Smart Travels

Sunday, 9 August 2020

Hiking to Grand Place

It had been a long time since I actually made an overnight trip to Mafate; my last two trips to the cirque were one-day trips to La Nouvelle with visitors, so I probably hadn't slept overnight in Mafate since 2014! But having an enforced staycation in Reunion due to the COVID pandemic was the occasion to hike there with a group of friends. We started our expedition by taking a 4x4 taxi from Riviere des Galets to Deux Bras.

view further into Mafate from Deux Bras

From Deux Bras we started a leisurely hike of ≈7 km and ≈500 metres of positive elevation up to our night's accommodation at Grand Place les Hauts, where we stayed at Gite Pavillon. On the way there we crossed Bras D'Oussy river on a high bridge (more about Bras D'Oussy later).

view from the Bras D'Oussy bridge
looking south-east towards the Gros Morne

view from Bras D'Oussy bridge looking south-west towards Le Maido
(note the red roofs of Cayenne barely visible at the bottom left)

cross by the side of the path on the way to Cayenne

On the way we stopped just outside of the hamlet of Cayenne for lunch.

gaily decorated building at our lunch stop near Cayenne

lots of purple ginger bush was growing

After lunch we passed by Grand Place primary school. It's one of eight schools in Mafate (the others are in La Nouvelle, Orangers, Roche Plate, Marla, Aurère, îlet à Malheur, and îlet à Bourse). For secondary school education pupils from Mafate have to board on the coast.

Grand Place school

Grand Place is overlooked by the distinctive pyramid-shaped Piton des Calumets which is 1616 metres high.

nearly there; Piton des Calumets in the background

We arrived at the gîte quite early and were able to rest and enjoy the view. Pavillon is quite practical because it has its own small grocery shop and there's even fresh bread - a rarety in Mafate.

gîte Le Pavillon with Piton des Calumets benind

looking north-west from behind the gîte

looking north from behind the gîte

We should have been spending two nights in the same gîte, but there had been a mix-up and so the next morning we moved to another gîte about 20 minutes/1 km away called Chez Marcel et Dominique Bilin.

leaving gîte Le Pavillon
(buildings just visible in the centre of the photo)

After dropping most of our stuff off, we then headed off to Roche Ancrée for a few hours. Located between Grand Place and Roche Plate, Roche Ancrée is a nice bathing spot, technically part of the Rivière des Galets river. We headed down a very steep path to get there.

view on the way to Roche Ancrée

view halfway down the path to Roche Ancrée

the bathing spot from above

Some of us had a swim in the icy water before lunch and then dried off in the sun. To make a round trip of it we hiked through Cayenne to get back to Gîte Bilin.

having a dip at Roche Ancrée

looking north on the way from Roche Ancrée to Cayenne,
the hamlet is just visible to the right

arriving at Cayenne

(ficus?) tree roots by the pathside on the way to Cayenne

looking back (south) just before arriving at Cayenne

Cayenne church

a cross at Cayenne

After our second and final night in Mafate we headed slowly down to Deux Bras, where we had to be by 4pm to get the taxi back to the town of Rivière des Galets. On the way back we stopped at Gîte Bougainvilliers where there's a grocery, a postbox, and a statue of the famous postman of Mafate.

postbox at Gîte Bougainvilliers

Ivrin Pausé was one of the postmen of Mafate from 1951 until 1991. He would leave the post office in La Possession every Monday morning and spend the next fours days hiking 120km on the trails to deliver letters. It's been calculated that during his 40 years of service he hiked a total of 253 000 kilomètres, i.e. 6 times the circumference of the earth. Another well-known postman in Mafate was Angelo Thiburce who was awarded the Order of Merit by Jacques Chirac, but famously said he would have preferred that the government pay him a pair of shoes!

statute of Ivrin Pausé, former postman of Mafate

We then bypassed Cayenne (as we'd been there the day before) and crossed the Passerelle des Lataniers footbridge, before heading down to the level of Rivière des Galets.

crossing Passerelle des Lataniers footbridge

Once there it was time for a picnic lunch and a swim at Bras d'Oussy before heading back to Deux Bras for the 4x4 ride back to "civilisation". From our swimming spot we could see the bridge we'd crossed over the first day.

swimming at Bras d'Oussy

looking back into Mafate from Bras d'Oussy

Sunday, 2 August 2020

Cascade Biberon

Cascade Biberon waterfall

Cascade Biberon is a short hike in the district of Plaine des Palmistes. Biberon literally means "baby's bottle", and I initially thought this meant the water had been used to fill feeding bottles, but it turns out it's named after the former owner of the land!

sign at the start, showing altitude (984m) and
hiking time needed (one hour for the round trip)

During goyavier season (June/July) the area is busy with people picking the strawberry guava that grow abundantly in the area.

hiking path, Cascade Biberon

I had been once or twice before, but not since a new viewing platform was installed in October 2019. Prior to that it had been closed since a fatal accident in June 2014 when a rockfall killed two people and seriously injured one other. Access to the pool at the bottom is still closed off, and the platform lets people admire the waterfall without danger.

sign indicating the last 5 mins are a steep & narrow climb

look-out point stairs (photo credit: Randopitons)

look-out point (photo credit: Randopitons)

I've mentioned "hike" but it's really more of a walk than a hike. The elevation difference is only 130 metres and part of that is the stairs to the viewing platform.

there's a small pool at the base of the waterfall

The waterfall itself is about 250 metres high.

close-up view of Cascade Biberon

view across Plaine des Palmistes from Cascade Biberon

Having worked up an appetite we then repaired to the nearby farmhouse Au Coeur de la Cascade Biberon for a hearty lunch!

blossom at Au Coeur de la Cascade Biberon

Useful links:

Wikipedia (in French)
Randopitons (in French)

Saturday, 18 July 2020

Grand Bénare & La Glacière

At an elevation of 2898 mètres Grand Bénare is Reunion's third highest peak*. I had hiked it once before, a very long time ago, and recently decided I wanted to hike it again. Last Tuesday (Bastille Day) we got up very early and drove up to Le Maido, where we parked. After a quick look out from the viewpoint, we started the hike itself.

View from Le Maido showing Mafate in the foreground and Salazie
behind (if you look closely you can see the east coast)

When we parked the car at around 8am it was only 7°C, and we made sure we were well wrapped up against the cold. Fortunately as it was a sunny day we soon warmed up while walking.

post at start of hike showing altitude & hiking time
(3½ hours)

Grand Bénare is the highest point of the narrow municipality of Trois Bassins. Trois Bassins (literally "three pools") is a textbook example of the "From the seashore to the mountaintops" principle (in French Du battant des lames au sommet des montagnes, literally "From the beating of the waves to the summit of the mountains") of land concession, whereby early settlers cut land into straight bands that stretched from the shore to the highest points without ever widening horizontally.

post showing hike via La Glacière (see below)

The hiking path we took is known as Grand Bord because it follows the edge (border) of the mountain ridge: to your right it slopes gently down to the west coast, but to your left it drops away sharply giving you a spectacular view of the whole mountainous interior of the island. If you're also going to visit La Glacière (see below) it definitely makes more sense to hike to Grand Bénare along the Grand Bord path first because the view is more likely to be free of cloud in the morning. You can then hike back via La Glacière, which is slightly inland. As July is the cold season in Reunion (= less rain, so less clouds) we were fortunate because the sky remained cloud-free virtually all day.

Grand Bord hiking path follows this ridge
Grand Bénare is the highest point, to the left

view over Mafate: La Nouvelle centre left, enormous Gros Morne behind

looking down over northern/lower Mafate: in the foreground is
the hamlet of Roche Plate and flat-topped Le Bronchard

Gros Morne to the centre left, Grand Bénare extreme right

Piton des Neiges behind Gros Morne to the left,
Grand Bénare to the right,
Piton de la Fournaise just visible in the far background centre

Grand Bénare to the right,
Gros Morne to the left

vegetation is sparse at this altitude

The hike isn't very difficult from a technical point of view but is quite a long slog, with about 800 meters of elevation gain, and the path is rocky. On arrival at the summit we were greeted by a large white cross and a view over Reunion's third cirque, Cilaos.

cross at the summit of Grand Bénare, Cilaos behind

view from Grand Bénare to the south coast

Our arrival at Grand Bénare coincided with lunchtime and after eating our packed meal, sitting well wrapped up against the cold, we set off back down via a different route: La Glacière (altitude 2490m). Bénare actually means "where it is very cold" in Malagasy, and at La Glacière two hundred years ago some brick shafts were built to store ice that was cut from surrounding pools of water.

ice-storage shaft at La Glacière dating from 1820

During the period of slavery, land owner Mme Desbassyns would send slaves to La Glacière so they could carry ice down to her mansion at Villèle, a 60-km round trip. 25 kg blocks were either transported whole in hessian bags or crushed then wrapped in woollen blankets to stop them from melting. She enjoyed impressing her visitors by serving them sorbets and iced drinks. She also sent some of the ice to her son who lived at Rivière des Pluies, Sainte-Marie, using a system of relay riders. Mme Desbassyns died in 1846 and slavery was abolished two years later, but the practice continued for several decades more, apparently with impoverished labourers scraping out a living by collecting and delivering the ice.

ice-storage well at La Glacière

The path from La Glacière back to Le Maido car park is relatively flat and straight, which was welcome relief for our legs after the stony terrain of Grand Bord! (As there were a number of forest fires in the area during the early 2010s, the fire brigade wanted to make sure they could access the area in all-terrain vehicles if needs be, so they flattened the track). And although we saw a lot of gorse bushes all day, they were particularly present by the side of the path for the last kilometre or so. Their yellow colour makes them attractive but they are in fact an invasive species, imported in the 1850s as a way of fencing animals in.