"Oh dear, I don't see any cinnamon leaves for sale!"
A couple weeks after the Seychellois Cooking School, Sapphire Jen and I find ourselves combing through the local market trying to find all the ingredients necessary to cook a Seychellois Chicken Curry. Steel Sapphire and her crew had been out sailing the day cooking school was scheduled, so I had agreed to bring my newly found knowledge over and teach them what I had learned. Good practice for me, and they don't miss out.
But first, we needed to acquire all the parts and pieces.
"Excuse me,” I say, my voice muffled by my Covid-Era mask, “Do you know where we might be able to buy some cinnamon leaves?” The man I am speaking to has a beautiful table stacked with crisp green lettuce, bright red tomatoes, spring onions, mangos, papayas, sweet potatoes, and more....but no cinnamon leaves.
“You want to buy cinnamon leaves?!” He asks, shocked.
"Well, we want to make curry tonight,” I explain.
He laughs, then looks around as if he might find a cinnamon leaf growing next to him. “Cinnamon trees are everywhere around here! Just pluck some leaves off any tree you find!” I believe him, and yet, he does not find one growing in the vicinity. He waves over a friend sitting nearby tending a series of plants growing in pots. They speak in Seychellois Creole, and then his friend leaves off. “He will go find you some cinnamon leaves."
It isn't very long before the man returns in his truck with a whole branch of cinnamon leaves waving out his window. We laugh, pay the man for his gas money and head back to Steel Sapphire to do some cooking.
But where are all these cinnamon trees he claims grow everywhere? We were about to find out first hand.
The best thing about living aboard a sailboat is the ability to change scenery, space, and life with the lift of the anchor chain. Thinking back to the months we spent in the Maldives, there was so much to love about that place. And yet, for me, there was something missing - one of those things I don't think I could live my whole life without:
Mountains.
The highest “Peak” in the Maldives is a grand total of 8 feet above sea level. Eight Feet! For my metric loving friends, that's only 2.75 Meters! There are ladders taller than that. Our appreciation for the Seychelles’ black granite cliffs, draped in jungle was immediate upon arrival. "We have to do some hiking!"
Anse Major Hiking Trail
The first hike we did in the Seychelles took Sapphire Jen, Steelie Pete, Andrew and I along a trail that followed the humps and ridges along the North Western sea coast of Mahe. I kept my eye out for the cinnamon trees along that route, and every so now and then I could sense a breeze carrying salty sea air and cinnamon through my hair. But, I never identified the particular tree I was hunting for.
Instead, we arrived inside of a small bay where locals had taken a ferry boat to sply in the sund and sand for the day. We unpacked snacks and watched the weekend revelers enjoying their day. Conversation was as stimulating as the scenery:
“The Kevin Bacon Game just isn't what it once was,"
“It's not? Why not? I think they recently found that it isn't even six degrees to Keven Bacon anymore if you count Facebook Friends. It's more like 3.4.”
But this can only be true if you stop acting like a hermit, get off your sailboat and begin making friends in the Seychelles.
How did we start?
How do these things ever start?
Jen needed reading glasses.
Tired of squeezing her eyes tight and stretching her lanky arms their complete distance to read even the most mundane of menus, Jen decided she would visit an optomitrist. Happy to have a plan for an outing in our otherwise marine-bound lifestyle, Jen dons a sundress and heads out to find her treasure: reading glasses that are neither purple, nor jeweled, nor wingged with old lady flaire.
On this question, she meets a lovely optomitrist named Ricarda. Ricarda, youthful, fresh, and still in possession of eyes capable of reading vigor, examines Jen while Jen explains her difficulty. “I don't know why, I just can't read anything. It’s the strangest thing." Ricarda tips her head, attempts to break this news gently, but fails to put her finger on just the right thing to say until Jen knows exactly what Ricarda is aiming at. “It's because I’m old, isn't it.”
Ricarda tips her head from side to side and says, “well...I didn’t want to say it, but…yeah!"
This is Ricarda.
With that bit of water over the bridge, Ricarda and Jen laugh and schedule happy hours, jewelry making, and Ricarda realized it might be fun if we all could join her for a hike on Sunday? She had been invited by a friend she met at her own birthday party a few weeks prior. All of us were game, and this opened “three degrees” to Nivven and Rosie.
