Reunion

January 15–17, 2012

Of all the French overseas territories I’ve seen, Reunion is the one that most resembles France (Mayotte and French Polynesia fall a bit short, to put it mildly).

There are French license plates here.

French notary signs.

French fire hydrants.

French large post boxes.

French compact post boxes.

And even the post offices are French. With machines that print the stamp after weighing your envelope.

There’s a French kilometer marker post from the 19th century.

And the modern, plastic kilometer marker is also French.

The old street signs are French (there are some like this still left in the Comoros as well).

One old street name plaque survived by hiding behind a traffic light (see the similar fate of an address plaque in Saint Petersburg).

There are a couple of nice quiet streets here.

Neat bevel-edged curbstones.

And polite warning signs and barriers.

Charming colonial architecture in places.

Even the signs on private gates are nice.

The roads are vacuumed in the morning.

Every single window has shutters.

Residential mailboxes.

A bus stop with a digital timetable display.

Stops for different intercity bus companies and routes have different shapes and colors. The pink bus stops at the pink sign.

Buses get so much love here that even three-lane streets have the center lane reserved for buses. Almost like in Curitiba or Guatemala City.

A traffic light.

A telephone booth with a square cross-section.

A telephone booth with a hexagonal cross-section.

There’s an excellent expressway going through the entire island. You completely forget that you’re so close to Africa. In places where the expressway passes along a cliff, there are nets and other sophisticated structures to catch falling rocks.

A local ad for a communications service provider. What’s being advertised, exactly? A Wi-Fi ban? No more phone, internet and TV? You’d have to be aware of the realities of local life to decipher it.

The realities of local life are as follows: there are radar speed enforcement signs along the highway. They depict vehicles whose speed is being monitored. So in the ad above, the idea is that there is no limit on the speed of the depicted devices. It really takes a convoluted mind to come up with something like this.

The “think of our children” sign is not as gruesome as in Canada.

The “scenic viewpoint” sign is interesting.

Generally speaking, the number of signs can get a little excessive here.

Some people come here to see the solidified lava from the local volcano.

But it’s not worth it. Reunion is an ordinary bland French province, the only difference is that it’s near Madagascar.