My 6 Days Hiking Reunion Island: Cirques, Volcanoes, and Vanishing Trails
Day 1 — Saint-Denis to Cilaos: 400 Hairpin Turns
Picked up my rental car at Roland Garros Airport (32 EUR/day, Peugeot 208, manual — automatic costs more and you want the engine braking on mountain roads). Drove south along the coast highway to the turnoff for Cilaos.
The road to Cilaos has roughly 400 hairpin turns. I'm not exaggerating — it's genuinely 400. The road clings to the cliff face, dropping away to a gorge on one side, with waterfalls cascading across the tarmac in places. It took 90 minutes for a 37 km drive. My knuckles were white for the first 30 minutes. By the end, I'd stopped noticing the drops.
Cilaos sits inside the cirque — an amphitheater of 1,000+ meter cliffs surrounding a small town at 1,200 meters altitude. The air was noticeably cooler than the coast. The town was quiet, clean, and distinctly French — a boulangerie, a pharmacy, a small square with a church.
Checked into a gite (40 EUR/night with dinner). The room was basic: single bed, shared bathroom, mountain views. Dinner was cari poulet — chicken curry with rice, lentils, rougail, and a carafe of local wine. It was excellent. The Cilaos lentils are a protected geographic indication, like champagne, and they deserve it — small, firm, and nutty.
Highlight: The drive itself. Terrifying and spectacular.
Lowlight: My ears popped four times during the ascent.
Day 2 — Piton des Neiges Summit: Reunion's Highest Point
Alarm: 1:30 AM. Yes. 1:30 in the morning.
The summit hike to Piton des Neiges (3,070 m) starts from Cilaos and takes 7-8 hours round trip. Most hikers start at 2-3 AM to reach the summit for sunrise. I was not enthusiastic about this concept.
But I laced up my boots, switched on my headlamp, and followed the trail markers into the darkness. The first two hours were steep switchbacks through cloud forest. At 2,400 m, the vegetation thinned. At 2,800 m, I was above the clouds. The stars were extraordinary.
Sunrise at 3,070 meters: the sky turned from black to deep blue to orange to gold. Below me, all three cirques — Cilaos, Mafate, Salazie — spread out in a 360-degree panorama, their floors hidden by clouds that slowly burned off as the sun rose. The Indian Ocean glinted to the east. Piton de la Fournaise smoked gently to the south.
I stood at the highest point in the Indian Ocean and watched the world light up. My legs were screaming. I didn't care.
Descended by noon. Spent the afternoon at the thermal baths in Cilaos (10 EUR) soaking my destroyed muscles.
Highlight: The sunrise. Nothing I write will do it justice.
Lowlight: My quads staged a formal protest that lasted three days.
Day 3 — Into Mafate: The Cirque Without Roads
Drove to the Col des Boeufs trailhead (1,940 m) above Salazie and descended into Mafate. The Cirque de Mafate has no roads, no cars, no motorcycle access. The only way in is by foot or helicopter. That isolation is the entire point.
The descent from Col des Boeufs to the ilet (hamlet) of La Nouvelle took about 2 hours. The trail dropped through cloud forest, across a river (wet feet — bring waterproof boots or accept your fate), and into a landscape that looked like a lost world: towering cliffs on all sides, waterfalls threading down the rock faces, tiny clusters of tin-roofed houses in the valley below.
La Nouvelle has about 150 residents, a school, a church, and three gites. I booked mine through reunion.fr well in advance (gites in Mafate fill up months ahead for peak season). Dinner was rougail saucisse with rice, cooked by the gite owner on a gas stove powered by a solar-charged battery. The electricity goes off at 9 PM.
After dinner, I stepped outside. The Milky Way over Mafate — with zero light pollution and zero ambient noise — was one of the darkest, most brilliant skies I've seen outside of the Namib Desert.
Highlight: Arriving in La Nouvelle and realizing I was genuinely off-grid.
Lowlight: The descent is steep and the trail is exposed. If you have knee problems, bring poles.
