Trip 43 — Réunion Walk

Day 7: La Possession to Saint-Denis
Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Today: 35934 steps/22.76 km/14.14 mi/5h 46m
(and 950m of elevation gain)
Total: 287908 steps/222.75 km/138.41 mi/42h 40m

Gigi was tending to his vanilla vines. Nadine and her neighbor were having coffee while the neighbor played with her week-old kitten. Nadine offered me juice, and we sat for a moment, enjoying the broad view of Le Port and the sea that she enjoys every morning.

I had no idea how hard the day would be.

I wriggled down the mountain just after nine, a little over three kilometers. Shortly before the bottom, I turned onto a side road to reach the trailhead for the Chemin des Anglais. Since the new seaside highway was built, it may be possible to walk the old one, but the traditional and reliable route on foot from La Possession to Saint-Denis involves taking the stone road down to the Grande Chaloupe ravine and back up.

A pair of goats startled me as I prepared to ascend. I also finally had a good look at a Peter's rock agama or African redhead agama — a kind of red-headed lizard; they're usually too quick to get away. They're now common in Florida, having been introduced and become an invasive species.

Nine kilometers in two and a half hours, the sign said. Would it really take that long? Those signs always seemed to overestimate.

The sign also said we should call it the Chemin Crémont, after the road manager who had the road paved in 1767 after its conception in 1730. Everyone refers to it as the Chemin des Anglais, an embarrassing reminder that after Colonel Sainte-Suzanne had the road restored in 1809, the British landed at the Grande Chaloupe the following year and, using the road, took over the island.

I started up the stone path. I knew it would be steep but I had no inkling how challenging. The first kilometer was brutal, as the day was already hot and I wasn't used to the pointy stones. A pair of hikers soon overtook me.

After a kilometer it leveled off a bit, the clouds came in, and there was a breeze. That all helped...a little. The problem was that the road was built for oxcarts and not Hoka shoes. The large basalt slabs required careful placement of each step. Even though there was usually a regular strip of them down the center of the path, it was a more difficult surface than trails that are an irregular mix of dirt, small stones, and tree roots. I'm all for preserving history, but converting a sliver of the path into packed dirt would do wonders.

Two things were on my mind. First was that I had bought a bar of dark chocolate along with the cheese and gazpacho at the Leader Price, knowing that it was then late enough yesterday that it wouldn't melt before I reached Gigi and Nadine's place. But I still had most of the bar with me. Would it be a runny mess by the time I opened my bag?

The second thing was the realization that it was now after midnight in the eastern time zone of the USA. Would any counties be reporting their votes yet? Of course not, silly; the polls wouldn't even open for several hours.

One kind of bird was going "Oo-ee, oo-ee." But I liked to think of it as being in French, that the bird was saying, "Oui! Oui!" — as if cheering me on.

I continued up the steep trail, laboriously. Sometimes I got momentum and could take long strides for a few seconds, but the stones had to be regular enough for me to do that. Usually I had to consciously choose every step. The kilometers passed slowly, 17 or 18 minutes each — almost twice my usual time.

The trail leveled off again, add I stopped and had some cucumber and water. I was glad I'd taken up Nadine's offer to refill my water bottle completely; I had gotten it only halfway full on my own, because of the angle of the faucet in my bathroom.

I continued again. Really nine kilometers of this? The whole day was to be 24 kilometers. I had thought I'd surely be up the other side by lunchtime; now I wasn't so positive.

I took a longer break at viewpoint near the top, where I found the two hikers who had passed me. There were a few houses down below, in the ravine, under the forest.

Time to go down, which was more exasperating than the ascent. The need to place my foot so carefully with each step made it impossible to make any encouraging progress. My pace dwindled to over 20 minutes per kilometer.

With a name like La Grande Chaloupe, there should have been a Mexican restaurant with frozen margaritas waiting. But instead, at the bottom, there was the former immigration and quarantine center for indentured workers. Mauritius had its Aapravasi Ghat near the port in the capital, but Réunion had hidden theirs in this ravine. It received arrivals from 1860 onward, and they spent ten days in quarantine.

