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.

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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.

Reading

Saturday 26th September 2009, day 344, 7,196 miles. 11° 59’.86 N, 061° 45’.71 W. Prickly Bay, Grenada.


Westley and Tyrell are a pair of jumping beans in human form. Around seven years old, they come along to the Mount Ayrie young readers’ programme every Saturday morning, to suffer the dubious pleasure of having their reading skills forwarded by a group of yachties. There are about thirty children, and around half that number of adults, so we settle down in little groups of three or four to work our way through the sterile adventures of Jane, Spot and Peter. I don’t remember learning to read (apart from sitting on the loo one day, and spelling out with a delighted thrill of recognition “ant-i-septic”), but was it always as insipid as this? Nothing in these books would make any child think reading is fun. Faced with page after page of not a lot, my reaction now would be: “Tell you what. Let’s go outside and find a real ball and a couple of real trees and run around and have some fun. And if you’re so keen that the words should be read, why don’t you do it?” Perhaps it just belongs in that vast collection of unfathomable activities that adults attach great store to and children unquestioningly comply with.

Anyway, the children turn up every week, of their own free will, to get even more of this than they had in school. The first 10 minutes or so are pure chaos, with everyone trotting round putting out tables, ferreting out chairs from the basement, the children scuffling to find their workbooks and get the best pencils (none of them have their own). Then it’s down to work. Westley and Tyrell are at the stage where they can genuinely read some words, can work out others, but the rest are a combination of guess-work and luck – and memory. We quickly come up short on “in” and “on”, and use this as an excuse to leave Peter and Jane and find lists of things that you can be in or on. Back to the task in hand. Spot has stolen the ball. Stop, Spot, stop. Tyrell is momentarily distracted by the book, and now Westley has stolen his pencil. Give it back, Westley, give it back. Much grinning. Peter is pushing Jane on the swing. Westley is kicking Tyrell under the table. More grinning. Jane has fallen out of the boat. Come back Jane. Tyrell is running across the room. Come back, Tyrell. Peter asks his mother for some cake. Westley asks Miss if he can draw a picture. Jane is tired. Westley wants to demonstrate the scars on his knees from the last time he fell out of a tree. Spot is tired. Tyrell is bouncing with unused energy. Peter is tired. Miss is exhausted.

How do real, full time teachers do it?

Meanwhile I (Anthony) had two six year old girls and we had a go at Peter and Jane as well, 3A in the Ladybird series. The trouble with Celia is that she did not learn to read, she just woke up one morning when she was ready and read!! I find the books ideal for this age group with a lot of repertition of key words on each page. But half an hour is more than enough time for their brains to concentrate and we moved onto pelmanism with some lovely coloured cards. Somehow they cannot grasp that you can only turn over two cards every time it is your go unless you turn up a pair.

Beach clean up

Saturday 19th September 2009, day 341, 7,194 miles. 12° 05’.46 N, 061° 45’.34 W. Flamingo Bay, Grenada.

September 19th was International Coastal Cleanup Day, and, like all good members of the River Deben Association, we went off to fill black bin liners with rubbish from the waterfront. The scene was just like the ones we’ve known for the past twelve years: keen volunteers stretched in a raggly line along the water’s edge, variously tutting at the stuff that some people seem to think they can just chuck into the sea, and calling their neighbours over to examine at a particularly juicy find – a lump of metal that could once have been a hand-turned Singer sewing machine, or a rusted enamel basin with the faint remains of a pink-petalled flower design.

Lumps of wood, broken glass bottles, a couple of biros, quantities of decomposing polystyrene, a great hank of unravelling nylon rope, a broken plastic beer crate, has anybody got any more bin liners? … plus ça change … several large sheets of rusty corrugated iron, brown glass bottles that once contained Mauby Drink or LLB, more bottles, with the faded labels of Clarke’s Court and Westerhall rum distilleries … the remains of a white plastic bucket that will be good to store the dinner-plate sized white land-crabs before they are cooked … our shoes may be rubbing, but there is no way we can walk barefoot on the burning sand … pausing to wipe the sweat from our faces as the sun beats down on the clear blue water of Flamingo Bay … noisy banter in patois as cane and manchineel trees are hacked back by boys wielding cutlasses … yes, we are a long way from familiar windswept marshes.

