Tobago Cays

Sunday 15th November 2009, day 394, 7,321 miles. 12° 37’.88 N, 061° 21’.40 W. Tobago Cays

Everybody should see the Tobago Cays at least once in their life, so they get some idea of what it is like to visit paradise. It’s an aquarium writ large, with turtles, rays, tens of thousands of brightly coloured fish, clear blue water protected by the offshore reefs, tiny islands with white sandy beaches …

The water is swimming pool blue, though I hate to use such a suburban comparison for so pure and natural a phenomenon. What else in nature is that colour? Hyacinth and larkspur have more purple, while the bluest of skies never has that tinge of green. The robes of the Madonna are more subdued, less vibrant. Cornflower blue? No. It’s an almost electric, neon blue, but constantly changing, filled with light and liquid. And the waters, being protected, are teeming with fish. It makes you realise the impact fishing is having everywhere else. Turtles, rays, groupers. A flying gurnard, that looks as if it’s walking on its front fins – perhaps the timid cousin of that first fish that climbed from the sea to the land all those generations ago? A 5ft long barracuda, with its vicious gangster stare. Something large and thuggish, staring out from a hole in the rocks, burping patiently while it waited for something toothsome to pass within reach. A flat round fish, at least 12” diameter, circling us with, as far as is possible, an evil look on his face. What was he protecting from us? Once he opened his mouth to reveal five or six tiny but sharp teeth. Many of the black and white splodged, rectangular trunk fish, their tiny little fins fluttering constantly to stay in place – including one quite close to the surface, which, when I pursue it, turns its ugly face on me as if to say “Yeah? Do you want to make something of it?”

And all the “pretties”: wrasse and damsel fish, sergeant majors, goatfish with their whiskers churning up the sand, butterfly fish, fairy basslets, the rock beauty and the barred hamlet. Shoals of purplish blue tang, the size of an upturned dinner plate, with their smiling gills and surprisingly yellow offspring. The squirrel fish, russet with puppy dog big brown eyes. The multicoloured parrot fish: stoplight, redband and midnight, and the most colourful of them all, the queen triggerfish, gaudily made up with turquoise and yellow lipstick over bright green foundation.

And why aren’t there photos of all these amazingly coloured fish? Our expensive, supposedly waterproof camera is discovered to be leaking. It has waited till the day before we get to the clearest, most fish-filled place in the whole Caribbean to give up. Another irritation is that, for the second time, Anthony’s front tooth pops out while he is snorkelling, and disappears to the bottom where it vanishes into the sand before he has time to see where it went. So he is back to a piratical grin.

We told Tomia before we left Grenada that she would be well advised to throw up any further little problems while we were there, within (relatively) easy reach of two (relatively) well stocked chandleries. Either she wasn’t listening, or has a warped sense of humour (or she can read, a frightening thought) because Anthony spent most of Wednesday dismantling and reassembling the watermaker, having replaced a shower pump the day before, and sorted a loose wire on the engine the day before that. Now we just have to mend a switch for the other shower pump, fix an occasionally leaking seal round a hatch, and find out a way of retrieving a drill bit which fell into the shower drain and remains obstinately out of reach. If we were Danish, she would be in danger of being renamed Jødtaa – Just One Damn Thing After Another. But she has brought us to this beautiful spot, and for that we are grateful.

Carriacou

Monday 9th November 2009, day 388, 7,298 miles. 12° 29’.04 N, 061° 27’.66 W. Hillsborough, Carriacou.


Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Two tiny islands, with a combined surface area of 6 square miles, meriting just a few column inches in the Lonely Planet guide,. How long can it take us to visit them? We feel short changed and rushed leaving eight days after we arrived.

Carriacou is by far the larger of the two. We anchor in the pleasant Tyrrel Bay, and tie up our dinghy watched patiently by a bus driver. No danger of his driving off while potential passengers are around!

The capital, Hillsborough, is a friendly little place, where the Bullen family seem to hold the reins of commerce, owning the pharmacy, the largest supermarket, and the Industrious Stores. The two streets have the usual shops, all selling the same mix of clothes, shoes, kitchen goods, plastic flowers and chairs, ornaments, and whatever else has taken the owner’s eye. The banks, in a civilised way, have a special fast track queue for senior citizens. A tiny museum shows some Amerindian and Carib relics, and traces some history of the tribal areas from where the original slaves were brought.

We travel out by bus to the village of Windward, the centre of local boatbuilding. Three boats are under construction – or rather, have been and will be, but are “resting” just now. The boats are wooden, built without obvious plans into a solid traditional workboat design, with the look of being able to sail into a whale and not notice. Grenada was pretty laid back, but we notice the change of pace coming to Carriacou, and then down another gear in Petite Martinique. In Grenada, the bus stops for you wherever you want. On Carriacou, it takes you on a free sight-seeing tour, or detours to a passenger’s (I almost said guest’s) office to pick up papers. On Petite Martinique, there is no bus at all…

On an island like Carriacou, where people are so very friendly and apparently content and at ease with their lives, the contrast with the poverty of many is thought-provoking. At first, dazzled by the sunshine, the fruits and flowers, the bright colours, the natural beauty, and lulled by the warmth and directness of every one we meet, the tumbledown houses by the roadside seem just part of the overall picturesqueness and general difference. But then it starts to come into focus: that beautiful slim girl, with the brightly coloured top and intricately braided hair, has just walked out of a two room house, whose windows are rotting, whose corrugated iron roof is patched and rusting, which probably houses a family of six or eight people, all of whom share that unthinkable lopsided privy down by the mango tree.