Many of those indentured workers built the railway line through the Grande Chaloupe, in use from 1882 to 1976, when the first coastal highway was opened. If I thought walking over the mountain was bad, I couldn't imagine building tunnels through it. The red station building still stands, with a locomotive in front.

The Chemin des Anglais resumed on the other side of the ravine. This was a shorter segment, but the constant incline gave hardly any reprieve.

I took more-frequent, longer breaks. What use was there in rushing? I had plenty of time to get to Saint-Denis. I wasn't going to make lunch anyway, so I munched on my cucumber and took time getting to La Montagne so as to arrive when the supermarket reopened for the afternoon at 2:30.

The last stretch of the Chemin des Anglais was a straight shot on a persistent incline that seemed never to end — it could have been an ascent into heaven, for all I knew.

Finally I reached the parking area, where I was greeted by a pair of dogs. They didn't bother me. One lay and grinned while the other ran into the parking area and returned with two puppies. I sat for more cucumber and watched them.

If I thought my climbing was over, I was much mistaken. I headed for La Montagne, first down and across a pedestrian bridge and then up a dirt track. If I hadn't been so tired, I might have taken a detour over into Saint-Bernard, where the old hospital for lepers has been turned into a restaurant.

A man was laughing in the middle of the road, wobbling about without purpose. He didn't seem in control of his faculties. He carried a sack and a couple of large poles. He was directly in my path and there was no way I couldn't acknowledge him, but he made me uneasy. I greeted him by way of a fist-bump and accelerated slightly. He did the same and followed me for a few steps. Then he dropped his sack, which landed with a clang in the middle of the road. While he figured out how to pick it up, I pressed on ahead. I looked back to see him pivoting about again, still laughing.

I stopped for water and ayapana juice at the supermarket and continued ahead two kilometers, where I took a real break for a chicken sandwich and pastry (a "brookie," they call this combination of a brownie and a cookie). The boulangerie's patio had a view of the sea, and all was tranquil, until it became school dismissal time and the place filled up with parents and little kids.

And the streets filled up with cars. A short distance ahead were the 13 hairpin turns of the road that ostensibly was going to take me down from La Montagne to Saint-Denis. I didn't feel like dealing with that traffic, as there was no shoulder and the drivers were fast.

Fortunately a path appeared that seemed to be a way down through the forest. And so I was picking over stones again, steeply again, though this was a more typical trail of dirt, rocks, and roots. It still demanded concentration, but it was easier than the basalt slabs. A couple of times it veered upward and away from town, but I trusted that it was going where I was going, and it soon did; it had plenty of abrupt turns of its own. There were a fair number of people on this trail, some of them moving quite quickly.

But once again, it took a long time for me to make progress. I kept looking down the mountain and marveling at how much distance was still left to be covered. I didn't need to stop, but I wished the terrain had been more conducive to going faster. It took an hour to come down the trail, and there were exactly 27 steps during that hour — one a set of seven, one a set of 20 — when I could walk normally.

Finally I emerged from the trail. "Holy moly," I said. I haven't used that phrase much, but it seemed appropriate for the cumulative effect of all the ups and downs of the day.

This put me on the zigzagging road near the bottom, by a lookout point with a quartet of cannons. I dealt with the traffic for the last couple of hairpin turns and then was walking normally, in a city.

And it was at this time — 5:08 p.m., eight hours after I'd left the safety of Gigi and Nadine:s place — that the rain started. Steady but light, refreshing, perfect. I thanked nature for waiting until I got off the mountain to start raining. And it lasted only ten minutes.

From here it was an easy 15 minutes to the Central Hotel. Today might have been the slowest pace of the entire Abecedarian Walks, an average of 15 minutes and 11 seconds per kilometer. Fewer than four kilometers an hour! I didn't even have a kilometer faster than 12 minutes between the time I started the Chemin des Anglais and when I came off the mountain at the end.

But speed wasn't the point. Jerome, my host back in Piton Sainte-Rose, had emphasized that we have to learn to live with nature, rather than conquer it. He knows that the mountain behind him might erupt at any time, or it might provide a good or bad harvest. It has a personality and it has to be respected. Today may have been tough going, but the mountains had treated me well. And the chocolate remained solid.

Go on to day 8