It must have been on the second day of this years’ ULTIMATE Réunion Island Trek, that something quite obvious, but until then elusive, struck me.

The 8 of us were hiking through the immenseness of Cirque de Mafate, for sure the wildest of the three eroded cirques ‘hanging’ clover-shaped like deep vessels off the 3070 m peak of Piton des Neiges. We were standing on the knife-edge called La Breche, looking down, the next 2.5 days worth of hiking through the cirque before us.

I’ve crossed these mountains solo twice before and was starting to feel like I know this place. A familiarity with the landscape and what to expect around the next corner was shaping inside me. It clearly is visible everywhere that these are volcanic mountains, but somehow I previously missed an important detail in the way I perceived it and I’ve been wondering what made the difference.

It was the same when I first started hiking in the fynbos after returning to the Cape in 2012. The beauty and variety struck me and I fell in love immediately, taking photo after photo. Although I loved it, at the time I deliberately did not want to learn names etc. for thinking it would taint the beauty for me. I guess my over-stimulated engineering brain resisted it. What happened though is that around 2019 I discovered the citizen science app iNaturalist and slowly but surely started loading photo after photo onto the app, getting quite hooked and super excited when a plant identity got verified by another person.

Quite the opposite of what I thought would happen, happened. I got deeply drawn in by learning more and slowly my eyes started opening to more than just (can there be?) the beauty of the flowers. I started grasping what an incredible miracle this intense biodiversity is, the phenomenal age of the plant families and how they uniquely evolved and specialized into such vast array of species right here on a small strip of mountains along the southern rim of Africa. Through hiking through the same and different areas on regular basis before and at intervals after fires, I started witnessing and learning very organically about their incredible resilience, but also their vulnerability.

It is 6.5 years later and having hiked over 7 500 km mostly through fynbos, I feel slightly (jokingly) embarrassed about my fanaticism growing to now having 13000 observations of over 2000 species on iNaturalist. I googled myself recently and saw that I sit within the top 0.5% of iNaturalist observers worldwide!

Now when I take clients into the mountains around Cape Town I love noticing that moment when they light up with understanding about what it is they are hiking through as I share and explain what I’ve learnt, not only about the fynbos, but also the geology with which it is so deeply interconnected. As one client put it “she makes the whole eco-system come to life!”

Now to get back to La Réunion.. the exact same thing happened. But this time, it was not me explaining and opening eyes up, it was the other way round. The 2026 expedition was quite different to the two solo treks I did across the island before. This was proudly Fynbos Whisperer’s inaugural commercial trek across the island with a carefully selected English-speaking Réunionese guide leading the trek on our behalf. I joined this first trek to get to know our guide and ensure the guiding and all the other logistical details work before starting to plan future treks.

We set out on the first day, and our guide’s deep passion for this unique island was immediately tangibly visible. Apart from tuning in and holding a beautiful safe space for us over the 9 days of the trek, she also carefully and slowly, bit by bit, shared information about how this phenomenal 3km high mountain rose out of the ocean 3 million years ago, a shield volcano, slowly building up out of layer after layer of lava flows after breaking through the oceanic crust over 5 million years ago. Bit by bit she shared about how the plants arrived, the different geological features, how the cirques formed… she slowly opened our eyes to what it is we are hiking through…

When we crossed over the steep neck at la Breche I looked down into this magnificent cirque surrounded by 1000m high cliff faces and the 3070m high Piton des Neiges hidden behind lower peaks 2.5 days walk before us, a powerful insight struck me on a fundamental level. This is not just another mountain. This is indeed an incredible geological wonder. This is a massive ‘free-standing’ 60 km diameter volcano in the middle of the ocean!  It looks and feels like a mountain because it has eroded into valleys and peaks and rivers and waterfalls and evolved forests and shrubs and ferns, but La Réunion, most definitely, is first volcano, then mountain.

Planning is underway and the dates for the 2027 ULTIMATE Réunion Island Trek will be launched shortly. Click on the link below to have the first opportunity to book your slot. It is the trek of a lifetime!