Trip 43 — Réunion Walk

Day 3: Piton Sainte-Rose to Saint-Philippe
Thursday, 31 October 2024

Today: 38000 steps/30.60 km/19.01 mi/5h 26m
Total: 106330 steps/86.89 km/53.99 mi/15h 23m

In preparation for a 9 a.m. lava-tube tour that was at least nine kilometers away, I set a few alarms starting at 6:30. But I needn't have worried. The roosters got me up ten minutes before that, and Jerome's wife, Angélique, saw me out of LaKour Fleurie shortly before seven.

A digital sign along the road flashed a big green numeral "7" as I approached, indicating that I wasn't walking at an excessive rate of speed. It was slightly faster than my usual target of ten minutes per kilometer, however. While I could certainly go nine kilometers in two hours, I wanted to see the Notre Dame des Laves church and take a coastal trail that would add distance and slow me down.

Some of the places that had been shut for dinner were now open at 7:04 a.m. I reached the church, which had been directly in the path of the flow from the 1977 eruption of the Piton de la Fournaise. The church still stands, surrounded by lava, and I was able to go inside and see its sunrise mural and pretty stained-glass windows.

I took the road behind the church to the 1977 lava field and started on the trail south toward the Anse des Cascades. I doubted I'd have time to see the waterfalls themselves, but at least this would be a lovely way to proceed.

A sign told me that the falls were two hours away. It was almost 7:30, and the falls were an hour from the meeting point of my tour. I was sure I could beat the suggested time, but I wasn't sure by how much. I recalled the Togo Chasm on Niue, signed as a 45-minute hike but completable in not much more than ten minutes each way.

The trail ascended, offering views back of the lava arms reaching into the sea. Most of the time I could proceed quickly, but sometimes I had to slow down when the trail became thick with vegetation or involved going up or down rocks. Still, for a trail, I was making good progress.

At the halfway point, I had an out. I had shaved half the time off the indication, but it wasn't enough. I had to return to the Anse des Cascades access road and then go back up to the main road.

I didn't realize how much "up" this second trail involved. It was only ten minutes, but the climb was relentless — not dangerous, just surprising, like a stairway that wouldn't end. When I reached the main road, I saw that I had 46 minutes to go 5.3 kilometers.

At least it would all be a gentle descent, but I was going to have to hustle. I alternated a minute of jogging with a minute of walking as a means of doing sub-eight-minute kilometers. By the time the 2002 lava field appeared before me, I had done enough of these alternations that I could relax into a brisk walk for the rest of the way.

At the meeting point — a parking lot opposite a bus stop — I found Julien and the nine other people on our tour. I realized that I'd been betrayed for Abecedarian Walks purposes. Nothing in the description or confirmation had said that we'd be driving two kilometers further down the road to head into the lava. I'd thought we'd be walking from the meeting point. But I wasn't about to explain my abstinence from cars. This tour would have to be an exception, codified as Rule N2-75-bis in the Abecedarian Walks Keen Wayfinding and Routing Document.

"You don't have a car?" Julien asked me.

"No," I said. It surprised me that having a car was assumed. The buses ran frequently.

"You can ride with me," he said.

"Thank you," I said. "You're able to take me back to this spot after?"

He agreed, not yet understanding why.

When we reconvened, we donned knee pads, gloves, and helmets with flashlights attached, and we were given elbow pads for the tightest crawls. Before we entered the cave, Julien explained that the mountain collapsed about 4000 years ago, creating the ramparts around it, and that we would see glossy lava and rough, rocky lava. The Piton de la Fournaise has some activity about once a year, but because the eruptions are predictable with instruments and not too violent, people have time to evacuate (or are able to examine the lava without much danger).

Tubes require just the right balance of gas, pressure, temperature, and material. The tubes we entered, created from the 2004 eruption, are among the world's largest. Inside, Julien showed us trees that had been carried down and embedded in the flow, and he pointed out roots dangling from the ceiling. Formations resembled a lion's head and a shark. As the lava oxidizes, it loses its rich color.

Most of the time we were able to walk either upright or hunched over, but a few times the ceiling was low, requiring us to go sideways or on our hands and knees. In one particularly tight space — optional, but we all did it — we crawled through, stomachs to the ground. I was grateful to Julien for taking my bag around this stretch.

"Thirty meters," he said as we got down to the floor. That's 18 seconds of walking at my target pace. With my body to the ground it took several minutes.

