Dominica : Island Tour

Our third full day in Dominica was unplanned but much appreciated. Kat was supposed to sail north with us but had classes until Friday, so we delayed our departure a day so she could come along. Then at Trafalgar we had met the lovely Roberta and her fiance Al who had also been waiting on a ride there. It turned out Al was a tour guide and he had offered to drive us around the island to see some of the sights farther away. We started out the day driving down to the south end of Dominica to Scotts Head - a large bluff at the end of a tiny peninsula which extended out at the very tip of the island. On one side of this little strip of sand and rocks there lay the windward side of the island and the Atlantic Ocean with waves crashing on the rocks. On the leeward side there was the placid calm and pale blues of reef and shoal and sheltered harbor in the Caribbean Sea.

Next we followed the western coastline and went back through Roseau stopping at the local farmer's market along the way. We were quite impressed. The prices were incredibly reasonable and the variety was astounding for such a small island. We were used to the Bequia market - but Bequia had no fresh water on the island. They collected rain water and so farming was not big there. Most of the produce came on the ferry from St Vincent. Dominica has more than 20 rivers - plenty of fresh water - and you could find almost anything you could think of at the market. Besides all the normal fruits and vegetables that you might see in any grocery store in America, they had more exotic things like sugar cane, guava and passion fruit, noni berries, dasheen, sugar apples, fresh or dried sorrel, fresh cilantro and nutmeg, huckleberries, truckloads of coconuts still in their outer shells being cut open with machetes as they were bought, and a hoard of other strangely shaped fruits, vegetables, herbs and tubers of varying colors and sizes which I could not put a name to. Along with our usual fare we bought our first breadfruit, determined to figure out how to cook and eat it.


We continued north all the way to Portsmouth and took a boat ride on the Indian River. It was named so because the original Carib Indians had settled along its shores before the European settlers had pushed them east. The river was narrow, deep, and very still, surrounded by mangrove shrubbery stretching right to the water's edge with yellow wild hibiscus blossoms hanging over our heads. Tall trees crouched at the water line stretching up to meet overhead so that we moved through a cathedral like tunnel. The roots of the trees traced along the surface of the water all looped and twined, rippled and serpentine, in amazingly intricate patterns. Because the water was so still it reflected back these patterns perfectly leaving an ethereal sort of quality to the air as we drifted silently by in our wooden boat poled along by our dreadlocked young guide named "Mosquito." It was like floating through the art gallery of one who paints with trees. There was no sound but the many small birds flitting and chirping through the vegetation. At one point we heard a parrot making its monkey squawking noise before it flew off through the canopy. Eventually we reached the farthest point a boat could move upriver and got out to visit a little cabana bar with grass huts and jungle flora everywhere. Cobra was the rastaman behind the bar who insisted that we try some of their local punches, like the peanut punch or coconut punch, which they had concocted from local fruits and spices right there in the back room. I tried the peanut punch. It was quite good - and extremely potent. Still haven't quite gotten used to the idea of having a bit of rum at any time of day. Sam and I were both feeling a bit "befuddled" for a while.


The next place we stopped was at the Carib territories on the east side of the island. As the Europeans continued to settle the island, the Carib's got pushed out of more and more of their settled areas and migrated to this place to go on quietly living in their usual fashion. Eventually the territory was deemed to be theirs by right. It was quite a lovely area on the windward side of the island at the top of great cliffs overlooking the waves pounding the rocks. There was a small village built there as a historical museum of sorts. They had reconstructions of all the different types of structures the Carib Indians would have built and what their functions were, and examples of the boats they carved. There were lovely lizards everywhere and a sweet waterfall that you could sit right at the top of looking out through a cut of land onto the frothy breakers.

It was getting late as we headed for the emerald pool. The light was waning fast while we picked our way along the approach trail down into a ravine and then part way up the other side. In a small circular clearing, where a cliff dropped from above, a delicate little falls poured out from the greenery as if from a spout or a funnel as opposed to a free flowing stream. It showered down into a round pool at its base behind which a cave cut back into the cliff above. There were bats circling the clearing and buzzing these strange humans stumbling about in the woods in the near dark. I imagine in the daytime with sunlight filtering down through all that greenery surrounding that bowl shaped glen - the pool must sparkle emerald indeed. We'd have to try it next time in the daylight.