The clean-up was scheduled to start at 10, but this is GMT (Grenada Maybe Time), so when we arrive at 10.30, having managed to track down a maxi bus going the right way, things are just about thinking about getting started. A couple of guys from St George’s University and the North West Development Agency are having a last drink of iced water before setting to. Flamingo Bay has not been “picked” since Hurricane Ivan devastated the island in 2004, and there is a bar just above the cliff half way along, so we are expecting plenty to cart away – and there is.

There are sheets and sheets of rusty “galvanise” – that is, corrugated iron – each one formerly the roof of someone’s house or chicken shed or loo. The sewing machine, too, probably got blown over during the hurricane, along with all the other contents of a house; there is no way something as valuable as that would just have been thrown out.

For the rest, well, it’s pretty much what you’d expect when there’s a bar above the beach. The added complication is the dense growth of sugar cane and poisonous manchineel trees all the way up the banks, so the locals set to with their cutlasses (the local machete, vital for anything from gutting fish to clearing undergrowth, and carried as ubiquitously and casually in the countryside as a mobile phone). As they cut, a team carry the debris away, and another rakes the revealed rubbish down onto the beach to be sorted, noted by the visiting academic, and bagged. A snake of porters carries the resulting bin liners along the beach, above their heads, like a convoy of ants.

A host of small children, belonging to the cleaner-uppers, are splashing in the shallows, playing with a rubber tyre and a tired tennis ball we unearthed (and, inevitably, leaving the cleaned beach strewn with straws and cartons from their drinks). Over at the far end of the beach, an octopus has been caught, and is being beaten to death – or perhaps tenderised - on a rock.

Gradually as the day wore on, our trips to the cool box got more and more frequent, and we were all increasingly loath to leave the shade. Was that another couple of empty bottles of rum just appeared? We’ve filled two skips; time for a celebratory party, and a toast to our friends at home walking home in their gumboots to tea.

A stranding

Tuesday 15th September 2009, day 333, 7,182 miles. 12° 00’.05 N, 061° 43’.29 W.
Le Phare Bleu, Egmont Bay, Grenada


We were having tea in the cockpit yesterday afternoon, Anthony watching a yacht come into the bay. “Look over there”, he said “She’s going fast. I’d watch that reef if I were her, she’s getting a bit …”

… at which point she stopped dead.

The stern swung round, swivelling about the suddenly immobile keel, and there she was, broadside on to the waves, immobile. We paused only to grab deck shoes and sped off in the dinghy to see what we could do.

By the time we got there, she was hard aground, heeling over in the shallow water. The engine was going full speed, putting out clouds of smoke, as the lone sailor tried desperately to force the boat back into safe water. But the engine of a yacht like that has enough power to push a floating boat along at a steady 5 knots, nowhere near enough to force that same weight, partially at best supported by water, over a rough and possibly uphill surface. And the yacht was heeling so badly by now that half the time the prop was only partially submerged, throwing up a great churning wash of spray, but providing no forward power
.
Each successive wave lifted her up, pushed her further in over the reef, and then threw her down with a crash. With each pounding on the sharp unyielding coral, the whole boat shuddered, the rigging clanging as the mast whipped and snatched under the force of the impact. The skipper was on deck, clinging to the guard rails, trying to keep his footing on the sloping surface as the boat was thrown around, not knowing what to do to save her.

She was a large and solid boat, a 53ft long Halberg Rassy, better able than many to withstand the blows without starting to break up, but without proper outside help, it was quickly apparent that she would end her days on that reef, stripped of everything of value, her owner’s prized possessions taken off, and left to gradually sink into nothing more than a little wreck symbol on a chart.

In a tiny dinghy with a little 8 hp outboard, we knew we weren’t going to be the boat that pulled her to safety, but our first thought was to see if we could take her bow anchor and lay it out a short distance away, to at least stop her getting swept further onto the reef. We made our way under the bow, riding the waves to keep from being swept onto the stricken yacht, but the sailor, in a state of shock, let the anchor fall right down, and its weight was such that we just couldn’t pull it up.

