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14.02 15:33.34N
61:27.75W
Before I carry on and tell you about where we are
now, I just want to finish with our last day on Martinique. You know what
it is like when you are on holiday (for a year); the two of us have not been
paying any more attention to the calendar than confirmation of
today-is-Sunday kind of thing, and so when we headed up to Fort de France and
found our selves slap bang in the middle of MARDI GRASS, we were quite
surprised! The Carnival season completely snuck up on us, so really
we didn't plan things very well. But. we were lucky just to catch the last
little bit of it, and I felt I just had to share a couple of
photos.
The whole town dresses up as women and comes out
on the streets See: even the
police are enjoying themselves!
for 3 days.
So. Onwards. Even though we are no
longer in French territory, we still appear to be in Europe, as we are at the
moment anchored off "Portsmouth"! This one is however, at the northern end
of Dominica (pronounced Do-my-nee-ka, and
not to be confused with the Dominican Republic!!). The journey
across the Martinique Channel to Dominica was quite blowy, and you hit
little patches of acceleration-zone as the trade winds whistle round
the islands. It died pretty much completely though round the leeward
side of Dominica, which is good as the shore is very straight with nothing in
the way of protective bays. We took a mooring buoy from a very nice chap
called Desmond, just outside the Anchorage Hotel south of the capital;
Roseau. The internet signal here turned out to be fantastic, so I
left Chris to catch up with e-mail stuff, and went into town. WOW! (I am
beginning to like that word!) What a delightful town! Roseau in its
own way, is by all accounts the one of most historically interesting towns in
the whole of the west indies. Don't get me wrong, Dominica was never rich
so the buildings are small and scruffy, and quite a lot of them are in serious
disrepair, but the whole historic part of town is a timber framer's
delight. So I spent all day gawping...
I would like to put in a bit of a word for Lorna
from the museum. A big Thank you to her for the really interesting chat,
and for answering all my questions about the buildings. its only a little
museum, but very informative and well worth a visit.
Downtown
Roseau
This believe it or not is a chineese take away - most of the old
buildings
look a bit like this. Wooden boarding, brightly painted, most with
pretty
verandas,
balconies, and trimmings. Shame about the tin roof.
The next couple of days we hired a car
and took off to explore. I wanted to come to Dominica mostly to
go walking in the Rain forests, but
Dominica is so covered in it that it is difficult to know where to begin!
There are so many waterfalls, we only managed to visit a few, starting at
Emerald pool. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to
find anywhere quiet in Dominica while there is a cruise ship in town
(ohmygodohmygodohmygod) so the place was thronging with baseball caps and
no-dress-sense socks with sandals from the USA. It would have
been beautiful if we could have air-brushed out all of the other people.
So we then decided to get away from the madding crowds, and headed into
Carrib country. the Caribs were the natives who lived here before
Christopher Columbus 'discovered' the Caribbean archipelago, and people started
bring slaves from Africa. Most of them were wiped out by Europeans, but
one small reservation - in the whole of the Caribbean this is - still
remains with a mere few hundred native people living on it. These guys got
an even rougher deal than the freed slaves when it came to independence and
all that, so the people live in grinding poverty, with basically the whole
system against anything ever changing. And yet, I have to say, as far
as the cultivated parts of the island go, it is probably the prettiest.
someone has gone to real effort to plant colourful plants along the roadsides,
and I'm sure there is less rubbish generally dumped around the
place.
 
The sea crashing across this stretch of road is
almost as
exciting Emerald
pool: a rare shot with no Americans
as the pot holes and the local taxi
drivers!
The next day we decided on that walk, and headed
in the direction of Middleham Falls. We thought we would also take
advantage of no cruise ship, and check out the aerial tram - a gondola affair
which transports you in electric driven tranquillity through the rainforest
canopy. But alas we were thwarted by the relentless pursuit of profit: the
aerial tram only operates when there IS a cruise ship in town, as it
is not worth their while running it for just us measly yacht
people.
We also learnt another very valuable
lesson: Dominica is still relatively new to the whole tourism game, and
does not make enough of the fact that their are such things as official
tour guides and unofficial tour guides. We were pursued by
a chap, who shall remain nameless, who accosted us in the road while we stopped
the car to read a sign. He was enthusiastically offering to guide us
up the Titou Gorge, and take us to hot springs and cold springs and tell us
about the trees. We had kind of fobbed him off by saying that we might
come back and get him to take us up to Middleham Falls, but he followed us
anyway. The long and the short of it is that we ended up giving him money
so that he would go away and stop hassling us: he was certainly not
qualified to tell us anything about the walk, and was incredibly
irritating. So if anyone offers to take you anywhere, ask to see their id
first!!!
The Titou Gorge, and Middleham falls on the other
hand, are both fantastic and once we had the peace and quiet back the walk
was a treat. The birds and the trees are just awesome what with it being
virgin rain forest, and the falls are quite spectacular. if you
are very lucky, you might get to see one of the national bird:
Jaco and Sisserou parrots. I can tell you're enthralled.
Titou Gorge: narrow and very
vertical
Chris and I at Middleham Falls
Most of Dominica looks like this!
So here we are in Portsmouth. It's not at
all like the one I live in! It's much more run down than Roseau, but there
are some nice things to see and do. As we came in, we
were approached by one of the ubiquitous boat boys. You have to
hand it to them, it was blowing an absolute hoolie, and we were motoring full
pelt against it to get into the bay, so we didn't stand a fart's hope in
hell of being able to hear a word of what he said, but he was trying
anyway! Once we got in and moored, he came back again to welcome us
to Dominica and invite us to take a tour up the Indian River with him, informing
us that, was where they filmed the bit in "Pirates of the Caribbean" where they
go up that murkey swampy river to visit Calypso the Witch. Well that sold
it! Little did we know however that, that evening we would be joined by
the goodly Mr Ian Douglas, the member of parliament for the Portsmouth area, and
Minister for Tourism. As we were rowed gently through the mangroves,
observing the Bannanaquits, the herrons, and looking for boa constrictors, we
were quizzed on 'What did we think of Dominica'.
  The Indian River. I'm just waiting for
Johnny Depp to leap out of The
bar at the end of the river. On the right is Raymond Ravioli
the
mangroves! our
excellent and very official guide and rower, and the chap in
the
middle is in fact a politician - (ours don't look like him...)
And yet in other ways it's just like being at
home - it has rained for about a week! It has not been the Caribbean
of endless sunshine and golden beaches that springs to every one's mind.
We are actually just away from town at the south end of the bay, right on the
best beach of Dominica's west coast, but it's just not sun bathing
weather! What makes it worse, is that we are actually sitting here waiting
to leave to head north to Les Saintes. For some reason Ugrib keeps
forecasting 35 knot winds over night and they don't appear! So we get up
the next day and look at it again, and find that they are forecasting
it again for the next night, so we don't leave, and again they don't
arrive! At this rate we could have gone 3 days ago, but we can't go
tonight cos there are 35 knot winds forecast! At least we have free
internet, catching up with the Archers is going some way to makeing up for it,
but we are both getting restless. I have to say though, I think Dominica
is my favourite island so far.
Click on the link bellow for more
pictures.
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