La Vallee de Ferney

It was like going into Jurassic Park except we were in a rickety bus, and the time scale is much shorter. Sandy is an enthusiastic young Mauritian woman who is our guide to today.
'You are stepping back 400 years to the time when men first came to the island' she informs us. She switches with ease between English, French and Creole. Vallee de Ferney is in the South-East of the island. In fact, on the way we stopped at a street sellers stall right under the landing flight path and saw a plane go right over our heads. She tells us that this is the part of the island where sugar cane was first introduced, from a cutting from Java in 1639, by the Dutch. The first growers made an alcoholic drink from it called in Creole, larac. It must have been the forerunner of rum.
The dutch also brought Ebony with the same cargo. Actually it was Ebony the Dutch were most interested in, and grew large plantations of it. When the European market for this wood was saturated, they literally abandoned the island.
The natural rain forest that covered most of Mauritius was also cleared for sugar cane, but this bit of Indigenous rain forest remains. Two hundred hectares has been left and is an active conservation area. Here endangered species are kept from extinction, and repopulate the forest. The reserve was due to have much of it's precious land bulldozed to make way for a freeway. This, despite pressure from conservation groups and local petitions. However, a very rare specimen was discovered. A tree thought to have been extinct, the Nail wood tree, came to the rescue. It does not pollinate and so has been reproduced by tissue culture. Only 80 individuals exist.

The Jurassic bus drops us off in the middle of the forest for the start of the hour and a half walk. Sandy leaves us and off we go. It is hot and insecty but brilliant. We walk past the nail wood tree, and many trees that were due to be cut down.
Then the forest opens up and we're near the end of the walk.
'Look, look' says Kate, excitedly 'it's the Mauritian kestrel'. We'd been told that we might see one if we were lucky. They were down to one breeding male at one point, but now there are about 1,000 individuals. It has a characteristic flight and is there soaring high in the hot sky. We also get to see a Mauritian white tailed Parakeet, and a flying fruit bat.
The whole area is owned by Franco-Mauritians, blanc-Mauritien, who also use the land to hunt wild boar. I suppose they must be direct descendants of Asterisk and Obilix or the French aristocracy that fled at the time of the revolution. I don't like the idea of these people owning large swathes of my island, but at least they appear to be being ecologically sensitive, so two cheers for them.
After a good lunch it's back home to pack, for the next move. I'm going to Toun's tomorrow, and Peter, Kate and Jen are off home.