By any of the material standards of the West: housing, education, health care, sanitation, pensions, possessions, these people are deprived. They are not living in some Rousseauesque natural idyll, they are living in poverty. And yet, there is no sense, or at least none that we ever pick up, of complaint, or bitterness or resentment, or even unhappiness. My American friend, Bart, says that all we see is the friendly smiles for the tourists, and that a simmering cauldron of anger lies beneath this. I am not so sure. There is a tourist smile, of course, and we see it when somebody is trying to hassle us onto a bus we don’t want to board, or circling the boat with a load of T shirts. But it is hard to fake the open warmth of the greetings all round the islands, hard to fake the ease with which people talk about their homes and families, hard to fake the welcome you get as soon as you show an interest in everyday life and talk about your own.

Which is not to say that you can’t offend people. Starting to talk to someone without first wishing them good day and asking how they are is rude. Losing your temper is a sign of poor manners. Not living up to the local standards of community and sharing is an offence - one which we are guilty of every day, as we glide over the surface in our cocooned luxury.

Then we get a counter-picture to our overall impression of harmony when reading the autobiography of the only person in recent history to have received a VC that was not posthumous: Johnson Beharry, a Grenadian. If you see the book, Barefoot Soldier, it’s strongly recommended. He writes of the difficulties of growing up with an alcoholic father and no income, in the Grenadian countryside. He describes how many young men take the pleasure principle to such an extent that they spend their days sitting on a wall drinking rum. He tells how hard it is for someone with drive and ambition to succeed with the blessings of their community, and how many people there are who want to extend the concept of sharing to simply letting somebody else work, and then pass the proceeds around.

The longer we stay here, the less I realise we know about islanders’ lives and what they think about them. And the more I realise that applying my own language to their experience and expectations will not necessarily lead to understanding.

So back to what we do know about: Our second pair of lobsters this trip is sold to us in Petite Martinique. The advice this time is to eat them fresh fresh fresh, which means keeping them in a bucket of seawater for the afternoon. They are an active and curious couple – or simply find the bucket a little constraining – so we put the bucket in the cockpit when we go ashore. Surely, even standing on each others’ backs, they won’t be able to scale 18” of sheer fibreglass.

Petite Martinique is tiny, perhaps a mile long. We walk the road in one direction, admiring the view north over the Grenadines, picking out Tobago Cays, Canouan, Mustique, and hazy in the distance the outlines of Bequia. Then turn around and walk to the other end of the road, ending up having described a letter C which leaves out the eastern side of the island.

The dogs on this island are different to the standard multi-breed Dogg that populates everywhere else: sandy brown, lightly built, pointy head, ears folded over in neat or lopsided triangles, curly tail held at a jaunty angle. The dogs of Petite Martinique are shorter, whiter, hairier, yappier … we imagine, not so long ago, a visiting West Highland Terrier having a testosterone-fuelled field day in the island’s canine gene pool.

From the island we take the dinghy out to a reef with two tiny islets of pure white sand, one called Punaise (drawing pin) which suits it well. We swim, snorkel, sit on the sand and look at the sea, plan our trip to the Tobago Cays … a Friday evening in November … sitting in the office, darkness has fallen already, streetlights shining on damp pavements, thinking about packing up, but dreading the crowded Central Line, the hordes at Liverpool Street, is it worth staying half an hour longer to have a chance of getting a seat on the train …

On Sunday, in our cleanest [only presentable pair of ] navy blue shorts, we went to the church in Hillsborough back on Carriacou. The church itself is in fine shape, but the attendant buildings next door are still ruined, a legacy of Hurricane Ivan. Although all the windows are open, there is no wind and the heat is stifling. The congregation is celebrating the 90th birthday of Tanty (Aunt) Rose, whose children, grand-children and great-grand-children fill the pews. The tiniest ones presented in a bunch of brightly coloured frills, like sugared almonds, the six year olds best-frocked and simmering with barely repressed mischief. Tanty Rose is wheeled in, frail, bent and cloudy-eyed, and parked, after two or three false starts, at the front, from where a low muttering is heard during pauses in the service. Poor old thing, we think. Not a bit of it. After the sermon, the priest says: “Well, I know you always like to have the last word, Tan Rose” and hands her the microphone. And off she goes. Parents! You should be bringing your children up better, teaching them respect. Children! You should listen to your parents and do your homework. Everybody should be cleaner, on time, more polite, sitting up straight, respecting their elders and betters, working harder, not fidgeting in the Lord’s house. And that, in case we hadn’t realised, means us. It is with some difficulty that the priest regains control of the service.

*****************

We leave you with this advertisement from the Grenadian New Today paper:

“Don’t be caught saying ‘If only I had known!’ Join the La Qua & Sons funeral club today.”