Our last stop for the day was at Al's house, where Roberta had prepared for us a meal of typical local foods. She had cooked salted codfish stir fried together with cabbage and greens, and boiled green bananas which tasted a lot like potatoes. To drink we had juice made from the sorrel petals which we had seen at the market. It was bright red and tasted a lot like hibiscus, very sweet and refreshing like a berry juice. It was the first time we had seen tv in a long time and the democratic debate in Texas between Hillary Clinton and Barak O'Bama was waging in the background as we talked long into the night.

The next morning Roberta and Al came with us as we sailed out of Roseau. Kat got hung up in meetings and unfortunately couldn't come along. We had a pleasant sail up the coast of Dominica and just for fun - as there was little wind - we threw the bosun's chair out on a halyard on the lee side of the sail. It was an idea I had mentioned to the guys when I had first met them in Bequia one day while we were trying to think of exciting, fun, and slightly dangerous activities to fill our days. When I had first sailed in the Bahamas years ago, we had dropped the bosun's chair off the boom while under power with the boom swung wide, and then dragged a person sitting in the chair through the waves. Well , while I had been away, Sam and Francis had perfected this idea and used a halyard off the mast so it could be done under sail with a lot more swing. I climbed into the bosun's chair and swung out into space. If the boat was heeled over you would drag through the water, which was fun if you got just a dip but if there were several waves in a row you tended to chop through them and at speed the water is NOT THAT SOFT. However when we pulled the boat out of its heel you could spin out into space and perform all kinds of aerial acrobatics, spinning about, leaning back to stare up at the sky while dragging your fingers through the water, hanging upside down, or just swinging out from the boat pretty high up in the air. Occasionally you would swing back towards the boat then push off to swing yourself out again. It was ten tons of fun, I can tell you. Almost like flying. I was out there for 20 minutes and never wanted to stop. We'd be doing that again for sure.


For a while as we sailed towards Portsmouth we were sailing almost into the wind and Sam covered my view of all the instruments. "Don't rely on those. You have to feel the boat and steer by the wind." When you're close hauled and heeled over you are running along the edge of the wind. You need to feel the hull with your feet and when it starts to settle that means you are getting too close to the wind and need to veer down a bit until you are heeling again. This slightly weaving motion is how you keep making ground without losing speed on this point of sailing. So, for the next hour I steered along that edge of wind without the help of instruments, trying to feel the wind on my face and the movement of the hull under my feet and the way the wind pulled the sails... When we reached Portsmouth, we managed the tricky maneuver of putting the dinghy together without anchoring and then Sam ran Al and Roberta into shore with the dinghy while I drove the Zenaida around the harbor until he got back. Then we took the engine off the dinghy again and headed back out to sea. It was so smoothly done that we attracted the attention of the local coast guard who probably thought we were smugglers transporting illegals into the country. They circled us for a while trying to look intimidating but I guess they decided we didn't look very guilty because eventually they headed back to their harbor without contacting us. The passage to the Saintes was relatively uneventful and we had another succesful anchoring in an extremely rolly harbor. We spent the whole night rocking and rolling as if we were under way with waves at the beam.

One thing I have neglected to mention in all my story telling is the cooking. Since Francis was the one doing all the cooking when I arrived, I ended up taking on that task as well when I replaced him. Which means that I have been cooking several meals a day since he left. This may not seem like a big deal to some, but for those that know me well - you know I haven't cooked 5 meals in the last year. I don't COOK. Half the time I don't even eat. I know HOW - and on several occasions have put together huge meals for Christmas or Thanksgiving serving 20 or more people with 12 different dishes. But with just me, and moving around so much, I never cared enough about it to bother. Well, I have cooked more meals in the last week than in my whole life combined. Somehow being faced with a limited supply of ingredients, a lack of recipes and a captive audience, so to speak, has forced me to be creative and come up with new and interesting ways to combine our staples (ie: eggs, potatoes, onions, rice, peppers, tomatoes, pasta, beans, cheese, and bread) into a variety of concoctions that don't too closely resemble each other. We only rarely have meat because we don't want to waste the extra power of turning on the freezer which just sucks down the juice - and in the fridge it doesnt keep for long. We do have a growing variety of spices in stock and some other interesting ingredients like bamboo shoots and coconut milk to add to our potential. I've also been playing with bits of local greenery and color to add garnishes and make the meal into an art project which seems to be the only way I can find the fun in something which generally seems like work to me. Strangely enough, I actually enjoy looking through the fridge and cupboards to see what random ingredients we have available and racking my brain to see what I can create with what is there. Definitely a first for me. But something that's been long in coming. The 2 dishes I have posted here are the result of my experiment with breadfruit. The first is cheesy scrambled eggs with breadfruit home fries. The other is a Chinese style dish that I used to make when I lived in Tibet. Again I substituted breadfruit for potatoes and made breadfruit, peppers, and onions stir fried with Hoisin Sauce and a dish called gan bian dou jiao or chili fried green beans.


