Marie Galante

Tuesday 31st March, day 255. 15° 58’.98 N, 061° 43’.11 W. Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe

Before Powerpoint, before even overhead projectors, there were slide shows. The white tray was painstakingly loaded with upside down slides, on the command “Next” a button was pushed to advance the cassette, the room held its breath to see if the contraption would jam, and with a brief pause and an audible, grating grr-thwock, the next picture arrived. It feels like that here in Marie Galante, with the discontinuity between one scene and the next, in these islands off Guadeloupe, so firmly part of the Caribbean, so immutably part of France.

Slide one: In the Caribbean, in front of the fish market, a small covered area by the dock, where, in a welter of blood and flies, mahi-mahi and kingfish are gutted and sliced. grr-thwock: Turn round, and you’re in France, faced by the Hôtel de Ville, a Rachel Whitehead-like construction, with the ghost of a concrete building surrounded by plate glass panels, and shaded by a twenty foot high metal lattice, woven to look like bamboo. grr-thwock: Back in the Caribbean, in the market, choosing christophenes, pineapples, sweet potatoes, plantains, then grr-thwock: The boulangerie across the square is sending out wonderful smells of croissants and pains aux chocolat. grr-thwock: Still in France, we have dinner at Footy’s restaurant, slices of fresh baguette come in a wicker basket to accompany the delicious local pork chops, cheese is offered before pudding, French television is muttering in the background, grr-thwock: We go behind the bar to the nightclub and feel utterly, uselessly, unredeemably Western, faced with the sinuous undulations and dapper footwork of the locals.

The houses all have blue and white enamelled numbers, the road signs come from the same factory as all the other ones in mainland France; the road that leads from Grand Bourg (pop 1,000) to St-Louis (pop 750) is marked the N9, which in another life we know as the road between Montpellier and Béziers.

We set off on Saturday for the second town, St-Louis: there are proper buses with timetables – but because this is France, and the buses are state run, unlike the cheerful free-for-all of the other islands, the fonctionnaires tend to take Saturday afternoons off, so we got a lift with a farmer on the way there, and hitch hiked back.

Marie Galante is lovely and peaceful, but, to be honest, it is at the very end of the road to nowhere. Stay there too long, and you would become rooted in the sand, swaying gently in the breeze like a palm tree on the beach. So we moved on to Basse-Terre, on the main island of Guadeloupe, to be measured for a new mainsail, the old one having reached the point of no return. This definitely felt like France – everything closed up, behind graffiti’d roll-down shutters.

We went to the local supermarket to stock up. This meant getting into the dinghy, bouncing up the coast for a mile and a half, scrambling up onto the remains of a partially collapsed dock, more scrambling over rocks to get out of the port, and picking our way through a rather manky underpass. The supermarket appeared, just across the road. “Oh that’s convenient” says Anthony, and can’t understand why I collapse laughing.

Because there is (yet another) strike here, the shelves were a bit bare, but we found frozen smoked salmon, some lovely blue brie, and the last two pots of crème fraîche, all of which we haven’t seen for many months, so the trip was worthwhile (probably).