More dinghies were now arriving, plus a larger rib with a decent sized engine. Someone dived into the water, to see where the yacht was lying on the reef and which was her easiest way off. Had she been swept over the biggest obstacle, and was best placed to let the next few waves sweep her right over and back into clear water? Or was she merely getting pushed further and further onto coral from which the only escape was the way she had come in?

For the next hours, all the boats around tried everything they could. By now, the water she was in was so shallow that the other boats had to keep clear, and a strong swimmer took lines to and from them. The powerful rib got a line on her, with which she held pressure steady so that with each wave the yacht could be eased slightly in the right direction. A couple of sailors joined the skipper on board to co-ordinate the efforts, and raised the sails to both heel the boat and provide some forward momentum. The mast halyard was lowered into the water and swum out to another powerful rib, which pulled the boat over so as to further reduce her effective depth. Rather than take her anchor out, a spare anchor was dropped some distance away, and the warp taken back to the yacht, on which the crew winched each time the pressure eased, gradually inching her off. Lines broke regularly, a cleat ripped off one of the rescuing boats under the pressure, but each time new lines were swum out, and the process started again.

All of this effort, so many people, and yet painfully slow progress. Would it be enough to get the boat free before the coral and the seas pounded a hole in her side?

By six o’clock, it was clear the yacht was not coming off the reef before darkness fell. But she was so far over the reef, that the biggest waves were not reaching her, reducing the battering the hull was taking, and the tide was coming in, giving some hope that she might just float enough to be dragged clear.

As night came on, the attending boats disappeared and returned, with torches, more fuel, warm or waterproof clothing, ready to spend the night standing by in shifts in case the situation worsened.

The rib’s towing line had parted yet again, and in the darkness it was too dangerous for her to try to pick up another one, so the only rescue efforts until daylight would come from the crew on board, painstakingly winching on the second anchor, heaving the yacht forward inch by inch.

Success came so suddenly it took us all by surprise. The yacht had been gradually coming upright, and all of a sudden, there she was free, making off at full speed under her two sails. The surrounding dinghies all yelled and whistled, but the crew were so busy winching on the anchor they didn’t notice for a while, and then a brief pandemonium set in while they tried to work out which way they were going, how to stop the boat, were they heading for the reef on the other side of the entrance? The anchor caught them and brought them to a halt in the middle of the channel, and we left them slowly sorting out the tangle of line and halyards, before motoring her gently to a nearby pontoon.

The following day she was still floating, a testimony to the solidity of this class of boat. She was awaiting the start of a barrage of tests to see if her internal structure had survived as well as the hull. How many other boats would have withstood that sort of pounding?

Thank heavens, the potential disaster ended well. Teamwork paid off, the boat was saved, and nobody was seriously hurt. But the desperate sight of that beautiful ship, powerless and at the mercy of the waves, was both terrifying and heartbreaking, and one I hope never to see again.

Hot in Grenada

Monday 7th September 2009, day 325, 7,171 miles. 12° 01’.42 N, 061° 40’.69 W. Grenada Marine Boatyard, St David’s Bay, Grenada.

Lazy journalists (the Economist is the worst) occasionally refer to the “yacht-owning classes” as a synonym for the super-rich. Your correspondent, bare-facedly not just a yacht-owner, but a Caribbean yacht-owner, would like to tell you how the other half lives.

In keeping with all your expectations about bloated plutocrats, we have been scraping Tomia’s hull, priming and anti-fouling it, in temperatures up around 100° F with 85% humidity. Just in case a paparazzo should come past, we are dressed in the latest fashion: Anthony in bleached-out (from an attempt to remove barracuda blood) lime green check shorts, I in the top half of an old pair of striped cotton pajamas, and a pair of fish-patterned leggings left over from 1987, from which the lycra has completely evaporated, leaving the cling but not the corseting. We both wear fetching ankle socks under our flip-flops, to stop the fire-ants biting our toes, and complete the ensemble with head-scarves, face masks and green surgical gloves. From sun, humidity and saltwater, my hair has fashioned itself into a style which the most avant-garde of Mayfair crimpers would be unable to replicate.