Day 4 — Mafate Traverse: La Nouvelle to Marla
The GR R2 trail connects the ilets of Mafate. Today's section — La Nouvelle to Marla — was about 5 hours of undulating trail with views that kept me stopping every ten minutes.
The scale of Mafate from inside is disorienting. The cliff walls rise 800-1,000 meters on all sides. Waterfalls appear and disappear as clouds move through the cirque. The trail passes through agricultural terraces where residents grow chayote, corn, and lentils — supplied by helicopter for everything else.
Marla is slightly larger than La Nouvelle, with a few shops and a post office. My gite here served cari bichiques — a rare freshwater fish found only in Reunion's rivers, caught during their annual migration. It's a delicacy that costs 30+ EUR in restaurants but was included in my 45 EUR gite dinner. Tiny, bone-riddled, and delicious.
Highlight: The trail between ilets — genuinely world-class hiking.
Lowlight: The heat. Mafate's lower sections can hit 30°C by midday. Start early.
Day 5 — Piton de la Fournaise: The Moonscape
Drove from the coast to Pas de Bellecombe (2,350 m). The road through the Plaine des Sables is 30 minutes of driving through a landscape that looks like Mars — red and black volcanic gravel, no vegetation, no buildings, nothing. If someone told me this was Iceland, I'd believe them.
The hike from Pas de Bellecombe to the crater rim of Piton de la Fournaise took 2.5 hours each way. The trail descends into the caldera (Enclos Fouque), crosses a flat plain of lava flows of various ages (some from 2018, some from decades earlier), and climbs to the Cratere Dolomieu rim.
The crater is massive — 1 km across, 350 meters deep. The walls are vertical, striped with red, yellow, and black mineral deposits. Steam vents hissed from cracks in the rock. The volcano last erupted [check the observatory site for the latest], and standing on the rim, looking down into the earth, you feel the geological reality that this island is a temporary structure built by liquid rock.
The Plaine des Sables on the way back, lit by late afternoon sun, turned from Mars to the Moon — silver and shadow.
Highlight: The crater rim. The scale. The heat rising from the rock.
Lowlight: The wind at the summit was brutal. Bring a windproof layer.
Day 6 — Salazie, Hell-Bourg, and the Vanilla Coast
My last day. Drove through the Cirque de Salazie — the lushest of the three, with waterfalls at every turn. The town of Hell-Bourg (named after a former governor, not the underworld) is a Creole heritage village with restored colonial houses, flower gardens, and a Sunday market feel even on a Thursday.
Afternoon: visited a vanilla plantation in Sainte-Suzanne on the northeast coast. Reunion produces some of the world's finest Bourbon vanilla. The guide explained the hand-pollination process (vanilla orchids have no natural pollinator on Reunion — every flower is pollinated by hand with a thin stick) and the 9-month curing process that turns green pods into the aromatic brown ones.
Bought a tube of 5 vanilla pods for 12 EUR. The same quantity at home would cost 30-40 EUR. Also bought a bottle of rhum arrange a la vanille (rum infused with vanilla) for 15 EUR. Best souvenir of the trip.
Would I Go Back?
I'm planning my return already. I need to do the full GR R1 (cirques circuit, 5-7 days), see an eruption at Piton de la Fournaise (the odds are good — it erupts nearly every year), explore the west coast lagoons, and eat more rougail saucisse.
Reunion is the most underrated hiking destination I've found. The trail infrastructure is French-standard excellent. The cirques are as dramatic as any landscape in Europe. The food is extraordinary. And the volcano adds a dimension that even the Alps can't match.
Budget was about 80 EUR/day: car rental (32), gites (40-45), food at gites and local restaurants (15-20), and fuel (5-10). Not cheap, but for French-quality hiking in an Indian Ocean volcano setting, it's fair.
Pack hiking boots, warm layers (mountain temperatures drop to 5-10°C), rain gear (showers come fast in the cirques), sunscreen (UV is intense at altitude), and a headlamp for those pre-dawn summit starts.
