Our first choice was to go to the waterfall that is higher than the Statue of Liberty. It's the Chamaral waterfall. As water needs a place to fall, this necessitated driving up the mountain to get there. We have a small compact car that we rented. It is barely large enough for our one suitcase and two dive bags and us. And while the speed limit on their major highway is 110 kph, this car wouldn't go that fast no matter how hard I pushed on the accelerator. Going downhill, it might reach 110. So I'm real excited about driving up the side of a mountain with it - not!
Yep, car performed exactly as expected. If I had a full head of steam heading up a hill, any elevation would bleed off my speed rather rapidly until I am chugging hard to reach the summit of this small road hill and hopefully have a stretch of straight road to build up my speed again. So it took us rather longer than the guide books suggested to make it to the Chamaral waterfall. But it was quite magnificent. We are rather far away from the actual waterfall and I'm not sure if you can hike to it or not as we had no interest in doing that but it was beautiful. There are two vantage points, one being in the parking lot and the other you can hike up a small hill which gives you a better view of the entire waterfall. We got up that small hill much better than our car driving up any hill.
After the waterfall, we continued on our way to the Gorges Waterfall. There are several within the Black River Gorges National Park which is a beautiful protected park of wonderful stands of forests and monkeys and who knows what other birds and animals. We stopped at the Gorges Waterfall because there was also a small craft market there.
Amazingly, the National Emblem is the extinct DoDo bird. What fun is that!?! Naturally we needed something to commemorate this odd fact of the land so we found a nice DoDo magnet at the craft shops and a nice DoDo wooden bird made from some wood we'd never heard of from Madagascar. It's probably not wood at all but something made of sawdust and glue and given a name to make people think it's a wood. don't care. the little DoDo is lovely and the magnet cute.
From there, we went on to the Alexandra Waterfall. Kind of wish we'd done the waterfalls in reverse order as the first one was magnificent, the second good and the last rather ho-hum. would have been nice to see them in opposite order, going from ho-hum to magnificent. The good thing about stopped at the Alexandra Waterfall is the view. On a good day, you can see to the coast and the waves coming ashore. We could see the coast but it wasn't totally clear with a bit of a haze.
Then to the Seven Colours. The book claims that the land here shows seven separate colours in the dirt and as this is caused by minerals coming to the surface and working with/against each other, nothing grows in this section. So there are small hills of the dirt worked into a small park area inside the Black River Gorges National Park. We wanted to see this fully expecting it to be like a lot of places where "you will see such magnificence in the different colours" only to find when you get there, you must squint, stand on your head, look over one shoulder, and still only see one or two colours on alternate Tuesdays. We were pleasantly surprised that this small area of rolling hills actually did have rather brilliant colour changes in the dirt. It was lovely. They also had a small display of the natural indigenous Mauritian tortoise. There aren't many left so it was nice to see some. Mostly they were all sleeping or eating but hey, how often do you see a tortoise move fast anyway.
Our final stop for today was going to be the Grand Bassin. This is a lake in the mountains that Hindu legend believes that Shiva was flying over the area and spilled some of his water from the Holy River Ganges which formed a lake where he spilled it. In January of this year, they had a huge festival where thousands make their pilgrimage to the lake to bathe in it's waters. Sometimes the festival is in Feb but we weren't lucky enough to be there for it this year. They are working hard to ensure that the festival has enough room and places to park and all. We're driving a small narrow road with lots of curves and switchbacks. We turn onto the road to go to the Grand Bassin and suddenly the road is several lanes wide with a straight shot up to the temples.
At the entrance to the entire area is a huge statue of Shiva in his glory and looks like they are building another one on the other side of the road along with a monstrous lion for Shiva to ride. magnificent! Then there is a temple building with several of the Indian gods and goddesses inside in their finest dress. From there, a great arch over the walkway down to the lake where there are pavilions holding different gods and goddesses on both sides of the lake. We were going to walk around when we realized there was a parking lot on the far side as well so thought we'd just go get the car and drive around.
On our way back across the mammoth parking lot on this side of the lake, we noticed a couple of monkeys that were making their way up a telephone wire and walking across the wire. Went closer to get photos and saw several monkeys in the trees along with a mother and baby too. Awesome.
Into the car, drive down to the lower temple and lower lot and park. There are quite a few people here today giving offerings and wading into the lake plus filling up water bottles with the lake water. I dipped my toe into the lake. figure it can't hurt. And a few monkeys sitting in the trees on this side of the lake watching the people.
They were doing a lot of construction work at the temples as well. Both sides had a lot of scaffolding over blank areas of parking lots and patios. Not sure if it is coming or going. Lovely place to visit.
Kind of tired after the flight and after the dive this morning so we decided to continue our tradition of always eating pizza in every country we visit. New country, new pizza opportunity. We stopped at our closest shopping center and bought a Mexican Fiesta pizza. Think they had some mole sauce on it around the edges. Not the best pizza ever but not the worst so Mauritius slots somewhere into the middle rank of pizza places.
Then back to the apartment for a semi early night as we are being picked up even earlier in the morning for our diving. YEA!
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