As I write this, we have left the Saintes behind and we are motor-sailing along the west coast of Guadeloupe. There is little wind and it's a bit overcast, which means the autopilot can handle the driving but it could be a long dull day unless the wind picks up. Not sure yet where we're heading for tonight. Just have to be in Antigua by tomorrow evening. Signing off from the leeward islands and sending sunshine and exotic breezes your way!

Dominica : Rainforest Paradise

Sailing from St Pierre to Dominica was a wild ride. The winds picked up to 25 knots and the seas were 6-8 feet. We started out with a single reefed main and a full jib but soon I was having a real hard time steering our course because the gusts of wind kept pushing us around. So we brought the jib half way in to reduce our sail area. Then we were able to steer reasonably well. The waves were wind driven over ocean swell. There would be gaps then you'd get hit with 3 or 4 at a time. It was like surfing a bucking bronco in a super speed canter with that extra step throwing you off. As if you were taking three steps for every normal two. But it was a beautiful day for it. Not a speck of rain came our direction. We kept up 8 knots the whole way and had burned some cd's of our own finally - so we had great music battling the winds for supremacy as we charged forward through the onslaught.

Our first day in Roseau, at the south end of Dominica, was spent doing laundry. Every piece of cloth on the boat was at the laundromat. We were wearing our swimsuits so we could wash ALL our clothes. Of course, the laundromat had 20 or so washers and dryers but only three of them worked. So, it took all day.... In between we wandered the town of Roseau 4 or 5 times. We know it quite well now. We had a chicken and rice meal with plantains and taro and beans at a small restaurant and tried ginger wine which was extremely refreshing.

The next day was to be a day of new adventures. We decided to visit the crater lakes in Morne Trois Piton National Park which was a UNESCO world heritage site. We found the bus to the nearest town and sat on the bus not going anywhere for nearly 2 hours. Apparently the bus doesn't go until it's full. We were beginning to wonder what our day would be like when finally a crowd of locals piled onto the bus and we headed up into the mountains. This driver was much more relaxed than the ones in St Vincent. He took his time going around curves and avoiding pot holes. The jungle vegetation and the steepness and the narrowness of the road were awe inspiring. As we drove around hairpin switchbacks we would look down several hundred feet to the ground below. There was nothing but jungle everywhere, with the occasional villager walking by on the way to who knows where.

We got out at the village of Laudat and had to walk about half a mile down an incredibly steep road to a cafe in the middle of nowhere that sold site passes for the park. Then we had to hike back up that incredibly steep hill to where we started and continue up the road into the park. Along the way we met a couple who were "developing" a property along the road with an incredible panoramic view all around. There was no sign of any building happening so far. They DID have a trowel and they had just finished planting a fern by the side of the road. In the meantime they were living in a storage shed which appeared to have a metal folding chair and a tripod in it and nothing else. Mostly they just seemed happy to sit and enjoy their view.

The road was not super steep but wound endlessly upwards. Then it did get ridiculously steep for a while -like the roads in Bequia where the moke would have tipped over backwards. We reached the highest paved point in the country and, just our luck, we had to go down again. Finally we reached Freshwater Lake. There were large moss covered stones scattered about the shoreline and stunted trees with odd fern-like branches. There was a constant mist moving through the area as we were now within one of the ever present clouds that tend to crouch upon high places. Because of this mist it was a bit dark and there were no people around and we knew how long it had taken us to walk there. Altogether these things lent a spooky quality to the place. It was also rather windy and cold, and Sam was starting to grumble about the long hike back, when a four wheel drive vehicle pulled into the lot at the visitor's center (which was closed.) A local couple jumped out, looked at the lake for a few minutes, then headed back to their car. I ran up to them and asked if we could catch a lift back to Roseau. Sure, no problem. The guy was from Anguilla, so we spent the whole ride talking about the St Martin area. In the end, he drove us all the way to Trafalgar Falls which was where we had wanted to go next and a good bit out of his way... trail magic.