When we have finished lounging outside in our tropical island paradise, we retreat into our charming home for a spot of rubbing down and varnishing. This takes place in a space 4’ by 2’, with minimal ventilation. Luckily, no long distance lens can find us in here, so we don’t need clothes, just a hanky to wipe away the drips before they can spoil the varnish work.

Today’s task was going up the mast to fix the halyards for our courtesy flags. Working up the mast is like sailing in a way: you’re trying to do normal things in a totally abnormal environment, being swung around, in some discomfort and a bit of danger, the sort of danger where nothing is going to go wrong, but if it does, you’re toast. But after the first few minutes, it all starts to seem quite normal, you work out which way to brace yourself, and how to hook a toe round the shrouds to leave both hands free to fiddle with a recalcitrant sheave. Taking the slow pains to ensure that nothing ends up crashing to the deck, and that ropes don’t get fouled round the standing rigging becomes just another part of the task. Anthony doesn’t know why I bother writing this down, as it is second nature to him, of course.

Tomia has had a mistressy fit, it’s the being ignored for three months that does it. She was grumbling about being lonely, so I reminded her that we’d arranged for a charming young man to visit every month to make sure she was ok, at which she adopted her Zsa Zsa Gabor tones and pouted that, dahling, once a month was hardly enough for someone like her. She perked up when another man came round to take her measurements for a bimini (quite like a bikini really, a small but vital and disproportionately expensive bit of cloth, which has to fit perfectly), and started saying that as he clearly understood her and her needs so well, perhaps he would like to make new cushions for her cockpit. I told her not to push her luck, at which point the starter battery for the engine, the pump to empty the shower, and another pump in the galley all mysteriously failed. At times I think a real-life mistress would have been cheaper.

Colorado - or how we dried out

Our trip to Colorado started off with my cousin’s wedding in Colorado Springs, a very happy family event. After five days of parties and unceasing hospitality, we gave ourselves two weeks holiday (yeah, right, from our stressful lives) and headed off to the Rocky Mountains for some serious walking – and some serious height: living at sea level for a year is not the best preparation for climbing hills at 11,000 feet.

The route took us on a loop up into the Rocky Mountain National Park west of Denver, over the mountains and out the other side down to Glenwood Springs on the Colorado River, then south to ski country, with a few days in upmarket Aspen to get us ready for our return to the Caribbean. It was a fabulous time: the mountains are spectacular, the air is clear, aspen groves stand in meadows of brightly coloured wildflowers, sparkling streams and waterfalls run from lake to lake, cute chipmunks and ground squirrels pose for photos, while in town a herd of elks graze the municipal rose bushes – but best of all, almost no other people! Colorado is twice the size of England, but has only 4 million inhabitants, most of whom live in Denver, so there is wilderness aplenty.

What were the highlights? A day’s white water rafting and kayaking on the Colorado River, down the spectacular Glenwood Canyon. As Anthony said half way, why haven’t we done this before? The rafting is fun and wet, but very easy, but the kayaking is hard work, particularly with the wind blowing us back up the canyon. The Canyon itself is stunning, even though only a fraction of the depth of the Grand Canyon, it is still breath-taking, the steepness, the multi coloured layers of rocks, red and cream and grey, the railroad balanced precariously on one side, with the telegraph poles leaning out over the river because there’s not space for both them and the train.

We went to a couple of genuine rodeos, with bucking broncos, mutton busting (like a bucking bronco, but the participants are one small child and one large and very woolly sheep), and vast plates of barbequed ribs and beans to eat. We sang The Star Spangled Banner, and God Bless the USA, and had the cowboy’s prayer read out, and Miss Rodeo galloped round the arena wearing a red white and blue shirt, carrying a US flag, and every man took their hat off and held it over their heart, and it all felt thoroughly patriotic.

