A new day and another new port. This time we are visiting the island of Reunion. However, before we move onto that, let us state that Mark’s love of Mauritius has slightly diminished due to have been bitten at least a dozen times and Pam had a handful too. So we were up at 7.15am ready for our day but spent the first 10minutes putting cream on bites!
We decide on breakfast in the kings court buffet and Mark also made up a couple of rolls for lunch. We had to meet our tour, (a visit to the town of St Leu and the turtle sanctuary) in the Royal Court theatre. We were given stickers and moved, as a group, through immigration onto our bus. Our 2 guides looked like students and their English was average, French is the most common language in Reunion and their have the Euro as their currency and drive on the right. It seems they are completely French, with french rule. This must have given them infrastructure investment as their roads are superb but the rest of the country (buildings etc…) didn’t get the same level of money so it looked a bit odd.
The coach was half full. We did not have a good start when the driver got lost getting out of the port, trying to leave the way you come in! When we eventually left the port we headed first to Kelonia and the Turtle Observatory which was 45 mins away.
This used to be a turtle farm (bred for food) but when the international law changed to protect sea turtles it became a site for turtles who are recovering from injuries. We were given a great tour of the facility by Marie who works there. Almost everything was in French but Marie’s English was excellent. There was also a school tour going on at the same time and the kids seemed so excited to see the turtles. Unfortunately, we only spent an hour there but it is a pretty small place with the hospital part and the main recovery parts off limits to visitors.
The site also rescues and looks after tortoises, though these are normal size compared to yesterdays. Not sure how these get injured though.
Then we were driven to St Leu, which is a small town around 2km away. There is not much there and must places looked quite basic We were shown a market that had 5 stalls - that were all craft and expensive. So not very interesting. There is a beach but it more of a coastline as the beach part is small and the area is dominated by volcanic rocks.
We found a bar on the beach. Everything was French but the music played was Caribbean so we felt we were in an episode of Death in Paradise and at Katherine’s bar - actually it wasn’t good enough for that bar but it had the same ambiance.
After just over 4 hours our tour was complete and the coach took us back to port where we had to all get off and go through immigration again and then get back onto the coach to go back to the ship. Once onboard we changed clothes and had a small lunch. In the afternoon, we got back off ship to meet Janet who had just finished a tour herself and wanted to go on the shuttle bus but not on her own as she struggling with her walking. So we waited for bus to be free and then the shuttle bus took us to St Gilles des Bains.
We separated as Mark went to pharmacy for antihistamines for his inflamed bites and some ibuprofen pain relief for Janet. Meanwhile, Janet and Pam walked slowly to a beach cafe.
It was a longer walk than the tourist information had described plus the weather was getting very hot and humid. Mark met us at the cafe and we all had mocktails and rested. We were not that excited about this town either. After a nice rest, we slowly walked back to shuttle bus while Mark took a little detour to get bottles of drink for the ship
So back on the shuttle bus again and a repeat of on and off buses and thru immigration again and then finally back to the ship. We can’t say we were impressed with this trip though later we heard from a number of people that the island tour was fantastic so that was obviously the trip to have done.
We left Janet to head back to our room and then headed to the kids area of deck 6 to ring the kids. It was quite successful with Katherine but Emily and Hugo were out shopping so the signal was not as good. We need to be in port to really get the internet to work as onboard it is absolutely abysmal - this is why there is such a delay in posting blogs as it is a pain at sea - very time consuming with the bad onboard internet. We will probably end up doing the last week of posts, for this segment, from home at this rate!
We then showered and dressed for dinner where we were joined by Janet for dinner in the Britannia restaurant. Mark had the brie starter followed by a melt in the mouth lamb shank. Pam had chicken broth soup followed by steak with potatoes, green beans and a mushroom sauce.
We both had the strawberry cheesecake for dessert.
We then parted company with Janet and headed to the theatre. The show was a magician from Sweden called Michael Halvarson who was more a pick pocket than a magician, with a bit of comedy. It was funny in parts but not the best magician we have seen. He also seems to have aged 25 years based on his stage photo.
Then we joined Diane and Andrew in the golden lion to play the Jokers Wild quiz. Five categories, you choose one for you joker. If you get any of the 5 questions in that joker category right you get 2 points. The other questions would be 1 point. We managed 15 out of 25 but did not win but we’re more than happy with that.
We then headed upstairs to the Carinthia Lounge with Diane and Andrew and did the late night
trivia quiz there we got 18 out of 20 but still lost - to the usual winners.
Mark finished the night with a late night hot chocolate (they are soooo much better on Arcadia) and we said goodbye to Diane and Andrew and headed off to bed.
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