This is an authorized translation in English of a post in French by @marc-allaria: LE VOYAGE D'AURORA - STOP#9 - Christmas Island, Episode3...!

^{As my primary language is not English, there are probably some mistakes in my translation.}

Remember that the person who speaks here is NOT me, Vincent Celier (@vcelier), but Marc Allaria (@marc-allaria), a French guy.

THE JOURNEY OF AURORA - Christmas Island
Part 3

Apart from its phosphate mines scattered on the high plateau, Christmas Island is first and foremost an island that has maintained a untouched nature of all human interference. It is also an island with varied scenery. Arid coast, "Amazonian" undergrowth, tropical bottoms, it is quite incredible that nature has been able to adapt in so many different ways to these different conditions of this small island. If homes are concentrated around Flying Fish Cove and on its heights, elsewhere nature reigns supreme.

The south coast of the island forms the first rampart encountered by the swell from the south. After having traveled the oceans for several thousand kilometers, a long swell of two to four meters high explodes against a rock made primary by shocks for several million years. An eternal fight between water and rock. From this endless war, water materialized its successes by cracking the rock, creating a maze accessible by the water alone. With each wave, the water penetrates the most inaccessible openings of the rock, before springing to the sky in a deafening noise to more than 15 meters of height. The show is as grandiose as it is inexhaustible.

Farther west of Christmas Island hides a totally opposite scene. Surprising rivers hidden by a rain forest cover the western part of the island. Here, the panoply of foothills of tree trunks shows us all the ingenuity of nature to adapt so as to maintain the verticality of a trunk. Ramified, straight, concave, all the ideas of nature to fight against weightlessness took shape here. The Guyanese forest does not seem far ...

Then the decor changes again. The feet sink into the ground. The grass does not grow anymore. Only taller trees resist, but obviously many fall regularly. We are at the "Dales". Small water terraces form a little like the Asian rice fields. The river descends the slope and comes to accumulate there until overflowing a terrace and to flow in the following one. Upstream of this domino game, a drop of a few meters plays the role of starting point for this course of fresh water that will end a few hundred meters lower in the salt water of the ocean. Here, nothing seems to have moved for thousands of years, because it is certainly the time necessary for the construction of such a work.