In the middle of the Mozambique Channel, half way between Madagascar and Africa, lies the very attractive island of Mayotte. It’s part of the four island Comoro group and more specifically it is the part of that group that resisted the urge to chose independence over a continuing relationship with France. Subsequently the three islands that went independent and chose to run their own houses found that house running was a complicated and costly business.
 Mayotte is now a department of France, which means that it is France; just as if it were suddenly attached to the northern boundary of Provence. The Gendarmerie and La Poste work just as though they were in France proper. Salaries are as high, if not higher, than European standards and the people are plump and well- groomed; they are generally able to enjoy all the First World packaged goods that you and I do. What they do with that packaging is the problem.
Although the people and geography are beautiful, Mayotte is a rubbish tip. Garbage, plastic wrappers and shopping bags blow in the sea breeze and form wind rows and drifts. Trash swirls in small tornados in parking lots and whips out of waste bins. Oh, there are plenty of public trash bins, but the impression is that some distant architect considerately put them in his drawings, and they were dutifully installed – and in fact dutifully filled – but that was the end of it. When the cans overflowed the wind skimmed off the top layer and people carefully deposited anew.
I noted one hand written sign on the side of a building that said in French “This is not a rubbish accumulation point…” There is a theory called “The Broken Window Syndrome.” Briefly, if a shut down factory allows a single broken window to remain unrepaired the impression given is that it is acceptable to break more windows. If none are broken it takes a hard heart to throw that first stone, and the converse is equally true. Unfortunately poor Mayotte is nothing but shattered glass. Having noted this particular shortcoming, there is no reason that it should stop you from enjoying the island.
Irene and I teamed up with a South African couple from a boat named Catalyst and toured the island in a rented Peugeot.  I will note, for non-sailors, that Catalyst is a catamaran and that “cat” sailors are inexplicably drawn to humorous boat names: Catastrophe, Out of the Bag, Side by Side. We immediately noticed that people in rural areas used less packaged goods, they were in fact reduced to making their roadside rubbish piles from organic matter; coconut fronds, banana tree trimmings and smoldering heaps of leaves. The roads were mountainous and narrow and of course the standard transmission brought out dormant testosterone; Irene spent a fair part of the outing with her foot braced on the dash or stabbing futilely for a non-existent brake pedal.
At one point we stopped to inspect a kapok tree full of inverted flying foxes, great bats with wing spans well over a meter. They were supposed to be sleeping, getting ready for their nocturnal feeding and socializing, but were in fact squabbling terribly with each other. Bats would hook their way along a branch, fully upside down, to cause a row with some sleeping innocent several spaces over. They made a constant bickering racket.
From Moose, at anchor at Djzoudzi, I had been looking each evening at one particular hill down at the southern end of the island; it was round-topped and impossibly steep. The map said it was called Choungi, and it was the ancient cone of some long gone volcano. Our two friends were pathologically attached to running, a condition to which Irene aspired, and it was therefore very easy to find consensus for climbing this 600 meter hill. It was fun but it was steep. At some stages the path was a climb, tree root to root, over rocks with damp clay between. It was really a test of stamina. The thought pounded through my head that there were actually a finite number of beats in any given heart. And near the top it became a worse scramble. I had to take many rests toward the end, but when we finally stepped up onto the grassy summit and looked out across lagoon and reef in all directions, the gasping felt more and more self righteous. It was a little deflating that there, facing Mecca, was a concrete prayer pad – with the distance noted, as though extra effort might be needed to propel a supplication so far.
Another day Irene and I took the two pre-teens from Blue Sky, our cruising friends, and visited the lemur island. There is a rehabilitation center for lemurs on this island and 635 of the wide-eyed creatures live there. Some had been shockingly mistreated by humans and it was particularly warming to see them so well cared for by a young man who was a refugee from the recent genocide in Ruanda. They spring from trees onto people, especially people that are bearing bananas. Young Drake, one of our wards, decided that being a lemur would be very cool and if that weren’t possible having a four- foot –long tail would compensate quite nicely. They are very likable animals with their great staring eyes and their agility through the trees, although you might hope that an animal that chose to sit on visitor’s shoulders would develop a more responsible bladder.
Once, on a 14 kilometer walk, we stood high on the rim of a crater with a verdigris lake below us. The wind blew up the slopes hot from parched brush and was not cooling although it was firm; half a mile out at sea a humpback whale was breeching and smacking the water with its flipper. The report of the blows came all the way up to us, but with a lag of several seconds. I looked down at this scene marveling at such an animal, and let my potato chip bag blow off into the slip stream, as one does.
Come on, you know I didn’t.