Réunion Island is near Mauritius but nothing like it. Originally uninhabited, in the 1500s it began receiving settlers from France and Madagascar. French is the official Language but a Réunion Creole is spoken with words from the various nationalities that have been imported, first as slaves then as indentured labourers. The influence of French Television is creating a more French tone to the language.
The island became an overseas department of France in 1946. Like the other four overseas departments, it is also one of the 18 regions of France, with the modified status of overseas region, and an integral part of the republic with the same status as Metropolitan France. Réunion is an outermost region of the European Union and, as an overseas department of France, part of the eurozone.
The Pacific Princess docked in the northeast corner, between Le Port and St. Denis, near Prossission at the orange tag [6]. We signed up for a half-day bus tour which took us to the other orange tagged places in the northern part of the island.
We drove along the northern coast from La Possession, through St. Denis to La Ville de Salazie.
A short delay for road repairs. 
Have you heard of Enterprise Car Rentals? 
It is a mountainous island.
The island is over a hotspot in the Earth’s crust, an active volcano zone like Hawaii. It has two main mountain peaks. One has been dormant for twenty thousand years. It is called Piton des Neige, meaning the peak of snows even though it seldom snows there and the peak has been eroded over all of those years. It rises to 3,069 m (10,069 ft) above sea level.
The other volcano is in the south of the island and is called Piton de la Fournaise, French for Peak of the Furnace. The most recent eruption began on 18 February 2019. We visited on 26 March of 2019 but not to the southern part of the island.
Near Salazie, we stopped for refreshments and a tour of a Vanilla Plantation.
The vanilla plants were not in flower at the time of our visit but I will show you a different flower because they were there. Vanilla plants are a type of orchid and require a host tree or pole for support.
In 1841, Edmond Albius, a slave who lived on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered at the age of 12 that the plant could be hand-pollinated. Hand-pollination allowed global cultivation of the plant. The majority of the world’s vanilla is Bourbon vanilla (after the former name of Réunion, Île Bourbon). Vanilla is the second-most expensive spice after saffron because growing the vanilla seed pods is labor-intensive.
To learn more about the vanilla plant and the labour involved, follow this link to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla.
On the way back to port, we stopped at the supermarket to buy souvenirs and other spices.
A dockside view of the northern mountains of Réunion Island