Trafalgar Falls is one of the most popular tourists spot on the island and we had thought about skipping it to avoid the cruise boat crowds, but the couple had said it was worth seeing. So we wandered back through the jungle on the short access trail and arrived at the "tourist viewpoint." Oh look! A waterfall! I have to admit, I wasn't too impressed. I had seen much bigger and more showy falls than that. So, we continued on down the trail past the sign that said "Continue at Your Own Risk" and eventually reached the boulder field below the falls. From there you could see the base of the falls up behind a pile of jumbled rocks. It looked like a whole lot of clambering. Sam said, "We're going up there." I was a bit tired I guess, and rather reluctant to be crawling and leaping over a wet slippery obstacle course. But Sam was sure it would be worth it. So we climbed and crawled and leap frogged our way up the landslide to where there was a giant pool right where the falls came crashing down. Some people were just coming out of the pool, so we stripped down and jumped in. The force of the air flowing down almost made it hard to breathe - like too much air was being forced into your lungs. And the water was just streaming out at the base. It seemed like 70% was going straight down and the rest was spraying out fanlike horizontally in all directions. The pool itself was refreshing but not too cold. Standing in the middle of the pool on a rock with just head and shoulders above the water and a funnel of wind and water howling down on you - was a bit more than refreshing. It literally took your breath away. I realized I had never swam at a waterfall before - and was thankful Sam had talked me into making the climb. It would have been a damn shame to have missed out on such a tremendous experience because I was too lazy to see what was up there. On the way back down through the jungle we stopped off at some natural sulphur springs that were steaming and inviting. I had a lovely bath lounging with the crickets and the tree frogs.


On our way out we managed to get a ride with one of the small tour buses leaving with only one person. It turned out quite well for us because we were just paying for a ride back to town but we got to see several more sights because they were going there first. So we stopped off at another sulphur springs where you walked through a tunnel of bamboo into a dark woodland scene. All around were fumaroles, little holes with sulphur steam rising out like the vents on the street from the great furnaces under ground. There was a blue grey pool that had bubbles the size of a fist churning and bubbling and bursting into froth and foam. The steam rising off of it rose up through the trees and bamboo and caught the light of the setting sun. It hung there and illuminated every ray of light cut into a million beams by all the vegetation - like a haloed star with a thousand glowing tendrils of light radiating from its heart.


The last stop on our trip was to take a look at a cashew tree. I never had any idea how cashews grew. I guess I thought maybe they grew underground like peanuts. They grow on a tree at the end of a fruit called a cashew plum which is bright yellow and slightly pear-shaped but less round at the bottom. Wedged into the base of the fruit is a nut the shape of a lima bean but brown and very hard. Inside is the cashew. The fruit is extremely juicy. You bite into it and suck hard and get a whole mouthful of tangy sweet juice. You don't really eat it so much as drink it.

We watched the sun set from a viewpoint over Roseau where Mother Nature was encroaching on some ruins above the city and applauded the end of a long and fruitful day. Later that night we had a few more gems to add to the treasure chest. As the moon rose over our anchorage we saw a moonbow in the harbor. I had never heard of a rainbow at night but apparently they are quite common in Dominica, where it rains for about 10 minutes every 20 minutes or so.... It was the night of the full moon which made it even more clear - and then, to our delight, the moon eclipsed. I watched the shadow move slowly across the face of the moon until it simmered a reddish brown shade before the clouds finally swallowed it up. Quite a day.

