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.