8. Beitrag - Bassins Sainte-Marie

On my third weekend on the island I went on an excursion with the Erasmus students and the Reunionese companions.

So we all met at Chaudron at 10:00 and then took the bus to the Rivière de Pluies stop. According to the announcement and our dear local Sébastien, a two-hour walk along a river awaited us. We would start at Bassin Marie-Luise, then pass three other basins and end up at Bassin Chouchou.

What we would actually do then had little to do with it...

It had rained on the way there and it is generally very humid in the Hauts, so we spent the first 2 hours sliding around from stone to stone in a river bed.

This was actually very dangerous at times because the waterfall was directly to our right and there was no way to secure it - one wrong step and you could have actually broken your neck quite easily. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that, firstly: there were extremely many people and secondly: most of us were prepared for a walk and therefore did not wear suitable footwear. The aggressive ants that literally ate you alive weren't necessarily pleasant either.

But we still made it to the first pool ("Marie-Luise") :)

After a while we came to the second pool, but no one really had the mood to swim, everyone was pretty exhausted (especially with their nerves :D). So we continued over slippery rocks on the slope and along the river until we reached the third basin.

From then on it got even more fun because we all had to climb up a rock wall that was about 3 meters high (really climb, it was vertical). The solution to this was that Sébastian and another boy pulled everyone up from above in pairs, while the rest pushed from below. It certainly didn't look elegant...

After a ridiculous 4 kilometers, which took us no less than 5 hours (just to make it clear how impassable and dangerous it actually was), we finally made it: basins 4 and 5 were right in front of us!

It was actually pretty nice there and I went swimming, but the water was really ice cold.

When everyone had finished their bathing fun, we walked up endless stairs that brought us back to civilization.

At the end of the day it was a challenging, beautiful hike between fear of death and a lot of fun - everything the vacation with dad had ever prepared me for :D

Conclusion of the day: A sprained ankle, a laceration, several scrapes and cuts and a ruptured eardrum.