike and a beach day. A hostel stay with an almost-entirely metropolitan French crowd led to an evening of drinks at a drag show, ten to a table with us vastly-outnumbered foreigners sharing the loose vibe. Strangers — couples, families, friends — would group up with me for a few hours during a hike, sharing snacks, stories, and photos. All the while, the recommendations for things to do and places to see kept coming, as if everyone was egging each other on over the spoils of the island: another step, another hike, another drive, another view, another drink… I felt like I was racing to catch up.
Why? Maybe this won’t be a secret for much longer.