Chamarel: Coloured Earths and the Waterfall

The road up is the beginning of it. You leave the coast somewhere around Case Noyale and climb in tight turns through forest, and every so often there is a gap in the trees with the whole lagoon behind you, further down each time. Ears pop. The temperature drops a few degrees. By the time the road levels out on the plateau you are somewhere else entirely.

Chamarel’s coloured earths are a set of low bare dunes in a clearing, striped in rust and violet and ochre and a strange pale blue-grey, with nothing growing on them. The explanation is geological: volcanic rock weathered into clays whose mineral content settles differently, so the colours separate rather than mixing, even after rain moves them about. Standing at the rail, that explanation is less interesting than the fact of it. The colours are not painted on. They are what the rock became, over a very long time. Early or late light does more for them than the middle of the day, and rain does more still.

A short way off, the Chamarel waterfall drops off the plateau edge in a single fall into a gorge lined with palm and basalt. There is a viewpoint built for it, and the drop looks improbable from up there. Aldabra giant tortoises graze in an enclosure on the same site, which children reliably prefer to both.

Then there is the rest of the plateau. Chamarel is rum country and coffee country: the Rhumerie de Chamarel shows you how its rum is made and then pours it, and a handful of restaurants take the local cooking seriously, with views back down the mountainside from most of them. The Curious Corner of Chamarel is the plateau’s odd one out, a house of optical illusions that works on adults as well as children. It is an easy morning to stretch into a whole day, and the drive back down towards Le Morne at the end of it is worth timing for the light.

The full-day tours come at Chamarel from the other side of the island, down off the central plateau. Depending on the version, that means the rim of the Trou aux Cerfs crater and a guided look round Curepipe; Grand Bassin, the crater lake ringed by temples; and the lookout over the Black River Gorges, before you drop to the coloured earths. The run home is usually down the west coast, past salt pans and fishing villages. If the coloured earth is what caught you, La Vallée des Couleurs, in the hills above the south coast, has its own, in a larger park you spend a whole day in.

Good to know

• Go early. The light is better on the earths and the site is quieter before the tour coaches arrive.
• The entry fee covers the earths, the waterfall viewpoint and the tortoises, and it is set locally. We confirm the current figure when we quote.
• The road up is narrow, steep and full of turns. If anyone in the car gets carsick, sit them in front.
• It is cooler and wetter on the plateau than on the coast. Take a layer, even in high summer.
• Lunch up here is a good idea rather than an afterthought, so book it if you want a table with the view.