My detour down to Dominica felt like going to a different world and back, and so this may be my most ridiculously long and epic blog entry yet! For the readers who are vaguely interested but would rather it didn’t take up their whole evening, there’s a very brief version first:
After a dirty, uncomfortable but fun boat ride down, i spent 5 weeks exploring this glorious island which is economically poor, but rich in everything that i, personally, think is worth being rich in – good locally grown food, clean water, happiness, connectedness to nature and community solidarity. I lived with familys, yoga teachers, drug dealers, cooked on fires, bathed in volcanic hot springs and under waterfalls, harvested and ate yams, dasheen, coconut, cocoa, breadfruit, papaya, coconut, sweetsop, green, yellow and red bananas, weaved baskets, was nearly mugged, watched possum be hunted down and ate it roasted, hiked through rainforests, got almost lured into drug smuggling, and fell in love… with this country. I had a bit of a stressful and scary drama trying to find a boat ride back Northwards, and ended up doing the unthinkable… but you’ll have to skip below to read more about that!
Now here’s the full story:
The boat ride down from the BVIs was pretty rough both sea wise and living conditions, but was all good fun and i was very fond of the characterful crew, just their excellent names i think will set the scene nicely for you: Marley, Canadian, Jones, Conrad and.. a lady, i can’t remember her name. As it was so rough, loud, smokey, hot, there wasn’t much else any of us could do but lie down, so we all just lay for 2 days either on mattresses inside until it was too hot from the engine, or went on deck and made a little cardboard bed amongst bananas, grapefruits and coconuts and lay there till was too wet from waves. Going past Monserrat was spectacular and really sad – the volcano is still smoking since the last eruption which covered the whole capital in a layer of hot ash, killed lots of people, and made refugees of many more (including my friend Luke and family, now living in Leicester). I could see all the buildings and roads completely grey, really ghostly, and then i could see the, now hard grey, lava flow coming down the mountain into the sea.
We arrived late on a Sunday night in Dominica, so one of the crew invited me to stay with his family, who were all lovely, and all either a bit mad or on high on crack. His brother is an aspiring politician, so i had some great discussions with him about the future of Dominica and as he enthused about wanting the world to visit Dominica both from pride and for the income from tourism, and i enthused back as much as i could about Dominica’s strength (it seems to me) being it’s self-sufficiency in food, water and energy and they should protect that.
Then i spent two weeks in the ‘Carib Territory’, which is the area finally set aside for the Caribindian community, the indigenous people of the Caribbean (there before Columbus’s time), after hundreds of years of persecution and massacres. This area is yet more of a different world, where they are still living, in some ways, as they have for hundreds of years. I stayed with the family of Johnny, a Caribindian friend i made up in Tortola, so i was very very lucky to be straight away integrated into local family life. Within seconds of my arrival at their home, Brianna (4) excitedly handed me a bit of rope to skip and we skipped together for a few hours, then Papoi (6) and Shanna (10) came home and we climbed trees, hung ropes and swung on them, and picked sweet juicy kashimas (custard apple), and so it continued for weeks – i spent my days playing, helping cook, wash, plant, going for little walks in the forest, bathing in the river, and wandering through the villages going to visit friends of friends of family. Every task was a pleasure – maybe just because it is novel to me, for example helping cook meant sitting on the grass peeling strange new vegetables with Brianna climbing all over me and a beautiful view down the hill past little wooden houses, breadfruit trees and coconut palms and out to sea, feeding the scraps to the little snuffling piglet, stoking the fire, and then at the end a delicious meal! Sometimes cooking meant a killing – once we had crayfish from the nearby river – you have to pull off each of their heads and drag out a little line of mud from running along their spine, before boiling them in a pot of rice, but for the tiny bit of meat in each one, personally it didn’t seem worth the effort or the death. Another joy was being around Anne-marie, the grandmother of the family, an incredible lady who has been bed ridden for the last 30 years (legs paralyzed when she fell over awkwardly at home), it felt like a caribbean version of Charlie’s family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with all the grandparents in bed. So Granny lives in her tiny wooden house on stilts, with a shuttered doorway right by her bed, so all day she can look out across the garden to the kitchen (corrugated iron shack with a fire place), from there she can watch Rose, her daughter, cooking and her grandkids playing, and shout to us to stoke the fire or run