The Grand Old Duke of York

Wind Charger
Bob and Elizabeth Frearson
Thu 16 Jan 2014 02:23
Why go for a trek to find dinner when you can walk to the end of the wibbly wobbly dinghy dock and fall into Stephanie/Tiffany’s who does simple grub and has wifi?  The chaps had pizzas, enormous ones that Matt managed to demolish, he is a growing lad, and Bob politely left only one slice.  I went for the unidentified fish, Tiffany’s partner Hubert had caught it but no one actually knew what it was but it tasted good simply cooked in a coconut sauce with tasty vegetables.  Tiffany also has an art gallery, her own and other local artists, hers in very modern cubist style.  At least we could identify that on one of her paintings that she had been very angry due to a container shaped black oblong across a cheerful red and orange background.  This produced a long story about why she was furious about a container that had been parked smack bang in front of her last gallery.  I’m afraid we only got the gist because we were a bit bored, Graham Norton would definitely have pulled the lever for the red chair.  After partaking of our fill of food, and wifi, we tottered back to the boat and slept like logs, admittedly ones that were rolling back and forth all night.
This morning heralded a lie in and we mooched about over a leisurely breakfast before suddenly realising that we were meeting the taxi at 10:00 so there was a sudden frantic acceleration as swimmers and towels were shovelled into bags.  We arrived on the dot and met Jovyon.  Our first port of call was a freshwater lake high in the hills.  It was cold, the wind was cold and the lake although a perfectly nice lake, not actually very interesting.  Our next port of call was the Titou Gorge.  On first glance it was pleasant enough, a pile of rocks, a manmade channel being shovelled out by one man with four watching, and a pool leading off through a mysterious overhang.     Matt and I decided to go and explore and headed off, me very sensibly wearing a lifejacket as advised, swimming along the most incredible gorge carved out in the volcanic rock. A few twists and turns looking up at the jungle of rainforest plants far above our heads and we arrived at a waterfall gushing through with so much force that I could barely swim against it.  Matt had fun mountaineering up the waterfall to the next, hiding under the waterfall and doing his trademark jump off the ledges into the pool of frothing water.  With great reluctance, we moved to our next destination, the Trafalgar Falls, a pair of falls cascading down through rainforest.  The water running down from them was hot and sulphurous and formed part of the system to capture geothermic energy.  Lunch was taken at the Hot Rock Cafe where I decided to have goat curry for a change (having seen so many tethered at the roadside) while the chaps stuck to a more conservative chicken.  All were served with sweet potato, dasheen, bread fruit, plaintain and coushcoush for true local colour.  Bob left his bar the plantain.  Our final port of call was the Botanic Gardens where we climbed the 35 steps to Morne Bruce, only to find that the 35 were just the first rise and we were required to stagger our way to the top of a terribly tall hill to admire the view before slip sliding down again.  We tried to see the parrots in their aviary, they were well camouflaged, but we did see those amazing black and yellow enormous caterpillars, a tree smothered in happy humming birds, a tree that had a lot of balls and also some very pretty orchid like flowers and the grande finale, the baobab tree that fell on a bus in a hurricane and has continued to grow, the bus left in place.  A passing man pointed out a nest of puppies that were snoozing away in the crushed bus, (so cute!).  Exhausted by our swimming up gorges and climbing up and down, we were returned to the dockside where Matt stayed on shore to Skype his Mum and Bob and I returned to Windy for Bob to tackle another of those five minute jobs, finding out why the bow thruster wasn’t working, which took on this occasion only three hours and ended up with only one half working.  We can go right which is better than nothing, let’s just hope that we are on a dock that is on the starboard side when we get to Rodney Bay. 
We haven’t even attempted to rouse Gerry.