After rushing to meet the tour, I felt fatigued in the cave. I frequently sat during Julien's explanations or rested against the wall. I had water — the bottle crackled whenever I misjudged the size of my backpack when walking on all fours. My knees felt the sharp floor even through the pads. At the furthest point in the cave, I was grateful for a rest while most of the others slithered through an even tighter passage.

I was the only non–French speaker. During one pause, another participant asked, "Were you able to vote?"

I've been asked that several times on this trip; American politics influence the world more than perhaps they should.

"Yes, I put my ballot in the mail before I came here," I said.

Julien had us feel the ambience of the cave. For a brief stretch, we turned off our lights and had to crawl along by sensing the walls and communicating with each other. I didn't like it, but it was empowering to rely on senses other than sight. When we reassembled, we sat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the dripping of water in blackness. No bats live in this cave system, but elsewhere on Réunion are birds that build nests in the tubes and travel by echolocation.

We left the cave system via an easier route, and I was feeling much better. In total, we traveled 1.6 kilometers inside the cave.

Another family took me back to the bus stop so that Julien could prepare for his afternoon tour. When I wobbled passed his second group, my legs still in a confused daze of hurry and crawling, they were putting on their gear.

"This guy is the best!" I said.

Between our tour site and my lunch spot — the next building I would see, an hour later — were lava fields from other eruptions, including the month-long event in April 2007 that forced the residents of Le Tremblet out of their village. Today's Tremblet isn't really a town, but it was the start of a string of neighborhoods and a reasonable number of restaurants.

La Case Volcan was notable for an anti-single-diner policy that deemed me unworthy of my own table, but more noteworthy was that it's the only place I've ever been that invited me to try all their main dishes before selecting my lunch. When I sat down, I received a wooden tray laden with 11 ramekins, each holding a couple of bites. Four shot glasses contained fruit juices.

After much thought I settled on the pork with hearts of palm, along with juice from the Victoria pineapple — Réunion's smaller variety. I followed it with a brick of ice cream flavored with the same kind of pineapple and goyavier, a kind of small, red guava (sometimes called strawberry guava).

Minutes after leaving the restaurant, I came to the foot of the Tremblet trail. After the day's already considerable activity, I can't believe I had briefly thought about ascending this steep, overgrown path to near the base of the Piton de la Fournaise. It was mainly AWKWARD rules (the trail would have put me nowhere near the island's perimeter) that injected me with the sanity to abandon the idea, rather than the online mentions of the Sentier du Tremblet saying "Trail to be decommissioned. Not maintained. Very, very bad idea. What are you, an idiot doing the Diagonale des Fous?"

Still, I glanced up at what was left of the trail. The sign by the road showed a distance of 9½ hours to the lodge by the volcano, where I had contemplated staying. Underneath was the admonition, "Trail strongly discouraged in rain" — in French and English, as if to emphasize to silly Americans what a horrible idea it would be to venture ahead. A few paces up was another sign, "Sentier fermé" — a closure with such finality that it was printed in large letters and attached to a wooden gate.

So I wound my way down the N2 toward Saint-Philippe, past copious residential areas and dealing with the resultant copious traffic. As usual on this kind of shoulderless road, I faced the traffic (walking on the left, as they drive on the right here) except when the road ahead curved sharply to the left, when I'd cross the road in advance of the curve so the oncoming traffic wouldn't be met with a surprise.

There should have been a better place to walk. The road carried bus routes, so clearly people were walking somewhere. There were also occasional bikers. Usually the curves stopped people from going too fast, but then they'd reach a straightaway and make up time, and there were a few who took the turns by cutting across the center of the road rather than slow down. They seemed to want to visit all the saints of Réunion in one afternoon, perhaps culminating in an early and unintended visit to Saint Peter.

When I reached Saint-Philippe, I was behind a skeleton and a goblin. I didn't realize how much the tradition of trick-or-treating would be followed on Réunion, but the town was alive with dressed-up children chanting and holding candy-collecting, pumpkin-shaped buckets.

I reached my bungalow at Dan'n Tan Lontan and then made my way up to the grocery store. I intended the yellow tomatoes, grapes, and beer to be a snack in anticipation of a sandwich at the corner. But after a dip in the property's beautifully lit pool and a few minutes supine, I was not going out again.

Go on to day 4