Trip 43 — Réunion Walk

Day 8: Saint-Denis to airport
Thursday, 7 November 2024

Yesterday: 11130 steps/8.27 km/5.14 mi/1h 39m
Grand total: 299038 steps/231.02 km/143.55 mi/44h 19m

I wasn't surprised.

Two TV channels in French at the Central Hotel were covering the election. By the time I woke up, it was nearly midnight on the U.S. east coast. Swaths of red already bloodied the map through most of the middle and down to Florida. Kamala was losing by a margin that brought to mind the score of the basketball game at the beginning of the original "Teen Wolf."

I was still tired, but I wasn't going to sleep any more. I was also still hopeful. I went down to the hotel's terrible breakfast (nothing hot, hard-boiled eggs pre-cracked, almost all the empty tables littered with uncleared waste from previous guests), dawdled, swigged the last of the goyavier liqueur, and checked out.

My flight out of Réunion wasn't until 9:45 p.m. I didn't have the energy — physical or mental — to do much walking or learning, and Saint-Denis accommodated that brilliantly. It had no must-see museums, but it had a pleasant pedestrianized shopping street with countless clothing stores, the post office, a samosa kiosk, an accordion player, a mosque, and the pleasant, low-pressure Grand Marché. There were snack bars by the water and cafes throughout town. It was hot but not too hot. I looked back up the mountains — the one I'd come down, with the zigzagging road, and the one to the left, the neighborhood of Bellepierre, occupying a skinny chute that goes up to the sky.

I searched for Furcy, but I didn't find him. The Rue de la Compagnie, on which the Central Hotel was located, had apparently been renamed for him, but I didn't see his name on any of the street signs. Off the pedestrian street, there are now a Clarks store and takeaway poke and ice-cream shops where the Routiers' house stood.

A shellfish platter at Le Bar à Huîtres Lebon seemed as cheerful a way as any to satisfy my stomach while hope was still barely afloat (230 to 210). Might as well suck oysters and drink wine. In the "Titanic" musical, with impending doom, Etches the steward proposes having the last bottle of Cristal.

"It would be a shame to open it," Ida Straus says.

"Under the circumstances...it would be a shame not to."

I had nine oysters, six shrimp, and six whelks and called that a starter. The main lunch was going to be one of the basic Réunion dishes, either rougail saucisse (sliced sausages in a tomato-onion sauce) or bol renversé (inverted rice bowl, a Chinese-inspired dish).

The election was decided. I shuffled toward the waterfront, embarrassed to be an American. Would anyone ask me about it? How could I explain that half of my fellow citizens chose a racist, misogynistic criminal after watching his lunacy develop for most of a decade? The 2016 outcome was exasperating, but this one announced to the world: We don't want you here, and we don't care about anyone here who isn't white, rich, and male. America has monumentally failed.

A few snack bars were open, with mostly the same menu. All advertised rougail saucisse and none had the bol renversé. At one, the seller took my name — we spent a couple of minutes trying to get it right, with me spelling it in French and another customer joining in the laborious team effort — so that she could call me back up ten minutes later to tell me there was no rougail saucisse after all. Another vendor was also out of it and able to tell me immediately. The third had it, however; the sausages were decent enough but the lumpy rice was unappealing.

I had a sweet potato cake at the Mafate Cafe and roamed the streets of compact central Saint-Denis for an hour. Toward the east, the streets were busier and the stores more Indian and African. A friend in Finland sent his condolences, inviting me to relocate.

Not wanting to walk after dark, I headed out of the city a little after five. At the water, I turned onto the bike path, the same one that led all the way to Saint-André. There was also a dirt pedestrian path, and I alternated been the two. The paths were popular for jogging and strolling. The aroma of barbecued chicken wafted toward me from one group's grill. I left the remainder of my sunscreen, a 200-milliliter bottle too scary for international travel, out next to a bench, in the hope that someone might take it and use it.

The path entered a park with little bridges and lots of trees, similar to the one north of Saint-Paul. Beyond, the path curled right and went uphill, and the sun was setting over La Montagne, past the city.

The Rivière des Pluies has dried up, but the sizy bridge still crosses it. The traffic runs above; walkers and bicycles are on the lower level, with the graffiti.

I'd walked almost eight kilometers. The lights over Sainte-Marie were coming on for the evening, just ahead, past the airport, as if the mountain had been plugged in like a Christmas tree. As a punitive measure, Joseph Lory would make Furcy walk here, barefoot — slaves were forbidden to wear shoes — after dinner from their house in Saint-Denis to check on things at the plantation and then return.

I turned in toward the airport. This was about the easiest airport access I've ever had on foot — no motor vehicles to deal with all the way from the city, and a bonus vibrant sunset. When city planners got things right here, they really got them right; it's a shame there were so many gaps in safe human-powered movement around the island.

Kids were running around the terminal. There must have been a hundred people checking in. The same at passport control. I bypassed both with a small bag and a luckily priced business-class award ticket. Ahead of me were two long flights in solitary pods, 25½ transit hours, without that despicable orange face on every screen, disconnection from the immediate fallout. But now what?

Back to the travelogue list