Our final Reunion road trip was to La Fenetre (The Window), a viewpoint over the Cirque de Cilaos. We’d visited Cirque de Cilaos earlier in the week, so it was fun to see it again from thousands of feet above. Afterwords, we drove down into the town of St. Pierre for lunch before returning to Le Port to return our rental car and begin the checkout process. We’d had an excellent time in Reunion–the island was a real highlight of the entire trip so far.
Trip highlights from October 15th follow. Click any image for a larger view, or click the position to view the location on a map. And a live map of our current route and most recent log entries always is available at http://mvdirona.com/maps
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Foret des Makes
Position: 55 25.82, -21 11.89
We made another early-morning drive along a steep and winding mountain road to a viewpoint called La Fenetre. Three days ago we were at La Roche Merveilleuse on the other side of the cirque, looking across to La Fenetre. On the way up we passed through a wonderful park in the Foret des Makes. Blooming planted flowers filled the hillside around lovely picnic areas.
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La Fenetre
Position: 55 25.98, -21 11.12
The sweeping view into the Cirque de Cilaos from Le Fenetre was spectacular—we could see all the places we’d visited while touring the cirque earlier in the week. The video at https://youtu.be/hozyvbQozpA pans across the cirque from southeast to northwest, then zooms in on the the village of Ilet a Cordes, the town of Cilaos and the L’Eglise Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, the Pont de la Boucle (loop bridge), and finally the village of le Palmiste Rouge.
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Breakfast
Position: 55 25.98, -21 11.12
A picnic breakfast at the edge of the cirque.
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Port-de St-Pierre
Position: 55 28.54, -21 20.63
After visiting La Fenetre, we’re returned down to sea level to have lunch in St. Pierre at the southwest end of the island. Some foreign pleasure-craft do moor in the marina here when visiting Reunion, but space is rather limited and most go to Le Port instead. We inquired about moorage, but at 55 tons Dirona is too heavy for their facility.
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La Medianoche
Position: 55 28.66, -21 20.65
We walked down to the harbour entrance to enjoy a coffee just as skipper Mareike Guhr was taking La Medianoche to sea, likely en route to South Africa. We’d had dinner with Mareike in Rodrigues and chatted briefly with her while she was visiting friends in the Le Port marina. The entry to the St. Pierre marina is as tight and difficult as it looks, and is closed during heavy swell when waves break across the entry bar.
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Beach
Position: 55 28.31, -21 20.65
The reef off St. Pierre creates a protected swimming lagoon along a popular sandy beach.
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Le Cocotiers
Position: 55 28.71, -21 20.61
St. Pierre has an abundance of restaurants—we had a difficult time choosing one for lunch. We finally settled on the outdoor patio over the water at Le Cocotiers where we had delicious sauteed fish. We’ve yet to have an average, let alone poor, meal in Reunion.
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Checking out
Position: 55 17.00, -20 56.51
After returning to Le Port, we stopped by the marina office to settle our bill, fill out a departure form, and request an appointment with customs for a weekend departure. Customs was already scheduled to clear out another boat on Friday at 7pm, we we’d just be added to the list.
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Superted
Position: 55 17.50, -20 56.29
Dinner with Jean and Matt Findlay from Superted. We’d stopped by for a quick visit the day they’d arrived, but it was great to spend more time together and catch up over another excellent Reunion meal.
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Click the travel log icon on the left to see these locations on a map, with the complete log of our cruise.
On the map page, clicking on a camera or text icon will display a picture and/or log entry for that location, and clicking on the smaller icons along the route will display latitude, longitude and other navigation data for that location. And a live map of our current route and most recent log entries always is available at http://mvdirona.com/maps. |
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James and Jennifer, I wanted to thank you guys for sharing your journeys with all of us. I’ve been an avid reader and follower of your blog for a couple years now. To say I am impressed would be an understatement! You’ve done such a wonderful job and are obviously living such wonderful lives.
I had a couple questions, do you have a place on your blog where you talk about where you are planning to go? I would be interested to hear how you two come up with your plans?
Have you considered writing an article or post about how you produce this blog? It is truly amazing and makes it so easy and nice to follow your journey. I know James you’re very computer savvy (huge understatement) but is their a program or website you use to produce the blog?
Thank you again and I look forward to checking your blog every day!
John
John, your question on how we decide where to go is an interesteing one. We debate. We always have new ideas, we often are talking to people who have been to interesting places, we are often scaning the charts for new options, and Jennifer and I always have new ideas. In fact, it’s kind of comical the number of times the trip plan has changed in fundamental ways. Each time one of us gets a new idea, it becomes the topic of a dinnertime conversation. We often change plans, sometimes change them back and no plan is solid until the boat arrives. One of the joys of traveling the world in a small boat is you can make up your own mind, go where you want, and chose exactly when you go there.
As an example, after South Africa, we were originally planning to head to the Med. Then we fell in love with South America and decide to go explore there. Then we decided we wanted to go through the Pananama canal back. Then we saw pictures from the eastern seaboard of Canada and fell in love. Our current plans will have us exploring the US and Canadian east coast before heading up north through Iceland and Greenland to eventually spend some time in the Baltic sea. But, plans change daily and these may as well :-).