Réunion

So this is a quick summary of my time in Réunion. I spent a month here visiting Lisa, who those who've been following this blog will know I met initially on the Pamir highway and we've been friends ever since.

I've probably done some individual entries but this is just to summarise the whole month in case I forget the individual details. I booked an apartment in La Possession and got a taxi from the airport to the apartment. Met up with Lisa later on and had a meal at the restaurant near the supermarket.

Rented a car from the same place that Lisa had rented hers. It was a bit of an old banger, but the price was only abut 10 euros a day. Which was fine until the car broke down on the return trip form Mafat on the Monday of Bastille day.

We did a number of hikes because Réunion is such a good venue for hiking being a volcanic island. The first was Trois Bassons which we also did with Lisa's friend Jeanne.

We also did - or attempted - the trek up the volcano, which was a bit of a disaster. My knee went so I had to wait near the summit while Lisa went up. Then I had to start down on my own because I was starting to get hypothermic. And Lisa didn't get a view of the sunrise because of mist. Oh well.

We also went to Cilaos and did a couple of hikes there. The second one had a quick swim in very very cold pond by the waterfall.

We also did a fullcircumnavigation of the island looking at the lava road. Réunions's volcano is active and every few years lava runs down to the sea crossing roads int eh east of the island. The scenery here was so beautiful. But then it is everywhere on the island.

And also hiking to Mafat. Unfortunately we caught some really bad weather so didn't do as much hiking as we would have liked. And on the way back the car broke down so we had a wait about three hours for a rescue truck.

Also, I hired a honda 750 hornet for a couple of days and just went riding around, I particularly liked the route to Cilaios so repeated that. 400 odd switchbacks apparently.

We also had an evening with some of Lisa's friends on a boat to watch the sunset. Again cloudy. We didn't have much like with sunrises and sunsets.

There were a number of very nice markets. Particularly in St Paul and St Pierre.

The only drawback was that the place was quite quiet in the evening. A lot of the bars / restaurants seemed to close early.

Two drawbacks. Someone gave the Réunion authorities way too big a budget for traffic calming measures. They were everywhere. Fine on a motorbike, but not so much fun when driving a car.

If other memories occur I'll add them here.Read more