‘Faut en profiter de la Réunion !’ – That I have done.

    Though over the last few weeks I’ve missed the English charm of the chilly Christmas season, I have been super-busy with various activities, so the idea of crimbo has pretty much passed me by. Except for the icicle-lights hanging from palm trees and other such seasonally-confused décor, it’s obvious that Christmas here isn’t quite so much of a hyper-ventilating oh-my-god-only-fifty-shopping-days-to-go fiasco. And I am DOWN with THAT. As long as one also avoids the bigass French supermarkets and their overload of Christmas visual-screaming, it’s pretty nice to not have the constant reminder there.
    Here’s the lowdown of my last couple of weeks of my first term in la Réunion.

Volca-yes!
     La Réunion is a volcanic island, a mere 3 million years old (oh-who’s-a-little-moochy-goochy!), and two weeks ago we climbed up to the original volcano which formed it, Piton des Neiges, which has long been extinct. However, the other Piton de la Fournaise happens to be one of the most active and  most accessible volcanoes in the world, and a shield volcano with effusive eruptions at that, so it doesn’t pose too much of a threat even when it does erupt. So we were of course eager to get climbing up that hot stuff to get a glimpse!
    To get to ol’ volcy, you have to first cross the Plaine des Sables, a desert-like plain of dusty orange sand. After the trek across the surreal half-Mars, half-mid-West-America landscape, the approach to the volcano was even more impressive. Black lava fields dotted with scraggly shrubs were overshadowed by the mighty Piton itself, a dominating silhouette on the early-morning horizon.
     The hike up to the crater was fascinating; you could still see the lava flows from the most recent eruption in December 2010. I had optimistically bought a big bag of marshmallows to toast on the volcano, but clearly I wasn’t sufficiently informed to know that there’s only a bit of smokin’ hot stuff soon after an eruption and also on the other side of the volcy. Hot damn!
    Alas, when we were about half an hour or so away from the crater, the Heavens opened, and it started raining like Hell. Dommage! The incessant precipitation mocked us as we thought we’d escaped it on our descent, and it just crept back up on us again. Is it because I lied when I was seventeen? I’d put it more down to relief rainfall, but sadly it made us miss the view at the top. Sauf ça, c’était carrément cool!

‘Le Grand Bleu avec rien dessous’ – Wow, wow and wow.      I really did dive in at the deep end this week when I went on a dolphin-watching trip with WWF representatives. The dude who made the documentary was carrying out some research for part of the of-the-minute project; recording dolphin sounds and trying to understand the correlation between sound and behaviour. Essentially trying to translate dolphin ‘language’.
      So we got on the little boat and went out to look for dolphins. After around half an hour, everyone was suddenly signalling to two snorkelers bobbing about in the water. I wondered what on Earth the fuss was about, it’s just two OH NO IT’S TWO BOTTLE-NOSED DOLPHINS SWIMMING TOWARDS THE BOAT WOW!  They apparently like the movement of small boats, so we picked up speed to get them to follow us. At one point there were around ten dolphins swimming right in front of the boat, playing in the waves we were making with our hands.
     But I didn’t just stay on the boat. As the main researcher went to make the recordings, we were allowed to follow him and see the dolphins from under the water. Now, as I am one to be a bit ill-prepared, it took me a bit longer to equip myself and get in the water. This resulted in me being about ten metres away from everyone else. Having seen a lot of David Attenborough’s documentaries, I know full-well that in the animal kingdom, if a predator is chasing after a herd, it will always single out the little weakling lagging behind. So when in shark-infested waters, you can imagine I was a bit ... completely terrified. BUT, don’t worry they said, sharks never come near boats nor near dolphins.

     Seeing the dolphins about fifteen metres away, hearing all their sounds and clicks under the water, that was special.
  

Flying home for Christmas ...       So in just two tiny days I’ll be coming back to ol’ Blighty. Mental. I left in the height of the British Summer, and will be coming back in the darkest depths of winter.

       And what a term it’s been. I was told by many friends and family before coming here to ‘make the most of it’, and even here everyone loves to say ‘il faut en profiter!’. Having the opportunity to come here makes me doubly glad that I chose to continue studying French, and it really reminds you of the joy of opening up new worlds which you could only access if you make the effort to speak the language. I’ve got a long way to go, and it certainly has been hindered by the overload of anglophone Erasmus students, but I’ve tried all I can to break out of the high-school bubble of Université de la Réunion.

    So that concludes term one. I greatly look forward to the next one!
Thanks for reading my blog to those dedicated enough to even still be reading it in its entirety by now. ‘Preciate it y’all!
 

In a bit,

Sophie.

'Oté La Rényon, la làba nousava’ – Explorations of the Secret Island

  Until the end of November we were all rather swamped with exams and assignments. In the typical vagueness of Université de La Réunion, it seems some teachers will give us our results ‘some time soon ... maybe ... not sure yet’. Basically, if I ever ran a university, it would probably end up being like this one. Vague, disorganised and laidback. 
  Anyway, here I go with another update of island shenanigans. It’s been another eventful month so far as the holidays began and everyone is eager to get exploring.
 