Then there was barrel racing, and bull riding (really, you would have to be mad to want to do this), and lassoing steers, as well as team roping, and a stampede with all the smalls chasing a bunch of bullocks round to try to get ribbons off their tails. After the rodeo there was a camp fire singalong, with children toasting marshmallows on pointy sticks – and, once again, not a safety elf to be seen. We are told in the UK that our safety culture is imported from the US, but so far we haven’t seen any sign of it; in all our travels of the past year, the UK is the most heavily regulated place we’ve been to.

If we had a favourite town, it would have been Redstone, where we stayed in a lovely motel, the Redstone Cliffs Lodge, which felt just as friendly and homely as the best sort of B&B. The tiny town of Redstone (population 92 as it states proudly at the entrance) was originally built as a model village for workers in the nearby mines in Marble (where, with the local literalness that names towns Gypsum, Basalt and Aspen, the marble for the Lincoln Memorial was quarried, and blindingly white chunks are still scattered around as kerb markers). The town has been renovated and is a most peaceful and beautiful place, either for striking out into the Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, or for just sitting and watching the aptly named Crystal River. The hiking from here was different from the National Park, more open, with meadows of wildflowers flowing down valleys.

Another place we would have been really sorry to miss, though it is not an obvious part of any tourist itinerary, was the Chapel of the US Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. It is a modernist building, of steel, concrete and aluminium, with 17 spires all along the roof ridge, designed to look like a series of jets taking off into the skies. It sounds a bit corny, but the impression is of strength, simplicity and spirituality. For me, it must be one of the most successful buildings from the 1960s; its concrete and steel still clean, the fine lines reaching almost to infinity, the interior unmarked by stains of water or rust. It seems to embody all the dreams that people first had when they started to use these new materials, with their strength, purity and lack of restrictions, before they got sidetracked into tower blocks and the National Theatre. Inside the chapel, a cross hangs over the altar, so fine that you barely see it at first, the vertical like a long rapier, the cross-piece subtly shaped like two soaring wings. A place of hope, aspiration, dedication, and belief in a something greater than oneself, and in a life that can raise itself above the lowest common denominator.

President Obama’s health care reforms were hotly debated everywhere we went, with everybody having a view: mainly that something needed to change from the present system. The NHS was widely referred to by polemicists, usually unfavourably – and usually inaccurately. Did you know that if life-saving treatment costs more than £25,000 every six months, it is automatically rejected by the NHS? No, me neither.

I came across an excellent book in one motel’s library: “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan. A fascinating account of the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s, and the completeness of the man-made ecological disaster that overtook that part of the plains. I had thought it was just a bit of earth that got a bit dry, but had no idea that dust clouds swept the country as far as Washington, blotting out the sun, that all the topsoil simply vanished over an enormous area, around 150,000 square miles – three times the size of England, that when the dust storms were blowing cars stopped dead and you couldn’t see far enough to make it back from the barn to the house. The book also shows how appallingly the Americans of that time treated the plains Indians, repeatedly making and breaking treaties with them, pushing them further and further into smaller patches of land, destroying their lives and the buffalo that they herded.

By the time the failures in farming techniques were recognised, the buffalo were gone, the Indians were gone, the topsoil and the prairie grass that had held it in place were gone, and nothing to show for it. A very cinematic book, full of visual images: the buffalo wandering freely over the plains, the dust pouring through the cracks in the log cabin’s walls, dust clouds towering up out of a summer Sunday afternoon, and those who remained coughing themselves to death from dust pneumonia.

I don’t want to end on this depressing note, so leave you on the Continental Divide trail, on the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific. We have stopped at Independence Pass, at 12,095 feet, on our way out of the Aspen Valley, and walked for a mile or two over the harsh dry tundra, intrigued by the patterns the lichen makes on the rocks, and finding tiny blobs of colour where the hardy relation of a flower we know from meadows lower down has scraped a toe-hold. The view stretches away in all directions; down to the ghost town of Independence, way over to Mount Sopris on the far side of Aspen, and over the mountains in the east towards where the high plains start again. Anthony has decided to run along a ridge, past a pair of unperturbed Dusky Grouse; he moves far faster than I do in this thin air, and has just whooped to draw my attention to him, standing it seems on tiptoe on a little pinnacle, silhouetted against the mountains that roll on behind him, master of all he surveys.