to the shop to get bread. She has visitors to her little doorway all day long, and it took me a few days before i realised they were not all just popping by to say hello, there were also little exchanges – it turned out that Granny is a weed dealer! Marujana is as common and accepted as tobbacco here, but it is still illegal and occasionally the police have a token crack down and arrest someone for holding a spliff, or they go and burn down their crop up in the mountains, and then everything goes back to normal, it seems. So Anne MArie spends her days preparing little bags of weed, so that she can, as she told me ‘make a petit dollar to buy my bread’ – her way of contributing to the family pot. She also managed to attentively look after the family’s chickens which run around free near the house, she broke up coconut into bite size pieces and threw it out the window for them, then by shouting and wielding a little brush (which she makes using the spines of palm leaves) from her doorway, she could somehow shoo away the intruder chickens whilst protecting her own. We communicated in a fun jumble of French patois and broken English. Patois or creole is spoken by and to most of the older people here, but the younger generations now all speak in English, or a beautiful Dominican version of English, which has a bit of a soft French accent and uses lots of phrases like, umm now i can’t think of any good ones, but for now: ‘i not accustomed to that’, ‘i cryin for wood’ (ie. i really NEED some wood), ‘you sorry for de fish?’ (that was said to me often, i don’t think it’s a common phrase!). I also spent three fun days learning to make baskets with Papa Son and Virginie, master basket weavers, whilst a continual stream of slightly drunken men wandered into the workshop/shop (which also sells shots of generic potent alcohol, i never worked out what it was made from, and all the leching drunken men put me off ever trying it) to try their luck with me (proposals varied from marriage to asking for just some quick sex up in their veg patch). Finally i finished a big basket which i brought proudly home to my family as a present, and it is now sitting in their little kitchen filled, as it should be, with green bananas and yams . Most familys in this community are very self sufficient, they supplement their income with weaving the traditional baskets, having little stalls/shops by the road selling bread, sweets, the odd jelly coconut (young ones), and mobile top-up cards, and occasionally a temporary job in construction, but for the most part, it seemed, they all have a little bit of land up in the forest where they grow their root/carbohydrate type crops, which they call ‘provisions’ like dasheen, yam, cassava, sweet potato, figs (what they call bananas), plantain, squash, and then from all around they pick coconut, papaya, grapefruit, sweetsop… One friend, Bruno, took me up to his land and we picked watercress and cocoa ( the beans come covered in this yummy sweet pulp which you can chew off before the cocoa gets processed), and i saw their crop of ’larouma’ growing which is the reed they use for the basket weaving (so they are self sufficient even in their craft materials). They do buy rice, wheat flour, milk, and meat – even though there are little familys of chickens running happily everywhere, feeding off food scraps, everyone seems to usually buy chicken in frozen form from the one shop in the village which has a freezer. And fishing – they dive off the treacherous rocky coast and go spear gun fishing, or more traditionally they go out fishing in their wooden canoes which they carve straight out of one tree trunk, felled in the depths of the mountain forests, carved out, then dragged down to the village, and finished off in different ways, one process i watched them do was building fires all around the canoe to heat up the wood, filling the boat with rocks, then throwing cold water over it (too expand the wood maybe?). One day when i came to to weave baskets, i found Papa Son (who’s about 60yrs old) sewing a big square of white cloth, and he said it was a sail for his canoe, and that he wa going to sail to Guadeloupe! However, i shouldn’t have been surprised – it was in a canoe just like this in which a big group of them sailed to Guyana (South America) a few years ago, to retrace the Caribindian roots.
As with every community i have met like this though, many of them of course aspire to live in a more developed Western way, many want cars, tv, office jobs etc. but the difference here, i felt, was that every Caribindian, and in fact every Dominican i met recognises the value of the wilderness they have left to cover their island – they are proud of the abundance of food, fresh water, and the beauty it provides. And they take advantage of it, they farm, gather and hunt and bath in the rivers, but as far as i could see, they have not exploited it. They are an incredibly inspiring example of a sustainable community for the world, and i told them that lots! Having said all that, i’m sure there are plenty of problems too, i’d need to live there to really know the score, and i realise sometimes i look through rose tinted spectacles when i am having nice time!
