Chamarel

The first time I saw the Seven Coloured Earths, I was standing at a guardrail with thirty other people, all of us looking down at the same thing, and I felt the slight embarrassment that comes with being a tourist at a famous attraction. Then I actually looked at what was in front of me, and the embarrassment evaporated. The undulating dunes of volcanic soil — red, brown, violet, green, yellow, blue, purple, all in the same hillside, with no clear boundary between them — are genuinely strange, in the way that geological phenomena sometimes are when they remind you that the planet is operating on rules that predate and exceed human comprehension. The colours are created by different mineral compositions in the volcanic rock, oxidised at different rates, and the dunes reform themselves after rain with the same uncanny precision every time.

I stayed at the viewpoint for half an hour after most of the tour group had moved on. In late afternoon, the light hits the coloured earth from the west and deepens everything — the purples become closer to violet, the reds turn almost orange, and the greens look radioactive in a way that makes the whole scene feel slightly unreal. I kept waiting for it to look ordinary. It did not.

The Rhumerie de Chamarel sits a few minutes up the road from the coloured earth, on a property that occupies a ridgeline with views south to the coast. The rum produced here is made from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses — the rhum agricole method — which gives it a grassy, raw sweetness that tastes nothing like the commercial rums I associate with Caribbean beach bars. The tasting room walks you through a range: the blanc agricole that tastes like cane in a glass, the aged versions that pick up vanilla and smoke from the oak, the flavoured ones (coffee, coconut) that I largely ignored in favour of returning to the aged blanc. I left with two bottles and the problem of fitting them in my bag.

The village of Chamarel itself is small and high and quiet — a church, a few houses, the school, a road that winds down into the gorges below. The Chamarel waterfall, visible from a platform near the coloured earth, drops into the Black River Gorges below with enough volume in the wet season to create a permanent mist that hangs in the valley. I walked down the path to the base on a day when the falls were running full after a night of rain, and stood in the spray until my shirt was soaked, looking up at the column of white water against the dark basalt walls.

The road up to Chamarel from the coast passes through sugarcane fields and then abruptly into the cooler, greener air of the upland, and there is a small restaurant beside the waterfall viewpoint that does a Creole lunch — rice, curry, rougaille, achards — that is better than it has any reason to be given that it feeds mainly the tourists who stop after the coloured earth. I ate there on my second visit, on a terrace looking down into the gorge, and the food arrived with the kind of offhand generosity that Mauritian cooking has as its baseline register.

When to go: Chamarel is worth visiting year-round, but the coloured earth looks best in direct sun — avoid overcast mornings. The waterfall is most impressive from January through April when rainfall keeps it full, though the road up to Chamarel can be slippery after heavy rain. A clear dry-season afternoon is the sweet spot for combining the earth, the falls, and the rum distillery in one visit.