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