Back to Winter . . .

.
Instructions For Re-Opening Blog After Vacation Is Over :
.
1. Take taxi home from airport, pay exorbitant taxi fare. Marvel at how cold freezing weather is on a Sunday morning after two weeks in the tropics.
.
2. Unpack suitcases, take long nap after sleepless night on airplane watching movies.
.
3. Give affection starved cats plenty of hugs and patting.
.
4. Put off blogging until tomorrow as too tired to see straight; too much to do still to get back into the swing of life at home again between two weeks worth of sweaty laundry, hiking boots to put away, snorkeling tubes and masks to stow in closet, etc. . .
.
5. Open two weeks of postal mail, the usual bills etc... Clear out two weeks of spam e-mails interspersed with the occasional real message from a real person. Delete about 75 spammed comments from blog moderation, while publishing a few kind comments that came in while away...
.
6. Go to bed early get long and refreshing good night's sleep in own bed with own pillow and quilt . . . close to heaven !
.
7. Get up next day feeling nearly human again, have breakfast, make big mug of coffee, turn on PC, proceed to copy from compact flash memory cards approximately 25 giga-bytes of photos taken over the past two weeks to PC, back them up to external hard drive as well to prevent accidental loss of treasured images.
.
8. Debate for long while about which of over 1700 photos taken while on l'île de la Réunion to post on blog first. Drink more coffee.
.
9. Finally get down to serious business of blogging again . . . Wonder if anyone will still be out there to read this after such a long time away . . .
.
.
So . . . after a much needed breather over the past couple of weeks away discovering Reunion Island, a small corner of France I'd heard of but never been to, it is good to be typing in this white box again, one starts to miss the good company of the blogosphere when away from it for too long. . .
.
Reunion Island is a few hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. A volcanic island that sprang up out of the sea only about three million years ago, a relative youngster as far as dry land goes. The tortured history of a long series of geographic upheavals caused by volcanic eruptions is clearly evident on this relatively small island that rises out of the Indian Ocean to a height of about 10000 feet in altitude over a distance of not more than 20 miles from the coast to the highest point, le Piton des Neiges. An amazing place in many dimensions. Today it is what is known as a DOM of France, a "Département d'Outre Mer", or an overseas administrative territory. Hard to believe one can take a flight from Paris that lasts over 11 hours, crossing part of Africa and the equator, and land again . . . in France.
.
This first post is not going to go into too much detail, call it hors d'oeuvres, une amuse-gueule as they say, a little bit of an appetizer. But there will be more to come . . . la Réunion will be another theme to be threaded into this multifarious creation over the coming weeks and months. And may you enjoy it as much as we did, even if only vicariously. Who knows, perhaps the images to come may inspire one or two of you to get in a sailboat and head across the wide oceans to pull into one of the ports of la Réunion some day soon . . .
.
Tropical islands are reputed to have an abundance of palm trees and endless beaches . . . la Réunion is no exception. And although such attractions are far from the only sights worth seeing on the island, I guess they're as good a place to start as any, just to sort of whet your appetites for what will follow, picnics by the beach are a time honored tradition . . .
.






















.





































At one end of the beach where the above palm trees were photographed, a place on the south coast of the island known as Grande Anse, a small corner of water was ringed with large stones to create a protected calm area for bathing, as otherwise the currents present there would render the water too dangerous for swimming. More on that later.
.

























.





































The other end of the same beach . . . more palm trees . . .
.






































On several evenings we were treated to splendid sunsets, this was off the west coast, at a place called Hermitage les Bains . . .
.






















.






















While wandering the island, north to south, east to west, in two different spots I stumbled on signs that couldn't help but remind me of one of the finest photography blogs out there in the blogosphere, run by one of the finest blogging pals one could ever wish to have stumbled on by pure hazard . . . none other than Loulou at Indiaphragme, so just to get back into the swing of blogging again, here's a little friendly coucou to Loulou . . . This first one was way up in one of the three interior cirques of the island . . . not easy to spot either, but as you know by now I like to poke around back streets and alleys . . .
.






















The second was in a beach town on the west coast, a pastry shop . . .
.






















This was the shop just adjacent to Chez Loulou, with a name symbolic of some of the best la Réunion has to offer, sun and vanilla, in great abundance. The white bird on the shutter is a paille-en-queue, or straw in the tail, an emblematic bird of the island . . .
.



















.
.