Sima

The road from Mutsamudu climbs quickly into the interior of Anjouan, switching back through hillsides so densely planted they constitute a kind of vertical farmland — clove bushes, banana groves, ylang-ylang trees with their clusters of pale yellow flowers hanging heavy in the heat. The smell intensifies with altitude in a way that is almost pharmaceutical, a sweetness so concentrated it shifts from pleasurable to slightly overwhelming and back again. My driver navigated a shared taxi of five people plus several sacks of something over passes where the cloud sat just above road level and the sea appeared far below like a distant idea. Sima arrived as a cluster of red-roofed houses on a ridge, visible from several kilometres away, before the road found a way down to it.

The ylang-ylang distillery at the edge of the village was the thing I had come specifically to see, and it was smaller and more improvised-looking than I had imagined — a low building with a corrugated iron roof, a fire pit below a copper still, and a man tending the whole operation with a calm that suggested he found the process neither miraculous nor dull but simply his work. The flowers go in, water goes in, steam rises through the still, and what comes out the other end — after condensation through a coiled copper tube — is a pale yellow oil that is worth more per kilogram than most things grown in the Comoros. It is used in Chanel No. 5, among other things, a fact the man mentioned without particular pride. I smelled the fresh oil and it was not the same as the dried flowers on the road — more concentrated, more animalic, a smell that had depth in the way that some smells do, where you keep finding something new in it.

The waterfalls above the village require some climbing — a path that ascends steeply through the terraced gardens, past women hoeing between rows of taro, past children who treated my presence with polite curiosity rather than the excited performance of tourist interaction. The main fall drops perhaps thirty metres into a pool cold enough to make me gasp when I swam in it, which I did immediately without thinking about it because the walk up had been warm work. The sound in the pool was immense — the fall generating a white noise that was complete and closed off from everything else, the perfume of the surrounding vegetation carried in on the spray. I stayed longer than I had intended.

That evening I sat in the village square while a group of men discussed something energetically in Shimaore and a woman sold fried banana fritters from a basket, and I thought about the economies of smell. Paris perfumers buy Anjouan ylang-ylang by the tonne. The flowers are distilled here, in this building with a corrugated roof, by this man with a copper still, in a village of a few hundred people who earn very little for producing something that ends up on the wrists of people who will never know where Comoros is. The fritters cost fifty francs each and were excellent.

When to go: Ylang-ylang flowers from roughly January through June, with peak production in March and April — visiting then means seeing the distilleries in full operation and the trees in bloom. The waterfalls are most dramatic in the wetter months but accessible year-round. Sima is best reached by shared taxi from Mutsamudu; the journey takes forty minutes to an hour depending on the road condition. Ask in the village about the distillery — the operators typically welcome visitors.