Following the steps of the Grand Raid Reunion Island

Reunion Island: our second destination after Mauritius, my home.

A day after the Royal Raid, we headed to Reunion Island for 3 weeks. With  mountains right at our doorstep and beautiful weather it is the ideal training ground for the Andorra Ultra Trail!
We had planned on crossing the island following the traces of the famous Grand Raid, la diagonale des fous the following saturday.  At first we thought we would do it in 4 days, then decided nah 3 days would do the trick...as planning the daily route using open runner was making us run an average of 40 km/day for 8 hours on the trail! How wrong were we! First of all, it doesn't matter which application you use to calculate your route, none of them can calculate all of the twisting and turning of a mountain trail, therefore 40km on a map turned out to be 50 to 55 km in reality....Second, an average of 2500m of elevation a day seems to be reasonable on paper...but it doesn't take into account the difficulty of the terrain...therefore if you thought you could do 40km with 2000 of elevation in 7 hours, in reality we took much more time depending on how much rocks, roots, river crossing and HEAT we got on that day….




The first day day should have been the hardest, we went from St Philippe to Bourg Murat following the trails of the Grand Raid 2011. The first kilometres went from sea level up to La Fournaise at 2000m. It was HARD with the heat, humidity, stairs and everything in between, I understood why so many runners drop out at the end of this ascent. BUT it was beautiful and worth the struggle.






We ended up doing 40km in 8h30 with 2675m of elevation climbing from the ocean front of st Philip to the enclos of the volcano, ran through la plaine des sables like we were on Mars,

Plaine des Sables

struggle in knee high mud English countryside style and had some incredible views of infinite wild.

On the second day we should have done bourg Murat to Roche plate taking a small lunch break in Cilaos before caring on into mafate. But by the end of the first day we came to the realisation that solo we couldn't do it, the running bag couldn't carry all the water, the food and clothing for 3 days and anyway running up and down the trails of reunion island with a 15kg load was definitely not going to work out...therefore we were relieved when my parents suggested to be our crew and meeting us along the way bringing us fresh food, water and clothes in Cilaos.





So it's with a much lighter bag and a good night of sleep that we hike to the shelter of the Piton des Neiges instead of going to the top, but managed to get a superb view of plateaus and Cilaos caldera. Met my parents for fresh clothes and food and climb the infamous col du taibit before going down inside Mafate caldera. The one place in the island only reachable on foot! We managed to cover 35km but it took us 10h27 with 2753 of elevation... Yes less kilometres but more time! From the pictures I think you understand why :)

Piton des Neiges

It is with relieved we arrived at Roche plate in our small and simple cabin for the night . After a well deserve shower and beer it was time to pounder on the route planned for the final day. we had already gathered that attempting to do the route we had planed on openrunner  for our final day was way too ambitious and that we were going to hurt ourselves more than anything. So looking at the map we picked another route and told my parents to pick us up in maido instead of dos d'ane. At the end of the discussion we came up with still our 2000m of elevation to go down to see a canyon, go up to see the heart of mafate go around waterfalls and ponds but with fewer kilometres and last big climb.

Nether less to say, it didn't stick to the plan. We did see the canyon, the heart and the pound but we also got to do the longest mentally toughest climb of the whole adventure! What should have been 1000m actually turn out to be 1600m which for some might be nothing but when your watch is telling you you've done all the elevation of the day but looking around you see that the top is not there yet...you wonder what's the point of having a map an app or a gps!!! But we did have a lot of fun and saw amazing wild nature! Day 3 turned out to be 27km 2670m of elevation...I was glad to look down at what we had achieved and wonder how on earth people manage to finish this diagonale des fous!