18th Century Home
Frank dropped me off in Saint Denis, the capital of reunion, for the day for my last day of sightseeing. I visited the Botanic Gardens with the Natural History Museum. The gardens date from 1763 and it shows. They are not some of the best gardens I have seen and the lily ponds are little stagnant but it was nice to see a green area in the middle of the city. The Natural History museum was better admired for its architecture rather than the display inside. Unfortunately it was school holidays so it was filled with kids and the displays were geared more toward children. Still, they did have a good range of stuffed lemurs, our next animal to see in the wild in Madagascar. They also had a skeleton of a dodo, though this was unlikely to have been from Reunion. I walked down the main street past many old colonial style homes, built in the 18th and 19th century. Some of theses have been conserved to still retain the good looks and splendor of stately mansions from that era. I visited the local Art Gallery, that occasionally has works on display from some of the great artists, but at this time, there were only works from many local artists of the last few centuries. After meandering the side streets, stopping for lunch at a nice sidewalk café and enjoying the sights of a city built a few hundred years ago, I managed to find a bus back to the boat. The local bus from the bus exchange to the marina runs infrequently but I have caught it enough times now to get to know the bus driver. Each time, he has gone out of his way to drop me off at the drive down to the boats, such is an example of some of the vey friendly people we have met here. And I didn’t even have to clap my hands.
After securing things on the boat, we cleared customs, paid our bill and got ready to sail to Madagascar first thing in the morning.