Finally i must pay tribute to Rose, the mother of the family i stayed with – one of those silent strong women who stoically provides for and holds her family and community together, not only without complaint, but with a big smile on her face, she washes, cleans, cooks and gardens all day every day for five children, the pig, the goats, the dog, and for the last 30 years her mother. And then she happily accepted me as part of her family for a few weeks, she is amazing, and i told her that!
I was so so sad to say goodbye to this little family of unbelieveably cute, fun, adventurous and affectionate children and strong wise women. I left them with gifts of books, colored pencils and paper, some money, batteries (things they said they needed), and a promise to send a wind up torch and radio one day so they wouldn’t need batteries again, and big hugs!
So then i spent a week over on the more developed west coast, staying with yet more wonderful couchsurfer hosts. Firstly yoga teacher and couchsurfer host queen Trudy (she has had 30 couchsurfers, just this year so far!) with whom i did yoga and had many lengthy discussions about the wonder of Dominica and, from a vegetarian self-sufficiency point of view – why they don’t grow beans there anymore (she is on a mission to get them growing beans again). Then lovely couchsurfer host English Jo, whose home was a little pocket of England in this foreign land, we ate baked beans and watched the BBC on her laptop. Then i became a traditional penniless traveller due to some bank access problems, so i lived on plantains, grapefruit and peanuts, until the Guadeloupean peanut farmers went on strike, then i was down to just fruit. (I should credit my family here for bailing me out, and dealing with my frantic and out of the blue ’hi-sorry-i’m-running-out-of-credit-but-can-you…’ phone calls, whilst my bank cut me off for a while!). Ironically that was the time a guy chose to try to mug me, as i wandered alone up a forest track just out of the capital. Not content with my offering of my last bag of peanuts, he demanded all my money and tried to yank my rucksack off my back. I managed to run away, and i later reflected that this was the only mildly scary incident i had had in all my travels, that i am a lucky lucky person and that generally i had felt very safe in Dominica so i should not let this scare me or taint my memories. This week i also did some spectacular mountain treks, one of which took me through the fantastically named ‘Valley of Desolation’ to the ‘Boiling Lake’. And it lived up to it’s name entirely. I went with a guided group this time, as i was warned that one wrong step and i’d have a boiled leg, and i do have a recent habit of getting lost in woods on my own. After trekking over two rainforested mountains we arrived drenched in the valley of stinking (like rotten eggs) sulphurous rocks, streams of yellow (sulphur), black (carbon) and grey (um, some volcanic minerals), water , and steaming bubbling water splurting out of cracks. We picked our way down the valley wading through the warm water and jumping over the boiling water, then over a few more hills till we reached a cliff edge past which i could see nothing but mist, but then a breeze blew the mist towards us and i could feel warmth – it was steam! For just a moment, the steam cleared and, peering over the edge i could see literally a big boiling lake! It was truly like a sight from a storybook, like a giant’s bubbling cauldron or something, it was unbelievable. On the way back we stopped for a soak in the warm volcanic mineralled water which relaxed me to the core, so that i blissed out, lost all momentum and the guide had to poke and coral me all the way back over the mountains.
MY ATTEMPT TO LEAVE DOMINICA!
Next, it was time to try to head back up to Tortola to gather my belongings and head for Puerto Rico to meet my, probable, boat to Bermuda. So i moved up to Portsmouth, Dominica’s main port town, hoping to spend a few days before jumping on the banana boat again, which was due to make it’s fortnightly delivery. The banana boat fell through immeadiately – it has stopped going to Tortola (apparently in need of repairs, which i’m not surprised at!). Then followed a few days, leading to a week, then two weeks of searching for a boat ride North,which lead me to dallying on the edge of a seedy world of sex crazed beach boys, yet more dodgy skippers, drug smuggling and illegal human trafficking. I was slightly anxious most of the time, constantly getting myself, as politely as possible, out of pickles, where an offer of a bed would turn out to be an offer of sex or an expectation to bear my host’s, or their son’s, next 10 children, or an offer of a boat passage turned out to be an invite to help Tortola get this weeks supply of cocaine. I don’t think i was ever in any very serious danger, i was never forced to do anything, and i was never in fear of violence or theft, however, (remembering lessons learnt from Bridget Jones’s Diary 2), i did check every single nook and cranny of my baggage, just in case anything had been planted on me, just before i finally left the country!