Grenada

Saturday 31st October 2009, day 379, 7,213 miles. 12° 02’.46 N, 061° 45’.36 W. St George’s, Grenada

Heavens, we are finally breaking loose from Grenada. What on earth have we been doing? The short answer is that we went back to a version of real life; we did work, we had a routine, made friends, got to know shopkeepers and bar staff (that last not quite so much like our previous lives) ... even started bumping into people we knew on the street. After so much rootless wandering, and brief encounters, it was very satisfying and solid to settle into a community of sorts. But after a while, as we got to know more people, it became clear that if we didn’t leave soon, we never would: last weekend we’d planned to leave on Friday, but were invited out to lunch on Saturday, and then there was a Hallowe’en party, and if we’d stayed for that there would have been a friend playing in a jazz club on Tuesday, and a walk organised for the Wednesday – so we had a delicious lunch of tuna steak and hot chocolate brownie with toffee sauce and ice cream (some things never change) at the University Club, and raised our anchor in a rush before we got too tempted to turn bin liners and sheets into costumes for the Hallowe’en party.

We’ve met some lovely people here, people who are interesting, warm, witty, informed, connected, opinionated, musical, out-going. It really is a wrench leaving some of them behind, not knowing when we shall meet again.

We got lured into staying in Grenada by Tomia making a persuasive case for having some of her teak decking replaced. This effectively tied us to a dock for three weeks – ample time for weed and barnacles to start growing on her hull, and for our own social pseudopods to find plenty of people and happenings to latch on to. Tomia also took the opportunity of throwing up a large number of little problems to fix, from a loose wire on an engine solenoid, to a corroded generator start panel, to a broken inlet to the loo.



All small stuff, but each taking a day to fix, by the time we’ve rowed across the bay, walked up to Nimrod’s rum shop (motto “Don’t drink and drive, smoke and fly”) to catch a bus, rummaged through one chandler’s, taken a further bus to the other chandler’s, finally tracked down the right size jubilee clip or cable in a hardware store in town, walked up the hill to the Shell garage to catch the bus back to Woburn, radioed home for the dinghy to come and fetch us, then collapsed in the shade for an hour to recover.

I say “to catch a bus” but the reality is more like a bus catching us. Buses here, like all the other islands, are minibuses, crammed to capacity and then just one more. They are all free market enthusiasts – he who gets to the bus stop first wins the passengers, and their EC$2.50 (60p) a head – so anybody walking, particularly a white person walking, effectively carries their own bus stop around with them. The drivers’ assistants have eyes like hawks for potential customers, however far down a side road they might be, and you get adept, if you are really trying to get from A to B on your own two feet, at hearing the screech of a rapidly decelerating minibus behind you, and, almost without looking round, making the horizontal wave of the hand that means “No thank you”.

We have been awash in limes and passion fruit: bags and bags of them at the road-side, the vendors almost as hard to avoid as the buses. Limes with everything: with tonic water, in coconut curries, with black tea, in rum punches, pickled in oil with salt, garlic and cloves and incorporated into Moroccan dishes with cinnamon and saffron. The passion fruit we just eat by themselves, one after another, scooping out the insides and savouring each pip wrapped in yellow juicy flesh, one by one. It’s lobster season too (well, they are really large crayfish, with feelers not claws) – we see them under rocks when we are snorkelling, but rely on local boys to lure them into traps and present them, at the boat-side, ready for the pot.

And on the theme of pleasures of the senses, another of the attractions of Grenada has been the music. There hasn’t been a lot in previous blogs about music, mainly because there hasn’t been a lot to write about. Whether it’s our own poor knack of sniffing out the right places, or just a lack of what we like, the choice seems to have been between steel pans cranking out yet another cover version of Bob Marley’s greatest hits, or ear-blasting rap in the scruffier bars.

Grenada’s south coast, full of little bays, each with its own restaurant cum bar, has a thriving music scene, fuelled by a mix of islanders and visitors. One band has a “guest artist” – a visiting professor of business studies at the university; short, tubby, balding, utterly unmemorable until he starts enthralling the audience with his virtuoso blues harmonica playing. Another group is fronted by a veteran Czech, with a voice matured into a husky growl by years of cigarettes and rum. Last night we went ashore to hear Carriacou’s “leading band” the Country Boys – dancing away in an open-air dance hall, thankful for the darkness which covered up our caucasian rigidity set against the multi-jointed, jelly-hipped ripplings of the locals. And we’ve been playing ourselves – quietly in the cabin – me on clarinet, dug out after 30 years gathering dust, and Anthony has taken up the recorder, and surprised himself by learning to read music and produce tunes very quickly. He’s also tried the clarinet, and a harmonica. This may sound like the most frightful cacophony, but we’re enjoying ourselves, and it’s led us to other “musicians” and fun evenings of singing and shared music making.

So now, fully provisioned with the rare delicacies like sour cream and mung beans that the presence of the American-studented medical school supports in the supermarkets, we are off on our travels again. Up to the Tobago Cays and Bequia, then on to Martinique and Guadeloupe, meeting up with friends old and new along the way.