Hi Everyone,

We're driving to the northern part of Grenada today, along the Caribbean coast. We hug an apparently expensive-to-maintain coastal road, drive alongside a tract of jungle and pass an enormous smoking landfill like a cigarette gone badly wrong. We turn after a few more minutes, drive up a steep valley and arrive at our first attraction, a waterfall! There’s even a monkey on a lady’s shoulder for us to gawp at and take photos. This is my favourite thing about Grenada, the place is well-organised and friendly with changing rooms and a small fee to get in. Perfect. God, I’m old. Anyhow, we change and take the steps down to the waterfall pool. Lulu gasps, ‘Look up!’ At the top is perched a tall, thin man in a sporty Grenada strip and a little black stocking tucked around his head. When he’s sure he’s got everyone’s undivided attention, he jumps. It’s high enough for two, three photos before he hits the pool. ‘Did you miss me?’ he says to me as he gets out. ‘Miss you?’ I fight the urge to bite my fingernails. ‘I don’t even know you.’ He rolls his eyes a little. Idiot tourist. He points to my camera. ‘Did you miss me in the picture?’ ‘Oh, the picture. No, I got you,’ I say. ‘So you’ll give me a tip.’ Without waiting for an answer, he climbs a smaller outcrop and helps people to jump in the pool, holding their hands until they’re ready, pointing them to a little stone to catch their balance. I route through my bag and bring him a dollar. An Eastern Caribbean dollar. ‘That’s not even enough to catch a bus back.’ I put my hands on my hands. Cheek! ‘Well, how much do you want?’ ’Ten.’ He tries to sound casual but ha, I’ve been in Grenada long enough to hear the honesty in his voice. Like he’s scared his mother may be listening behind that big rock. ’Ten? What, do you think I’m on a cruise ship? How about five?’ He nods. ‘Deal.’ After I bring him the five, he helps Lulu, Gwen and the birthday girl, Robyn to jump into the waterfall pool. ‘Do you do this on your own?’ I ask, pointing to the top of the waterfall. He shakes his head. ‘I used to jump with someone else but he met a girl and left.’ ‘What, she doesn’t let him jump anymore?’ I say, thinking of a worried Grenadian mama with her hands on her hips, ‘cause it’s too dangerous?’ He rolls his eyes again but this time he smiles. 'No, because he met her and left. Left the island.’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘right.’ Someone from another country fresh off a cruise ship, catching a glimpse of his stocking, watching the high-octane jump and falling straight in love. ‘Well, good luck.’ He nods and raises an eyebrow at the girls. They’re being whirled around by the waterfall, red-cheeked and laughing in the cold-water. 'Those all your kids?’ he asks. ‘Just two of them,’ I say. 'How’s the best way to jump?’ He takes my hand. ‘You have to put your feet here.’ 

Eventually, Justin gathers all the swimmers and shepherds us back to his tour van. A little while later, we pass a row of small buildings. The turquoise sea comes right to the edge of the road. 'This is Gouyave,’ Justin says, ‘the city that never sleeps.’ A city? This stretch of small buildings? ‘Why’s that?’ someone calls with similar incredulity in his voice. ‘Because people are always around, day and night.’ Gouyave is a fishing village, sorry, a city that on Friday nights has a famous ‘Fish Friday’. Our van stops by a warehouse building and Justin jumps out the driver’s side. ‘This is the largest nutmeg processing plant on the island. We will have a tour,’ he commands and throws open the door. We all trundle out and listen to a fast-speaking tour guide who’s missing the majority of his teeth but has a wicked twinkle in his eyes. Like he can bluff you with one hell of a game of cards. ‘Do you understand a word he’s saying?’ Beth asks, approaching me. She’s a teacher at a primary school in Canada. ‘Not a word, but I’ve still got water in my ears from the waterfall.’ ‘People tell me that I talk fast too,’ she says. ‘Yeah but you’ve got all of your teeth.’ She nods. ‘True.’ We look around; the building is brown, the nutmegs are brown, the burlap bags the nutmegs are transported in are brown too. It’s a dry and pleasant-looking place to work without a piece of modern technology in sight. Surely we have travelled back through time. ‘They go all over the world,’ I hear the guide say. He takes us to a column where women sit at little hatches like they’re working at the post office. The guide tells us that they sort through each nutmeg by hand, separating by size and weight and putting them into bags. He gestures for us to follow but Beth and the girls linger by a woman wearing a colourful head-scarf and full skirt. ‘She makes 42 EC dollars a day,’ Lu says, catching us up at as we’re looking at another pile of nutmegs. The guide is talking but I’m lost again. Brown nutmegs, brown bags. ‘That’s not even enough for a pair of shoes,’ Lu continues with a new ring of indignant authority. ‘Nope,’ I agree. A group of workers stand by another pile of nutmegs, looking at us. Not rude or glaring or anything. Just like they’re waiting for us to go so they can call over the tour guide and get the cards going again.

