A Grand Adventure: Salazie, Hell-Bourg, and Trou de Fer

I've never gone on an actual "hike" before, so I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when I signed up for this. I imagined it to be like a ruck march in the Army...maybe like 16 miles of walking through the woods on a maybe paved or semi-paved path with a ton of gear. I can do that. I got this...

Except it wasn't anything like that. It was more like rock climbing, at 90 degrees. Then when it started raining, it was more like log hopping, or swimming really. And there was not so much of a path, as there was a bunch of slippery rocks or roots people have walked on before. Here are some examples:

don't trip on a rock! there is only one way downnn

So needless to say, it was a challenge. But it felt a little bit like being in the middle of a Disney fairy tale. The forest is amazing. Breathtaking. Really words and pictures can't even describe it. No matter how miserably cold, muddy or wet we were, all we had to do was stop for a second and look around. It was completely worth it. 

We stayed in a place called a "gite," which is like a privately owned cabin/hostel. You pay a fee to stay there overnight in bunk beds (luckily we went with 6 girls so we had an entire room to ourselves, but you might be bunking with complete strangers!) and then you can pay extra for some home cooked meals. It's cheap to stay the night (15 euro) but super expensive to eat!! (18 euro for just dinner!) so we paid for the first night's dinner and packed camping food to eat the rest of the time. Dinner WAS pretty amazing....totally Réunionnaise. Reunion has their own rum, so they made a Rum Punch as a before meal drink, and something called Rhum Arrange for after you're finished eating (this is a specialty and a big deal...it is rum infused with fruit and spices.) After the Rum Punch, was a quiche with chouchou...that weird veggie my roommate and I cooked for our first cookbook adventure. Then we had a traditional Réunion dish...Curri Fish with beans and rice.  For dessert we had pineapple cake, of course with fresh Réunionnaise pineapples! 

Our Gite...on the top of the mountains!! 

The second day rained a lot and it was freezing. So after our hike to Trou de Fer (which was covered in fog when we finally got there after hiking for two hours...but luckily the fog lifted enough for us to see the waterfalls!) we came back to the gite. In the room next to ours were four little Réunionnaise girls and their two moms. We ended up playing card games with them for the rest of the night. They were so cute. They had just started taking English classes so they would say a few words here and there. And they told us they really want to visit the US one day. When they went to dinner, we pathetically were sitting around the table by the fire, rationing out tiny pieces of a baguette and eating tuna out of a can. So when they came back from dinner...they had a surprise for us...they smuggled back six pieces of coconut banana cake from dessert!!

we are very happy now. 

Before bed, they gave us all goodnight kisses and performed a dance for us! haha. 

We got back Friday afternoon and it took me most of the day to recover!! But it was a perfect little adventure to end the school break. We start classes on Monday, so for the rest of the weekend I'll be preparing lessons and seeing how long it takes to walk to my schools....keep your fingers crossed for a good semester!!! 

Oh!! I discovered how to upload small videos!! Ok so this one is not terribly interesting, but it is of the BEAUTIFUL bus ride into the mountains!

And this one is of the little dance the girls did for us before bed :-)

OK, now, c'est fini <3