Le Chemin de Rivière Deshaies

After a good rain, the Rivière Deshaies has many small spillways. 

      This being our second trip to Guadeloupe, we aimed to do some sight seeing we had missed on our first visit and the hike up the nearby Deshaies River was at the top of my list.  You may recall from a 2012 post that we couldn’t find anyone here who would speak English to us.  Now three years later, this is still true and, unfortunately, so is the fact that our command of the French language has not markedly improved. 
  


Some rock were slippery and took great balance!

 

       Nevertheless, we reviewed the hike’s description in our cruiser’s guide that read ”Continue for 1-2 hours and you come to a road on the left hand side that will bring you back to town in about 15 minutes.” That certainly sounded doable for this 60-something couple, so we packed our hiking bags and set out.



No trail markers, but sometimes we sort of saw a path.



 

 

 

      The beginning of the trail was clearly marked with a sign and we made our way along the gently running river, taking in the soothing sights and sounds, stepping from stone to stone until it became unmanageable.  Then we looked to the left and to the right banks to locate a somewhat clear path to follow through the dense woods. Sometimes, but not often, there was a blue painted dot on a tree or stone in the woods or a red and white surveyor tape hung randomly. That trail was followed until it dwindled and forced us back to climbing along the boulders in the river. When passage on the rocks became impossible again, we repeated the process… over and over and over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


We noticed unset traps like these twice along the way. 



The farther we trekked the more the boulders grew.

         As we hiked, Dan took the lead more often than I did.  He doesn’t know it, but I prefer it that way for two reasons: 1. He is an impatient man. 2. Judging from the terrain we were hiking, I thought we might encounter something icky since a worn trail was nonexistent.  Something “icky” like a FER DE LANCE!  You may wonder what a fer de lance* is- well, it is a poisonous snake that TOM of sv TIGER LILLY warned me about while hiking a trail on a French island- probably Martinique- a few years ago. (Tom is my elder and speaks with conviction and authority, so I believed him. ) The leaf strewn forest with its nooks and crannies seemed the perfect habitat for snakes and they totally freak me out, so I happily let Dan lead our way, just incase…

Fer de Lance (Google image)

      After an hour and a half, fording the river became more challenging as the stones in the river became insurmountable boulders, the forest grew more dense, and the banks steeper. We began looking up the rive gauche for signs of a clearing where there might be a road.  I crawled up a couple of times and walked through a spider web on my second descent.  (Spiders freak me out, too!) But I found only rocky pasture land. We pushed on through the tropical woods along the riverside for a bit more.  Finally a brighter clearing was revealed at the top of the bank about one-hundred feet above us. We grabbed on to young trees, thick vines, and strong roots to pull ourselves up the steep incline.  At the summit, there was no road, but a sparsely wooded field. At last, Dan led us through the field to where a barbed wire fence stood at the edge of the ROAD!



    There was an open water spout along the pasture, so we paused there to douse ourselves and cool off a bit before commencing on the downhill trek to town.

    

[*When preparing this entry, I learned through Wikipedia that the poisonous fer de lance is the “ultimate pit viper…found only in Central American countries.” It is NOT in any island of the Caribbean. So TOM-  I’m NOT going to let you mess with my head anymore!  ]