Island Hopping

The last few days have alternated between monotony and blur. We left Young Island, made our water run, and headed north to Wallilabou Bay to clear out with customs. This is where the Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed and much of the set still remains, looking even more rustic and rundown after years of weathering. The weather report was looking pretty sketch - 35 knot winds and lots of rain - so we decided to wait until morning to head north when the weather had slacked off. It was a rainy humid day but we tried to make the most of it. We pulled on our rain jackets and headed ashore. We wandered through the movie set ruins for a bit then hiked up the road a piece to see a waterfall. It was a pleasant walk through the countryside although we quickly abandoned the idea of wearing jackets and had them tied around our waists. Despite the constant gentle rain, it was still far too warm to have so much skin covered. Later we met the couple on the boat next to us who were traveling through the Caribbean for five months. We sat and had a spot of rum with them at the little pirate cafe on shore. They had an incredible story of a dolphin sighting with groups of 50 or more in every direction. One group in particular were swimming all in formation, shoulder to shoulder, in a line about 50 feet long and maybe 30 strong and swimming at a heading straight towards the beam of the boat. The line of dolphins stretched past the length of their boat in either direction, and as it reached the boat the dolphins for whom the boat would be an obstruction dove as one under the boat so that the whole formation bowed down in a great curve and then came back up again on the other side without even slowing. They continued on like they were on a mission to somewhere and not in the least bit interested in humans today. It would be so incredible to see such a thing. They were in awe. They were running around the boat trying to find a camera but it was just so overwhelming. There were dolphins everywhere. I'm so envious. What an experience that must have been. We've seen far too few dolphins so far on this journey.

The next morning dawned quite lovely and we made our getaway. It was a long hot sail to St Lucia. Raised the mainsail by myself for the second time. I'm terribly slow, because the sails weighs quite a bit more than me. Normally you use your body weight jumping up and hauling down on the line until it gets too difficult, then cranking it the rest of the way with the winch. But my body weight runs out of steam about 4 feet from the top. So it's a long cranking session that leaves my arms like jello and sweat pouring off my face. Sam offered to let me drive and he could raise the sail. He's very sweetly chivalrous. "But it only makes sense," he said, "I'm a lot bigger than you." Whatever I lack in size, I need to make up for in arm strength and speed. I don't want to be getting jobs on boats just because I'm a girl, and a pleasant distraction for the "sailors" to look at. I want to get a job because I can DO the job. He backed off with his hands warding off my diatribe. "Raise away, sailor girl," wth a grin on his face, "you can do it every time if you want. We've got all the time in the world."


That night we stopped in Marigot Bay at the northern end of St Lucia. It was a very quaint little protected harbor. It's a long narrow cut that bends around a curve and supposedly an entire fleet of British ships once hid in this harbor with coconut palm fronds tacked to their masts and the French that pursued them sailed right on by. We got the dinghy all put together and then ran out of steam. It had been a long hot sail and we had baked ourselves in the sun all day. But we HAD gone to the trouble of putting the dinghy together... So we wandered into town and tried the local Piton beer and were assailed by a woman who insisted on stealing the mic from the band and singing her own drunken rendition of some unintelligible song. We were told by the people at the next table that she had been going from bar to bar subjecting everyone to her caterwauling. There was also a rather bizarre trio which appeared to be a couple and their teenage daughter on vacation together. They all looked exactly alike, rather horsey looking, with blonde hair and glasses. They could have been genetically replicated from each other asexually. The daughter was wearing a rather sluttish red dress and sprawled across the pool table as if on display, smiling widely so her braces gleamed. All three of them were incredibly drunk and dancing about in a very robotic and discordant fashion. Suddenly in the middle of the song they linked arms and went skipping off together down the lane, like they were off to see the wizard, the father waving their room key about frenetically. It was quite disturbing. The rest of the harbor was pretty tame after that.

In the morning I got my first chance to tie the boat up to a dock as an official crew member while we got fuel. It went quite well and we said goodbye to St Lucia and pointed towards Martinique. We were on a a mission to Dominica and these were just pit stops, not real visits. I raised the sail again, and this time I got it almost two feet higher before I had to start cranking. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless. When we got away from the lee of St Lucia we picked up some good solid wind and managed to go continuously between 7.9 and 8.6 knots for about four hours - nearly top speed for this boat. It was quite exhilarating and we were passing all the boats who had hugged the shoreline. Since we had speed working in our favor we made a beeline for St Pierre, the northernmost anchorage on Martinique. As I looked back behind us, there was a huge cloud settled over St Lucia, and ahead another one crouched over Martinique. Everywhere else it was bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. It is such a strange phenomena to be able to see the weather so clearly.

As we passed along the length of Martinique I was able to point out all the towns and landmarks for Sam, well-known now from my time spent there. Later in the day as the wind started to die down we were getting bored and stir crazy. We started tying knots in all the extra lines - practicing bowlines, bowlines on a bight, clove hitches, rolling clove hitches, reef knots and becket bends. Pretty soon the cockpit was a web of lines tied across and back and through and to each other. But tied securely....