The Copolia Trail
Nivven is an interesting guy who works in the Seychelles as a project manager for a large construction project. He also seems to enjoy hiking, and most weekends he collects a group of his friends and work colleagues to explore one trail or another. This first week, Andrew, Pete and Jen go, but I stay behind with a few writing-chores to do aboard Sonrisa. Nivven selects the Copolia Trail - a short, but steep hike that takes everyone through a field of carnivorous pitcher plants to the top of Mahe Island to see Sonrisa's anchorage. This was a great introduction to our new hiking crew
The Almost Circumnavigation of St. Anne
“Nivven is great, but Rosie is the one who really leads the hikes," Andrew tells me the morning we are preparing for our St. Anne hike.
“Oh yeah? What is Rosie like?"
“She's fat! And she has the shortest little legs!” Jen says.
“She looks hilarious climbing up and around all the boulders and roots," Pete adds.
“But she can out-hike all of us," Andrew confirms.
“I can't wait to meet her." I say, and as we all climb out of our cars at the meeting point.
Rosie circles the whole group offering all of us her cheerful welcome greeting. "So, this is Rosie!" I laugh having thought Rosie was a human. I scratch her white, wiry curls. “Hi Rosie! So nice to meet you!”
This hike is scheduled to be a circumnavigation of a nearby island, St. Anne. We all climb into a ferry boat (Rosie included), and shuttle over to the island where, though the hike is less than a whole mile long, and never climbs much altitude at all. We are whisked away from the boat port in golf carts, taken along a sidewalk past the resort in progress of construction, and left to go free at the trail head.
Nonetheless, it takes us four hours and feels like a challenge with boulder scrambling, skiing our feet over thick leaf-fall, scaling ropes up granite rock faces, and walking along thick beach sand. Rosie scampers up granite rock faces as though nothing stands in her way.
“She’s not fat," I observe to Jen, "She's just thick.”
Among our hiking group this day is a number of Nivven’s professional collegues - some local from the Seychelles, others from Mauritius, some from Sri Lanka, and still others from India. Add to this group Ricarda from Germany, Steel Sapphires from Australia and Scotland, and the Oddgodfreys from the good ole U.S. of A. and we have a rather diverse group of hikers! The conversation is great as we trundle along in a string of people that almost stretches half the island itself when we don't bunch up.
We stop occasionally for a rest, and one of the group climbs a palm tree to retrieve coconuts for everyone's refreshment. Nothing better than fresh coconut water and the young meat of a green coconut to keep you moving on a hike.
Here, we find a whole field of baby cinnamon trees peeking through the deadfall of dry leaves warming under tropical sun. One of our hiking friends plucks a leaf from the ground, crushes it in his hand and takes a deep breath. Cinnamon fills the air, warm with tropical sun and memories of delicious meals I've both cooked and had cooked for me.
"They really are growing everywhere, aren't they?”
“Yeah, Cinnamon was brought here from Sri Lanka by the British to see if they could make it grow. Over the years, the price of cinnamon went down and the plantations were no longer profitable so they aren’t really in operation much anymore. But, the cinnamon still grows well!”
Given that it has been popping up wild on every hike we’ve taken, it must grow well here.
Morne Blanc
And this brings us to our most recent hike on Mahe Island: Morne Blanc - with a real life, naturally growing fairy hut! Back with the hiking group, returning to the larger island of Mahe, we start this hike at 7:00 a.m. (sharp), with mist and cloud still curling between granite boulders and stands of cinnamon trees, laying dew drops on the moss growing on everything.
This is a steep climb, but not long. The air is cool, and this is a change from our usual hiking mode: tropical-sweaty. The dirt between granite boulders is not to be trusted, a springy matt of tree roots, moss, and decomposed deadfall from thousands of years of cycling jungle. Indeed, one of the unique features along this hike includes holes that open up in the floor, leading to deep, dark, spider infested caverns. Step carefully.
This is my favorite hike of all so far, I'm romanced by the soft moss under my feet, decore of tiny, delicate mushrooms I imagine must act as an umbrella city for some tiny, mythical creature or at least the "Dancing snail,” and a fully natural "fairy hut” built of tree roots and moss growing over a clump of granite boulders.
When we reach the top, we enjoy a somewhat limited view of what likely would be ocean side villages and turquoise water of the Indian Ocean. But that’s okay, the fog makes for such beautiful mystique none in our group were complaining - not even Rosie.
And what is it that I smell? Is that….cinnamon apple pie?