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Curieuse Island in the Seychelles
From Wanderlust: September 2008
Standing knee deep in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean on the island of Praslin, I can see Curieuse Island, an old leper colony that will be home for the next few days. I'm waiting for Rich, a conservation base manager on this desert island, to collect me in his homemade RIB styled boat.
As I wait, I ponder General Gordon's claim that I am standing in the original Garden of Eden. 'Eden' is such a hackneyed cliche, overused by tourist boards around the globe, but to General Gordon's Victorian eye there was clear evidence to back up his assertion. The versatile and nourishing breadfruit was clearly the Tree of Life and the brazenly provocative coco-de-mer tree was without doubt The Tree of Knowledge - that should on no account be tasted.
The male coco-de-mer palm boasts a metre long phallus shaped flower spike while the seed of the female tree is a 40-pound double nut closely resembling a woman's unclad lower torso.
Curieuse is also home to the giant tortoise (Geochelone gigantea) a relative of the more famous Galapagos giant tortoise. Sailors drove these magnificent creatures to extinction around 1770 and unbelievably set the island alight to make collecting the coco de mer fruit easier.
When it became a leper colony in 1883 it was unsurprisingly left alone. The island vegetation recovered but not the tortoise. In 1978 giant tortoise were reintroduced from the southern island of Aldabra but after a promising start the population crashed and hatchlings were eaten by rats, feral cats and crabs.
Its now thirty years on and with more effective management things are looking up. Rangers now patrol the island and have put a stop to poaching and ugly but effective concrete pens now protect hatchlings from predation while they are small and vulnerable.
Jason, a Curieuse ranger told how when he arrived on the morning of 24 December 2004 he was horrified to discover that all the giant tortoises had mysteriously disappeared from the beachside. Two days later the tsunami struck but the tortoises had migrated safely to higher ground - it seems that scientists are missing a low-tech trick for a tsunami early warning system.
Today upward to 300 giant tortoises roam the island........