We met the effervescent
Yolande, a local lady who runs a restaurant and bar, is married to a
Frenchman and speaks good English. This bubbly character knows cruisers
as she's experienced some of that life herself and she's a mine of
information about the island. We immediately made arrangements with her to visit
the reserve the following morning then took a wander around the village.
The following morning, we were met by a local guide, Giargino, who took us on a four hour hike up to the top of the mountain, through a few tiny villages, stopping at a small school hidden in the growth, then through vanilla and cocoa plantations, all the while looking out for chameleons and lemurs. We saw our first lemurs at the very start prior to setting out to climb the mountain, one with a teeny little baby but due to all the other tourists around, we didn't really get a chance to associate with them. We'll come across them on other islands later. Our guide pointed out several baby chameleons as well. Had he not done so, we would never have found them as, even when he did stop to show us, it took a good while before we finally saw them hidden under leaves even with him pointing directly at them.. How he managed to pick them out as we walked by is beyond me.
The number of fruits and other crops grown here is amazing: mangoes, papaya, Jack fruit, pineapples, lichis, avocados, limes, coffee, vanilla, sugar cane and a few we didn't know. Giargino, on his newly acquired one hectare of land, was busy planting vanilla and cocoa for export in the future and showed us how he pollenates the vanilla flowers.. Very industrious.
After four hours climbing in the heat of the day, we spent the remainder chilling out doing a well deserved nothing.
PHOTO ALBUM:
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