After that we started climbing up in the rigging and standing on the boom leaning back against the sail while under way. This whole time we're sailing 7 knots with the boat on autopilot and no one in the cockpit.



Eventually we turned on the stereo and played some random cd's that some girl in Bequia had lent to them. One disc labeled "oldies" was full of really cheesy 80's songs. So we blasted this crazy music for the last bit of our sail, miming the most passionate moments in Meatloaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love - But I Won't Do That" as we sailed into the French harbor of St Pierre. We dropped anchor in 60 feet of water and it bit on the first try. I felt very professional - or at least very lucky. It was my first real solo succesful anchor drop.



St Pierre was the "Paris of the Caribbean" at the turn of the century. Then in 1902, Mt Pelee chose her moment to revenge the extermination of her native Carib people by erupting and destroying the whole city and killing 30,000 people instantly. There were only 2 survivors. You can see the remnants of this destruction in the architecture of the town as most people used the one standing wall left after this cataclysm and built 3 new walls to go with it. So, the whole town is riddled with this mixture of old and new construction, lending a slightly eerie historical feel to the town - or a sense of having survived and carried on but with a badge of remembrance. As if the looming peak forever swathed in clouds weren't reminder enough. We ate some yummy crepes for dinner. This was our last pit stop along the way. Next stop Dominica!

Sunkissed

I sit here
being kissed by the sun
making love to the wind
with every inch of my skin
the waves are my stomping ground
the ocean my dream
yet I'm awake
awake
with every inch of my being

St Vincent Escapades

It was such a warm and fuzzy feeling getting off the Liat jet for the second time in St Vincent and making my way to the ferry terminal. When I was on the ferry watching Bequia grow closer and closer, it was like coming home. So long a time had I lingered here. So familiar were its shores. And this time, familiar friends ashore to meet me. Francis' face emerged from the crowd as I stepped ashore and Sam had pina coladas waiting when we got back to the boat. I returned to the Zenaida quite happily and we spent our last few days in Bequia visiting old haunts and saying goodbye to our local West Indian friends.

And then, one fine morning, we set sail for St Vincent with a reefed main and jib. We caught some hefty winds and were quickly heeled over at 7.8 knots trucking through the waves. I spent the brief sail practicing cranking down on winches properly, sheeting in the sails when needed and tacking back and forth with the jib. We pulled into a protected area by Young Island and dropped anchor.

The morning dawned with a trip to the airport as we said goodbye to Francis who had to go north for a few weeks to take care of some business. We would be meeting up with him again in St Martin. At the airport, we met up with Carrie, a peace corps volunteer who had met the guys in Bequia a few weeks earlier. After Francis had flown away, the 3 of us headed into Kingstown to explore a little. We got our first taste of "doubles" - a type of food that supposedly was imported from Trinidad. A rastafari with a huge white tam full of dreads with green, red, and yellow stripes served up the tasty treats made of slightly thick tortillas piled up with chick peas in a thick sauce like a curry but with a different flavor hinting strongly of cilantro and some other far eastern spices. All the while he bemoaned the fact that his girlfriend had broken up with him the night before and so his day wasn't going so good - but he'd be sure to find a new one by evening... We took our doubles to a little coffee shop where gathered a whole posse of peace corps workers. We discovered that there are more than 20 on this island working on various projects and we met four of them right there. Eventually we went our separate ways and Sam and I walked around Kingstown for a while exploring the capitol city. Then we rejoined the peace corps crew later at the beach near our boat. We spent a lazy afternoon at the beach, having a few beers to celebrate Sam's birthday. Deb and Carrie, who both already knew Sam, had brought along several friends, including Kat, another peace corps worker stationed in Dominica. As we were headed there next it was good to meet a new friend and contact. After geting baked by the sun we had come to decide that we all wanted to hike up the volcano, Mount Soufriere, the next day and decided to stay with Deb and Kat so we could get an early start in the morning.

