Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We had a relaxed New Year's morning, only getting moving around lunchtime. We cruised through town to see what was open (almost nothing), walked along Grand Anse Beach, looking for a place that would sell us some sunscreen (failure), had a decent lunch at a beachside restaurant, and headed in to the interior.

Adrienne drove us up some windy roads to the Grand Etang National Rainforest. The visitor center was closed, but we did a hike around Grand Etang Lake. Or maybe that's redundant, since "étang" means "pond". The pond is the remains of a volcanic caldera that's slowly going through the cycle from lake to swamp to meadow. Our objectives: to see some of the monkeys that live in the rainforest (success!) and to not slip and injure ourselves (also success!). The walk was fairly level and would have been pretty easy if the trail weren't quite so muddy. Almost the whole thing was slippery wet leaves or mud bog. Happily, we were both wearing ankle-high hiking boots, so even when we squelched through the middle of the trail, it wasn't too bad. As a bonus, we saw some hummingbirds and some doves that are almost certainly not the national bird.