Le Grand Cul-de-Sac Marin (Basse-Terre)

According to my guidebook, le Grand Cul-de-Sac marin, encompassing a large lagoon, is a nature reserve created to protect various species of birds, turtles, and mangroves and is thus off-limits to tourist activity.

However, there is a small boat manned by a drunken Frenchman which leaves from a parking lot in Sainte-Rose. He will take you on a tour of the mangroves, to a nearby reef, and to the paradisical Ilet de Caret. I don't know if what we did was forbidden but it was really, really cool. Luckily, I know some French and was able to understand the captain telling the life story of these salt-tolerant trees.

A mangrove tree starts its life attached to its parent tree, and then is dropped off into the water where it can travel for up to a year before putting down roots.

I'm not sure how anyone knows this, but maybe someone has tagged seedlings like little birds and sent them adrift, tracking the movement by GPS. Seems a bit much for a plant.

When they decide on a convenient resting spot, they send roots down sometimes meters into the water to anchor themselves in the sandy bottom. Eventually they create buttresses of their roots and trap soil and sand, and if you get enough of these tough guys together they can form islands with waterways running through them or beaches drifting up against them. In these clumps of mangroves live animals and sometimes people- we saw a little hut with a boat tied up beside it down one of the tunnels we explored so i know that the rumors of escaped slaves and outlaws could be true.

So, these innocent little trees do a lot to protect animals and the shoreline and sometimes even serial killers. I imagine it would be pretty easy to get lost in the tangle of trees, so please go with someone who knows the way around. And again, if it's illegal, you didn't read about it here.

Posted by Ree in Guadeloupe on 01/Nov/2004