A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back

Of cocoa and volcanoes

Sam and Alex Fortescue

Thu 30 Dec 2010 23:34

Disaster, dear reader, has fallen upon my head - in the most literal sense. Not blood and mayhem disaster, I hasten to add. But disaster nonetheless. Let me explain. Alex and I borrowed Jesse and Will's motor to dash off into the implausibly steep hills that make up the interior of Grenada. We went for a walk along a trail from Grand Etang up to Mont Quaqua - at 2,800 feet, more of a hill according to the strict Victorian measure of these things.

I'd negotiated the muddy, vertiginous route along the lengthy shoulder of Mont Quaqua qithout incident on the way up, despite a blistering easterly wind. But on the way down, a rogue gust seized my hat, and wafted it gently out over the abyss, where it floated out of view. I crashed around in the head-high bracken for 20 minutes to no avail, so am now forever separated from my fine grass headgear, made in England and purchased just before my friend Steve's wedding, in Sevenoaks, of all places.

It was a lovely walk, all the same, through steep, verdant greenery: plantains, palm trees, tree ferns and all manner of tropical flowers. Mont Quaqua towered over the crater of a long extinct volcano, now photogenically filled with water and water lilies. Alex decided to do the walk in 'technical' sandals and paid the price early on, when she had to negotiate 40ft of muddy swamp. Happily, there was a waterfall on the way back down the mountain, where we could bathe.

Jesse, Will and Tabitha have enjoyed a quiet day at their almost-beachside-villa today. It follows a day of incredibly scenic, but slow, driving yesterday, when we went to Sauteurs in the north of the island. The town itself is mainly remembered as the place from which the last Carib people on the island threw themselves, rather than be captured by the French. The town has the cheerful, down-at-heel character of everywhere outside the island's capital St George's. People lounge outside makeshift shacks serving as bars or the ever present 'jerk pits', where they grill chicken in chilli, nutmeg and cinnamon grown on the island. All the houses are painted gaily in different colours, and great queues of cars, four-by-fours and minibuses jostle to get down the main street.

We also went to the only Grenadian-owned cocoa estate on the island, where we saw the process of preparing the beans. They are delivered by dreadlocked farmers in buckets of perhaps 20 lbs. Then they're put in a bunker to ferment for a few days before being spread out to dry in the sun on huge, wheeled trays. As soon as a soaking threatens, people shout 'rain down!' and estate workers come running to wheel the trays under cover. After about a week, the beans are dry, with the most tremendous choclatey smell, and are shipped off to high-end manufacturers like Lindt. There's also a small local chocolate factory run by an American, which turns out Grenadas only guaranteed organic bean-to-bar choccy.

Among the many other undoubted points of interest in north Grenada, we stumbled upon an old airstrip, now used only for drag racing. It has a central role in recent Grenadian history, though. The two old planes that lie on the apron, surrounded by goats and thsitles and corroding away, were given to the island by Fidel Castro's Communist regime. One plane bears the logo of Cubana, while the other, even more provocatively, is marked aeroflot. This gift in the early 1980s came at a time when Grenada appeared to be leaning towards one-world socialism, and lead to several thousand American troops storming the island to restore a 'democratic' regime. This entire episode is coyly known as the 'intervention'.

Tabitha wore all this exceedingly well, being riveted by the cocoa, but tired on our return to the south. She woke up when we stopped for fresh coconuts to drink from a roadside vendor, who macheted them open for us. Then she squawked all the way home, partly from boredom at her car seat; partly because she was tired. Alex and are putting in a strong bid to look after her tomorrow, but we don;t yet know whather the full IOC committee will vote in favour...

Market day in Grenville