In order to make it to Deb's village we had to experience the local Caribbean dollar bus service. I had used the bus in Martinique and was familiar with the system. Full size vans with the name of the destination printed on the dash stop at the side of the road to pick you up and they wedge up to 20 people in the van at any given time. But in Vinci, they have a style all their own. The vans are all pimped out in bright flashy colors. The destination is printed in tiny lettering just below the wipers and scrawled across the whole front of the vehicle in elaborate tag style lettering is the name of that particular van - names like "Vete Ran", "Iron T", and "Ballerz" proclaiming the identity of the driver. The locals learn to tell which bus they want by the driver's name not the route. And the vans are all vibrating with the boom as they pump their reggae and hiphop beats. No elevator music here.

We piled into one of these and it was like we were the ball in a pinball machine. As the sliding door slammed shut we were hit by the plunger and shot forward into space. The van hurtled around curves, up and down hills. All the people were being alternately pressed against one wall or the other as the van flew headlong into the unknown beyond the next curve. It was the roller coaster rocket into paradise and I loved it. I was holding a dozen eggs in one hand and my backpack in the other with no real hands left to hold on with and the seats were covered in plastic so we were sliding all over them like butter. I kept apologizing to Kat as I found myself crushing her against the window, then clutching at her with my spare elbow as I was dragged away towards the woman on the other side of me. The roads we were driving on were little curvy roads through the mountains with dense jungle greenery all around us at times, and cliffs dropping away to entrancing rocky coastlines on the windward side. Other cars and vans are careening past us without slowing down in the least - all playing the same pinball game and all determined to be the winner. I held my breath every time we blew past some small children standing at the side of the road and my heart just stood still. When we finally reached Mesopotamia, the van screeched to a halt and the passengers all lurched back. The door slid open and we scrambled out. The moment we were out, the door snapped shut and the van leapt into forward motion again. What a rush. I couldn't help but grin and found myself wanting to turn to the others and say "let's do it again!" Yeah, I know. I'm nuts. But remember - I'm the one who likes turbulence on airplanes... It's like a two for one - you pay for transportation and get a carnival ride for free.

At Deb's house we made some yummy tacos with homemade tortillas and talked into the night. It was my second time sleeping on land since I had begun this journey - and luckily this time - no earthquake. Even better, we got to take real showers. Well, I mean she had a shower that poured water down from above but no hot water. Which was more than we had since our water had run out 4 days earlier. No reverse osmosis on this boat. We had a place to get water. We just kept postponing doing it because fun things to do kept distracting us. So I had been doing dishes in sea water - and there was just enough water left in the tanks to rinse the dishes and brush our teeth, but that was about it.

Also at Deb's house I befriended the little lizards that crawl all over the place, inside and out, up the porch walls, across the ceilings, leaping from post to post. They were adorable, about as wide as my handspan with the fingers spread. Their heads and torso were a lovely grass green melting into yellow on belly and throat and blending further into orange on legs and tail with a striking sky blue circle around the eye.

In the morning, we got a ride with Deb's friend up to the north end of the island picking up Carrie along the way and passing through Georgetown, the old capitol. We got dropped off at the trailhead and tramped into the jungle. It began on a narrow ridge that dropped away for hundreds of feet on both sides with nothing but a sea of green falling away. There were huge clumps of bamboo swaying and creaking along the edge of the trail. There were several steep sections of stairs winding upward through heavy vegetation and although it was overcast, we were quickly drenched with sweat. We crossed a dry creek bed of old lava flow and started up the scree slope which was tufted sparsely with grasses and a variety of low growing plants. There was a lot of precipitate in the air and the wind picked up quite a bit. Near the summit we were still climbing steeply and moving through a spitting soft rain. We reached the top and looked over the edge of the abyss into the crater and saw

nothing

but mist dropping away into forever.

Which made it all the more creepy.
We sat at the top for a while hoping the weather would blow over, but in the end we got too cold in the wind and rain and they didn't show any signs of easing. So we trekked on out again. When we reached the base we found some plumrose fruit - small pear shaped fruits that start out white and ripen into a reddish color. They taste like you are eating something flowery and roselike, very tangy and tart. They were not my favorite, but it was something wet to put in our dry mouths after the hike. We felt tired and hot but exhilarated. Before we left I saw a hummingbird flit by us. It was a dark iridescent blue with red patches on its head. I had never seen one of this color. He buzzed by watching us for a moment as if investigating what strange creatures we may be. I cannot fault a day in which both hummingbird and lizard visit me. It was a good ending for our time on St Vincent.