I-I-I-I-I-I like-a coconuts. And lychees.

    During the stressful process of working on our group project, we managed to find time to sneak out of the library to go and nick some bananas from outside one of the campus buildings. Now that lychee and mango season has arrived, hunter-gathering is pipsqueak-easy, and we’ve already had a fruitful month so far with a bit of harvesting on our trip to Cascade du Chaudron. A short bus ride and about an hour’s hike away from the university, this little gem isn’t something we expected to find given that the connotations of Le Chaudron are of a slightly threatening and potentially dangerous area of Saint Denis. And with the 75+ waterfalls on the island, it’d be quite a project to see them all.

The best things in life are free 
     Last week I helped out at the ticket office at the university’s theatre, just about managing to count the money correctly and hand out the tickets to the audience, most of which arrived about half an hour late (oh, dahling, that is like SO Réunion!). And now that I’ve done this rather easy voluntary work, I have a special badge for special people so I can see shows at the theatre for free whenever I like. I’ve used this privilege to watch a Maloya concert (by far my favourite genre from the island), and an avant-garde French theatre company performing a play which included a man dressed as a bear in a suit swinging around his giant willy and a wall with lots of small doors with a hand that popped out of them which threw Barbie dolls and teddies. Disturbing as it was, I enjoyed that. It's like, symbolic man, you know.

‘On l’appelle “Putain des Neiges” – tu verras pourquoi!’ 
    Last weekend we ventured up to the highest point in Indian Ocean – at 3071 metres above sea-level,  Piton des Neiges is the mighty extinct volcano which originally formed the island some 3 million years ago.
    Before the Big Climb, the six of us went to the town of Cilaos, our starting point, which coincidentally happened to have a Maloya concert happening on the Friday night. What’s that? More Maloya? Wi, bin, mi inm maloya! Such infectious rhythms and powerful vocals, I find it particularly cool that it’s not just a music genre that was a passing phase – this 200 year-old Réunion style is still just as popular today. This is the group which we saw at Cilaos, just as a taster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iULIiX0uQ4
    The next day saw a seemingly endless steep climb, trudging up rocky paths through lush humid forest. Pretty much every time we passed people coming down the mountain, they would say the usual jovial ‘Bonjour!’ followed by a smug smirk of ‘et euh ... bon courage!’. And courage was certainly what it took, but we made it to the other-wordly summit just in time for sunset. Camping on the summit itself was a shivery experience; not one of us slept more than a couple of hours, but waking up for the sunrise that illuminated the view of the whole island beneath us was something really special.
    
     After a few hours of revelling at the views, we set off on the descent back down to Earth. Half of the group went off on another route to continue the adventure, but my half of the group had stuff to get back to the next day, and so took the route of Cap Anglais.   Notoriously the most difficult ascent on the island, we weren’t quite prepared for the hours and hours of knee-wobbling descent through misty primary rainforest, conifer forest and endless zig-zag ‘paths’ consisting of many four-foot drops for which I resorted to just crawling. Cap Anglais? More like Crap Anglais. Never have I been more ashamed to be English. The pain and torture aside, we passed through some beautiful scenery and seeing the wildlife there was a treat; particularly my first sighting of the lovely oiseau vert. It was overall a sweet, sweet weekend.

‘Bienvenue au ciel de La Réunion’ 
    I went paragliding yesterday; that was cool. It wasn’t really anywhere near as scary as I had thought, but when we first arrived we saw the vehicle which was taking us up there that looked like the Mystery Van from Scooby Doo, and it took three men to push-start it to get up the mountain. So putting our lives in their hands seemed initially not the best idea, but in the comical ‘Oh dahling, that is SO Réunion’ way, it was easy to laugh off. It took a short run up and then up we went, circling around the hills with the iron-roofed villages below, and some cliché like ‘and everyone just looked like little ants from all the way up there!’.  Soaring over the coral reefs was cool; it gives you a better perspective of how extensive this beautiful ecosystem really is.

Coming soon ... 
     After a meeting with the documentary dude this week, I’ve been invited to go on a trip to see (hopefully) dolphins with other visiting WWF representatives next week. I’m saving my victory dance for after it’s happened. The process of doing the subtitles has been long and difficult; I had to firstly transcribe the whole documentary, then translate it, and now all that’s left is the process of condensing it into subtitle-length sentences. And as a New York Times journalist is apparently waiting to see the documentary in a few weeks’ time, the pressure is certainly on to do a good job!
   Oh yeah and I’m going to the volcano next week. That should be cool/hot. Well, with the island's 200 microclimates, it could be anything really.

In a mere two weeks I’ll be returning to ol’ angleterre; how on Earth did that happen?!