As we go further north, Grenada changes. It’s not a dramatic change; the trees are the same, the place still so green like it's trying to solve climate change on its own and Justin’s van’s windscreen spits with raindrops just like in the south. ‘This is where a lot of Grenadians live who’ve come back from England.’ Justin says, pointing to large, modern-built houses and of course, beautifully-tended lawns. ‘Are these people here because they’d be poor back in the UK?’ Lulu asks. My tween. ‘No, Lu,’ I say,’ these people have worked hard all their lives. They’ve come back here to enjoy it.’ I watch her brain whir. ‘Oh.’ Still, this proud repatriated community isn’t the change. The first real sign of it are in the very tall palm trees. We begin to see them waving like giraffes' necks over smaller jungle trees. They’re so much taller than brittle nutmegs which we discover is originally from Indonesia and easily damaged. ‘The plantation-owner prized palm trees and always planted them by his house,’ Justin’s voice drifts across the van. ‘It was the ultimate status symbol.’ We pass a large plantation house then another and another. Most plantation houses are perched up like tortoise heads on hills. Some are intact, even re-furbished and ornate while others are broken old shells. All are surrounded by these giant palms. ‘The North is where people first settled when they came to Grenada,’ Justin says, ‘since it was easier to spy ships coming down the coast.’ Suddenly I notice clusters of these tall, tall palms everywhere, even where is no sign of a house anymore. The northern end of Grenada has its history, I realise as the hair on my arms stand to attention, in living botanical markers. What have these trees lived through? We stop at Leaper’s Hill in the very north where the Caribs leapt to their death after realising the French didn’t come for a long visit after all, cross over to the Atlantic side of the island and have lunch at the Belmont Chocolate Estate. After a chocolate tasting session and brief stop with a parrot that can say ‘Happy Birthday,’ and ‘Do you have a cracker?’ which makes Robyn and the girls roll around laughing in the grass, we stop at the old airport with relics of Cuban and Soviet planes from the early 1980’s. The girls stamp around the plane carcasses like we’re in Romancing the Stone, expelling any stubborn snakes. 

In the late afternoon, we drop in at one of the oldest Rum Distilleries on the island, River Antoine. A primly-dressed tour guide looks at us wearily. ‘Come on,’ she says as enthusiastically as someone who was hoping to go home early but realises they can’t now. She shows us the island’s oldest working water wheel, 231 years old, made in London and Derby to process the sugar cane. A still-working boiling house is full of hot bubbly liquid. Everyone stares on glassily, hot and bothered. Finally, the girls give up and go sit in the van, calling out, ‘We want to go back to the waterfall!’ while the grown-ups go to sample the rum, sitting down on old barrels in the shade. I wander off into the boundaries of sugar cane fields. all lined with broken railroad tracks. This is the modern-day sugar cane industry, built on the back of cruelty and opportunity and operating now under a different guise. Gorgeously-packaged, 75% proof white rum. Justin bundles us into the van again like accustomed kidnap victims and we start driving back towards the finger peninsulas in the south with its river outlets, murky waters and swimming pools. To get there, we turn into the island’s mountainous centre which is also a national park and Justin announces that our last stop is to be Grand Etang Lake. It’s an extinct volcanic crater and rumoured to be bottomless with an endless supply of fresh water for the whole of Grenada. The van comes to a soft halt. It’s reedy and cool up here and there’s no one else around. Everyone breathes a little easier and we watch Justin feed a tussling school of fish with bread he'd stopped to buy at a country bakery. Surely this is a blessed place. 

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx