La Réunion

A few random pictures from my first few days on La Réunion, before I get to the big set from hiking up the volcano...

We ate lunch one day at a sort of upscale Créole restaurant, which serves traditional Créole dishes but kind of fancy-schmancy. There's a picture of the food coming up, and I wish I'd gotten more pictures of the beautiful garden next to our table. Most of the restaurants we visited were actually people's homes with the living room and patio converted to dining rooms.

Check out all those amazing sauces; I wish I could remember what anything was specifically, but it was all wonderful. Créole cooking mostly borrows from French and African dishes, going back to the days when the island was largely populated by French colonists and Africans slaves, and it also incorporates a lot of Indian stuff, since nowadays there's also a large Indian population there. Weirdly, samosas specifically are a really common sight in Créole restaurants, markets, and snack shops, and I suspect the people on La Réunion probably think that samosas are Réunionese and not Indian. They make samosas with just about anything, from all the ingredients you'd expect in Indian samosas, all the way up to crab samosas, cheese samosas, and palm tree samosas (I'm not kidding). I ate at least two different kinds of trees in the various Réunionese dishes I tried; palm tree and some other tree I can't remember the name of, but they were both delicious.

This is back at M's parents' house that night. During our stay we ate a lot of weird fruits that I'd never seen before, and this one was definitely the weirdest. It might be a bit hard to make out in the picture, the fruit is covered in a thick, waxy, dark pink skin with strange little fins circling around. The flesh of the fruit inside is white with black seeds, and it tastes like... just about nothing! Not much flavor, and not very sweet. This was in direct contrast to all the other fruits I ate on La Réunion, which were all extremely sweet and tasty. Their versions of pineapples (which are smaller and lighter in color) and bananas (which are short and fat and called bananes cochons — pig bananas) are much sweeter than the versions I'm used to in France and the US. This pink thing was just straight-up weird.

Here's the backyard at M's parents' house. They live in a small town partway up one of the mountains (i.e. extinct volcanos) on the island. That's the ocean in the distance at the left! You can see the ocean from almost anywhere on La Réunion; the whole island is only about a hundred miles around, so you have to get really deep into the mountains to forget you're surrounded by ocean on all sides.

The name for this plant is something like "voyager plant," because early visitors to the island knew to look for this thing to find fresh water; rain water flows down the branches and collects in the spaces between the branches near the trunk. This particular one lost a couple branches in the last cyclone.

These little translucent newt(?) things can be found crawling around the walls of every building on La Réunion at night. This one hung out on a lamp on the outer wall of M's parents' house, catching lots of insects that were drawn in by the light.

Next: Part 4 — Volcano!