Checking into Villa Marie Lucie

Coming off a wild adventure traipsing around mainland Africa, exploring seven countries, including a roadtrip across six countries, a tour to Lesotho, a week spent in a hostel in Johannesburg and three weeks spent in the incredible Cape Town, and with the Christmas holidays imminent, I was ready for a break. Traveling, while rewarding and exciting, is also exhausting and challenging, and with the sheer volume of it I've undertaken this year (26 countries in 2022!?), the end of the year was the ideal time to find a small island in the Southern Indian Ocean and unwind for a while.

And so, for the final week of 2022, I'll be decompressing and relaxing on two small African islands - the first of which is the French overseas department of Réunion, tucked between Madagascar and Mauritius, the latter of which is my final destination for this year.

I flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg, a two-hour nonstop flight, and then switched over to a four-hour nonstop Air Austral flight through the night, landing at 5:45am, tired and looking forward to getting to my hostel. Wait - hostel? Isn't this blog post is about checking into a villa?

Sure is. Initially, I had booked all four of my nights on Réunion at the Les Baroudeurs Hostel in Saint-Pierre. And so, I waited outside the airport shortly after 6am for the long distance bus that would take me around to the opposite side of the island and the sleepy little town of Saint-Pierre. Well, in an instance that would match every other attempt of mine to board a bus in Réunion, the first bus was canceled, with the next one not arriving until 8:45am. So myself and a growing crowd of travelers, all French-speaking of course, sat for three hours outside the airport, tired and growing impatient.

When the bus finally arrived, I refused to push and shove my way to the front of the line, even though I had been at the bus stop first, and so the luggage storage compartment below the bus was completely full by the time it was my turn. As a result, I had to sit the entire bus ride, which was meant to be one hour but took us three, holding on to my luggage so it wouldn't roll down the aisle.

I arrived in the middle of Saint-Pierre shortly before noon, six hours after landing, to a blaring 30 degrees. Naturally, the smaller town bus which was to take me three stops to the edge of town was also delayed by half an hour so it was close to 1pm by the time I finally got off the last bus. And to my luck, that last bus stop was quite literally on the edge of a highway, which I then I had to walk ten minutes down, lugging my heavy suitcase in the heat, to find my hostel which was essentially in the middle of nowhere at the end of a gravel road.

I could find no fault with the hostel itself; the owner is lovely, the wi-fi was great, breakfast was included, and the whole place felt like you were checking into someone's home, but with the arduous journey (and having to face it again for my return journey to the airport) and the lack of anything to do within even walking distance made me miserable. And so, after resting my head for a night in Saint-Pierre and eating a plate of noodles at the only open restaurant in town, I made the cumbersome journey back around the island to Saint-Dennis.

As my luck would have it, while the first small town bus was on time, the second long-distance bus was canceled, with - of course - the next one not for two and a half long hours. I sat on a concrete bench outside the Saint-Pierre bus depot, the stifling heat made only slightly more bearable by the shade I had managed to find.

When I finally returned to Saint-Dennis, many hours later on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I checked into the Villa Marie Lucie, a place I had found on booking.com the day before from my hostel when, through eyes blurred with tears, I tried to find a place to stay where I wouldn't feel so completely isolated.

Given that Christmas is very much my favourite time of year, I figured it’d be cute, cosy, welcoming and about as close as I could get to that feeling of being “home for Christmas” while being on a tiny island where it’s the peak of summer and 30°. Well, it turned out I was the only guest, so I spent a very quiet and hot Christmas by myself in this big villa on a tiny dot in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean.

The villa itself was an oasis in the heart of Saint-Dennis. Beautifully and tastefully decorated in Creole style, the large, cool space was welcoming and peaceful. There were some notable downfalls, especially given the very high nightly rate. It could have been cleaner, the internet wasn't great, the kitchen was a bit of a mess and the €18 breakfast was disappointing. Otherwise, with having the run of the villa all to myself, my stay here was relaxing, safe and the perfect place to rest my head for three nights over the Christmas holidays.