It’s funny how different people view me, or view travelling on boats in such different ways – here, even though i always explained i didn’t want to fly because of the pollution (to which everyone said, oh you’re a rasta girl), they still all assumed i couldn’t afford to fly (therefore would be up for some drug smuggling), was an illegal immigrant or was looking for a position as bikini clad eye candy on some rich man’s megayacht.
In spite of this slightly scary underground world i found myslef in, hanging around on the beach waiting for yachts and cargo boats and getting myself in pickles, led me on all sorts of unique adventures and to get to know all sorts of wierd and wonderful people. One guy, Dean, lived in a beautiful tree house by the beach, with his girlfriend AND two children, i hung out there lots and he seemed to take lots of pleasue in giving me a continual supply of roasted breadfruit. Another guy, Humptee, let me sleep on his floor with his two puppies, and took me on excting hikes into the hills off the beaten track, to secret waterfalls, to pick fruit, dig for yams. to collect calabash (a big green hard round fruit) and sit in the river scooping them out to make bowls for his house. Once, on a moonlit walk, he killed a possum, he gutted and roasted on the fire the next day, and i did try a bit, it was sad but tasty. A great French girl i met, Agathe, took me to hot springs and rivers where we lazed around and she tole me about falling in love with Dominca and a Dominican who she has now moved from France to live with. I could well see this happening to me, having fallen in love with this country, and part of me was definately falling for one or two of these nice men, impressing me with teir excellent self-sufficiency skills and their inherent connectedness to the earth, and their general very attractiveness. I was often asked by these proud Dominicans why i wouldn’t come and live there, in my kind of paradise, and i had moments of wondering why not too, but then i remembered my mission! I’ve been travelling for 7 months so far, to visit my grandparents, because they live an ocean away from the rest of my family. So, however amazing the journey has been, i still don’t want to live forever an ocean away from my family and friends – we would have to spend most of each year travelling to visit each other (which is silly unless you want to live on a boat always at sea, or impossible for some), or we would all have to fly, or we would have to give up our close relationships. I love them all too much for this, and i do love England too!
ONE MORE PLANE
Now this brings me to my guilty confession, and the fact that i need to change the title of this website. As the weeks drew on in Dominica my boat search continued unsuccessfully, all boats seemed to be going South and my fellow beach dwellers (tourist guides and water taxis) started to greet me like a familiar neighbour (with an ultra cool handshake, a grin and an offer of a mango (just coming in to season mmmm)), i started to get anxious that i would not make it in time, or at all, to Puerto Rico for my Bermuda boat. Coupled with the fact that i kept getting mixed up with nice but dodgy drug smugglers, i decided to FLY!!! But only back to Tortola. So, i suppose my failure here was getting all carried away with exploring, straying from my mission, and taking a detour back Southwards, which meant i risked not being able to get Northwards again. The other lesson to be learnt here is to be more flexible – i could have, maybe should have, given up on getting the Puerto Rico boat, however the risk there would have been that i may still not have found a boat to leave Dominica, and there’s no guarantees that i’d have got another to take me to Bermuda. Another thought i had, as i waited guiltily and excitedly for my plane, was that all this time taken, the long round about route, the traumas (and adventures) of boat hitching, which most people would not or could not do instead of flying, has only been necessary for my journey because there are so many planes. If there were no planes, people would still want to travel so there would be more ferries and passenger ships, and if there was no oil there would be sailing passenger ships by now i’m sure! (And of course people would just have to travel less and familys would live closer together.)
Anyway, i decided i should atleast appreciate it if i was going to do the deed. And it was fun! I whizzed through the skies, and above the clouds, and down to the islands, this was more like a little local bus – the plane carried about 30 people and stopped at a few islands on the way to drop off some and pick up others. You know, i do love flying, i just wish the planes could be constructed out of old tetrapaks (no new resources), hand sewn together (no energy used), run on wind and last forever. On the other hand, on a scale of fun, i would still say that the boat was still better – it took 3 days, i got to sleep amongst bananas, stop in St Martin for the day and go to the beach, see Monserrat volcano close up, make friends with the crew and be invited to stay with their family – i’d have never done all that if i’d flown there!
