{"id":1609,"date":"2018-01-31T23:52:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T23:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1609"},"modified":"2018-02-04T14:57:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-04T14:57:00","slug":"iles-du-salut-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/iles-du-salut-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Iles Du Salut"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, we arrived at one of my all-time favourite cruising destinations; we dropped anchor at Iles Du Salut, off the coast of French Guyana, within sight of the French Space Centre.<\/p>\n

Iles Du Salut consists of three small islands; Ile Royale, St Joseph and Ile Diablo, the latter being better known as the infamous Devil’s Island from the book and film, ‘Papillon’ (which they showed yesterday afternoon in the Show Lounge, clashing just nicely with my art classes, thank you very much).<\/p>\n

The tender operation was to the Island of Ile Royale, which just happens to be the largest of the three, and was, along with St Joseph, the administrative centre for the islands when they were being used as a penal colony. It did also house prisoners, though, and many of the buildings are still standing (more of those later…).<\/p>\n

We had a leisurely breakfast and picked up a tender ticket, which had us leaving for the island at around 10am. This was a perfectly good time for us, since the last tender back to the ship wouldn’t be until 5pm, so we had lots of quality time to explore.<\/p>\n

Despite being the largest of the three islands, Ile Royale is still actually quite small; its perimeter path around the outside of the island can be traversed in about an hour… it really is that small! We headed for that very path, knowing that it would take us much longer than an hour to complete, simply because here is so much to see.<\/p>\n

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The wind always howls and the surf is quite wild along the first stretch of the walk, with St Joseph visible a short way off to our right (we chose to walk anti-clockwise, as we always do), and the palm trees fair bend in the wind. As we turned the corner, Devil’s Island came into view. No-one is allowed on the island now; in Papillon’s day, all the trees were removed to prevent the prisoners from building boats. Now, however, the trees have grown back, and in a clearing one of the small prisoner’s huts is visible (possibly the hut that Papillon himself resided in, since the literature tells us that his hut is clearly visible).<\/p>\n

A little further along, at the point where the gap between the two islands is at its narrowest, there are the brick remains of the housing where a pulley would once hoist prisoners and food across to Devils Island. If the pulley broke down, prisoners who could climb across and fix it in situ had several months knocked off their sentence. Many prisoners fell from the pulley, however, to be devoured by the sharks in the broiling waters below. Prisoners who died on the islands were always fed to the sharks, to keep them interested, and add to scupper any thoughts of swimming from the islands. Even today, swimming around the coast of the island is not permitted, on accout of the strong currents and sharks.<\/p>\n

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On our walk, we saw stripey Geckos and lots of Agouti (also known as Palm Rats) rummaging in the tangled undergrowth. We were also fascinated by a wasps nest in one of the walls. I say wasps; they were unlike any wasps that I’ve ever seen, looking quite ugly and fierce, and definitely not to be messed with. A little further along, we encountered turtles in the shallow waters, sheltered from the strongest of the currents, and as we turned off the perimeter track to join another path that would lead us up to the centre of the island, we found a group of small monkeys entertaining passengers for scraps of food.<\/p>\n

By the time we reached the centre of the island, we were hot and hungry, so we decided to spend some of our euros on a couple of drinks and a sandwich from the bar.<\/p>\n

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After lunch, we spent some time looking at the old penal buildings and saw two large iguanas on the wall of the dried-out reservoir. For such a beautiful, tropical paradise, bursting with so much colour and wildlife, the islands have a dark and unpleasant past. Papillon’s story is only a small part of the horror and human degredation carried out there… a total contradiction, in fact. A small childrens cemetery tucked away in a corner of the central plot is a stark reminder that the penal colony housed not only prisoners, but many other folk and families who were in the employ of the French Government. The remains of the base of a guillotine in one of the yards between the cells stands as a reminder that the French knew a thing or two about how to exert their own form of discipline. The cells themselves are so dark and dank, it’s difficult to imagine just how dreadful life for a prisoner might have been.<\/p>\n

Finally, with time getting on, we started heading back towards the quayside. It rained for the second time that day; the first had been as we had lunch, the rest of the time it had been gloriously hot and dry.<\/p>\n

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I’m still feeling under the weather, but was determined not to let it spoil my day; Iles Du Salut never fails to impress, and today was no exception. As on previous occasions, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to visit the island, and, as always, we leave not knowing when or if we will ever make a return visit… it’s good to have been back, though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we arrived at one of my all-time favourite cruising destinations; we dropped anchor at Iles Du Salut, off the coast of French Guyana, within sight of the French Space Centre. Iles Du Salut consists of three small islands; Ile Royale, St Joseph and Ile Diablo, the latter being better known as the infamous Devil’s Island from the book and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1615,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions\/1615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}