It has been years that the Rempart Mountain, found on the west of the island of Mauritius, has been on my bucket-list and some days back, one very early morning we set off to conquer the beast. Rendez-vous was set at 5h30am at Cascavelle and with my friend JM Agathe we started the trail around 5h45.
The First Viewpoint
Unfortunately for this hike the track details won’t be revealed since some parts appeared risky to my understanding and this blog is mostly a narrative of the hiking journey. After following the path through the sugar cane fields and across some woods we arrived at the first viewpoint revealing the beautiful south west side of the island with the soft sunrise light.
The Less-Obvious Path
From what we could determine, this mountain isn’t so much visited by hikers since the path access at places was overgrown by thorns and bushes and we had to find alternative ways towards the top, and sometimes even making way through the thorns.
Views behind Sunrise
As we continued to climb towards the peak, the sun was almost one hour after sunrise and being on the shadow part made the climb rather cool and less tiring. Behind us the scenery was obviously getting better and better, and the shadow cast of the mountain upon the lower grounds was quite pleasing as well.
The First Ladder
Some 10 minutes more and we reached a fenced part where I believe this is where the serious part begins as it followed rather on the narrow middle part along the mountain and this ridge was more like a one person path. Seconds ahead we had to make our way through a metallic kind of ladder, which by the look appeared quite old and rusty but still strong enough to handle the weight of hikers. We handled that rather easily even though there was some very strong winds on that day we were doing the hike.
The Suspended Bridge
We paused a while to admire the view (and take some pictures) and continued to move ahead where the next step lead to a metallic suspended bridge through a huge gap. Those having dizziness issues will certainly won’t be able to face that as it was literally in mid-air and nothing but height below our feet. Slowly but surely we crossed that bridge and this lead to a second longer metallic ladder.
The Second Ladder
This last ladder was steeper and longer than the first but nothing we couldn’t handle. After making our way through we paused to admire the higher view with some paille-en-queue birds hovering around and some deer further away down below.
The next step involved climbing a vertical wall of around two meters with only some metal handles and nothing below , nor on the sides. Given the very strong winds we preferred to stop here and believed we were at roughly 75% of the hike path. The remaining part would have only brought satisfaction of the extreme top but nothing additional to the views.
Our way back was much quicker and at 11:00 am I was already back home. Being a regular hiker I would rate the difficulty of this mountain High (8/10) and risky at some places.
