A Visit to Dominica September 1, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Caribbean, Hotels, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , trackbackA strange thing happened this year. A man I’d met only twice, a bit of a loner, invited me to go with him to the West Indies. I fancied him so I said yes.
I knew of Dominica only as the birthplace of Jean Rhys, a writer I deeply admire. Now when I read about the island I discovered that it is volcanic and mountainous and is the last refuge of the Carib Indians, the descendants of proud cannibals who starved to death rather than accept the fate of slavery. It is one of the wilder places on earth and contains rainforest, and boa constrictors.
The Caribbean is a vast sea, the islands so small. From the air they all look different. We flew over dry, brown Antigua with its ruined sugar mills standing solid as castle puddings; butterfly-shaped Guadeloupe with city boulevards; green Martinique and Marie Galante. Then sliding reluctantly over the ocean came a thunderous grey cloud, and under it was the crumpled, dark green lozenge of sulky Dominica.
There wasn’t much of an airport: just a largish shed with a corrugated iron roof, open at the sides like a cattle shelter. Roseau, the capital, had primitive street lighting, no smart shops, and nowhere to post a letter. Concrete drains ran down the sides of the streets, with a bridge across to each house. In the botanical gardens a huge tree had fallen and crushed a bus. It looked startled and bedraggled, like a rat in a trap.
The town ended sharply, and we were driving along a bumpy lane through the jungle at reckless speed. It began to rain. In the porch of a wooden shack a small boy dangled a land crab on the end of a makeshift fishing rod; it clawed the air, defensive and gaudy.
When we arrived at Papillote, which had advertised itself as being `in the rainforest’, we found that its flimsy buildings were half engulfed by the surrounding forest. The owner of the guest-house, Mrs Anne Baptist, was a small, shy, American woman. She greeted us guardedly, smoothing her wispy hair. She urged us to order supper straight away from a painted board which said:
KINGFISH
FLYFISH
CRAYFISH
`Mountain chicken is not available,’ she added, ‘because the frogs are still in their breeding season.’
We sat in the open-sided restaurant and saw forest all around. There was a pressing, gently swaying wall of vegetation in a thousand shades of green. Beside the kitchen a communal bath, fed from a hot sulphur spring, was built into the wall. A whole family sat in this, nattering and chuckling in the brown steam. They had walked up the road from Roseau. With a tinkling sound, the spring emptied into a shower basin at the edge of the jungle. Fowls stalked out of the vegetation, looking incongruous: geese, peacocks, guineafowl. Mrs Baptist grumbled, `The snakes are very unpopular here. Boa constrictors. However you build your henhouse they’ll sneak through a crack. Then of course, when they’ve eaten they can’t get out again.’
Our room was tiny and wooden. Through the slats of the shutters we saw the high, green sides of a ravine and a solitary tree fern growing luxuriantly, a living fossil from the coal forests of the Carboniferous.
`I’m sorry I don’t love you,’ my friend said.
`Don’t be sorry.’
We heard a chorus slowly start up and deepen, far back into the forest night. Something high in a tree clinked sharply, over and over again like a coin thrown into a metal dish. Other voices mewed, rat- tled, croaked, quacked and barked. They were frogs. One of them was the mountain chicken, emitting a discreet ‘woof .
I lay in the cacophonous darkness thinking about magic. There was magic here. Even in our short journey the taxi driver had spoken of the soukoyant, the witch who takes off her skin at night and flies about like a bat. Magic: it lubricates the gap between what we can see and understand, and what unhappy feelings haunt our dreams.
Anne Baptist joined us as we explored her jungle garden before breakfast. She showed us trees with calabashes and wooden fruits, and a thicket of juicy ginger stalks which sheltered huge, pink plastic blossoms. She pointed out tiny, delicate orchids growing on trees, and the dammed ponds in the river where she planned to breed crayfish.
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