By the time we reach the hotel we are hot so we have a beer in the bar. Its refrigerator produces tall narrow glasses so cold that when the beer is poured into them the condensation that forms on the outside freezes instead of dripping onto your lap. Golden Rock is run by friendly, middle-aged American women and the one serving our beer tells us that the bar is in what was originally the long house where 300 people were fed daily. It must have been hellish with heat and noise but is now a very pleasant place with large windows overlooking dining tables on a flagged terrace bright with exotic flowers.
One of the hotel’s features is the rainforest, which begins at its back door. An American couple return from it, dripping with perspiration, order cold beers and ask if they can join us. Having established that they are wet for entirely personal reasons, and that the rainforest itself is bone dry, we say we should like to visit it, too, and they give us their ‘thirty minute’ trail map with its thirty numbers relating to flora of interest. They had got lost at number 10, they say, and been gone so long that the hotel’s elderly black Labrador had been despatched to find them and bring them back. We pass the Labrador on our way out. She is soaking her feet in a small fish pond and observes us with a professional eye as if assessing whether another search and rescue mission is going to be required this morning.
Leave the long house, cross a stretch of lawn with a foot-weary Labrador in it, turn right and you enter the rainforest. Although even with a competent navigator along, it isn’t easy. The map itself is a model of obfuscation. Down its left-hand side is a column of numbers each with the name of a tree or plant beside it. On its right side is another column of numbers with a description or ‘legend’.
Confusion begins early, because there are 30 numbers and names on the left-hand side but only 24 ‘legends’ on the right. None of the numbers relate to one another so that, for instance, you crane your neck to stare up into the branches of an enormous tree with the number 3 on it, while the legend of the same number on the map describes a small, delicate plant. It is compounded by the fact that a quantity of the weather-beaten numbers, painted onto small pieces of wood and nailed to specimen trees or small posts, have disappeared.
We reach number 10, where the American couple got lost, and never do find another number. But forewarned is forearmed, and we simply roam at will along narrow paths among huge trees and low scrub with a sense of delight. For we are not only making our first ever foray into a rainforest, but climbing higher up the volcano as well. Its peak, which dominates the whole of this small island, is wreathed in cloud again today. In fact, apart from the day of the squalls, we never do see its peak again, giving the impression that it is permanently steaming gently.
When the paths disappear we follow dry stream and river beds and it is magical. There are hummingbirds, large black butterflies, tiny lizards with tails no thicker than a darning needle and, although we never see them, we can hear the monkeys way above our heads in the forest canopy. Technically we are lost, but happily so, until finally we stumble onto a path whose shape David recognises from the map and we return to the hotel. Lying on her side in the grass now, the Labrador raises her head, acknowledges us politely as we pass, and then flops gratefully back down on the lawn again.
We lunch on the terrace, among the exotic blooms, on lobster sandwiches three inches thick, full of tail meat and with the crusts cut off. A flaky white couple across the way is lunching with a black couple from the neighbouring island of St Kitts. The flaky woman says, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great to go back in time to when this was real?’ Her fellow diners do not express an opinion.
There are tiny lizards stalking slowly among the table legs and diners’ feet, a tongue darting out now and then to snatch an insect out of the air. Then, behind a large flower pot, two of them embark on an unseen but noisy squabble until the winner chases the loser under our table at incredible speed, across the terrace and out of sight.
After lunch we stand on a promontory of dense spongy turf looking down onto an incredibly blue sea and up the steep forest slopes to the white cloud wreathing Nevis Peak. A small guest bungalow nestling in trees nearby bears the sign Paradise.
Instead of waiting for a bus to come along we decide to walk back towards Charlestown so that we can stop by the Hermitage, said to be the Caribbean’s oldest inhabited building. It is a most pleasant walk, mostly downhill, with neat painted houses and gardens with the kind of colours and lushness you’d expect in this climate.
When we pass the school, girls in immaculate uniforms are running a race along the street, barefoot, although they exhibit a distinct lack of enthusiasm when their route takes them under the wall of the boys’ playground where the boys leer down on them and shout abuse. Even in Paradise, it seems, some things don’t change.
After about two miles we notice that a very tall, thin man, wearing only shorts and wellington boots, is striding along behind us. He is swinging a machete in his right hand and talking very loudly to himself. A couple more furtive backward glances establish that he is also gaining on us. Apart from this man, and us, the road is deserted.
We are discussing various unlikely scenarios for escape when another glance behind reveals a bus hurtling down the road. Abandoning all interest in the Caribbean’s oldest inhabited building, we leap to the edge of the pavement and flag it down. It has Prodigal Son in a beautiful cursive script above the windscreen and screeches to a halt just far enough ahead of us for us to read the word Jehovah across its rear.
We wrench open its door and scramble in. As we slam the door shut the man overtakes us and from my seat I can now see what was hidden before. Behind a very high hedge there is a garden gate with a middle-aged woman leaning on it, taking the air. The man pauses level with her, and while David pays the driver I stare back in horror fearing some terrible bloodbath. The two of them merely exchange a cordial greeting, however, and then the man with the machete resumes his long stride and his monologue. It is not until we are some distance down the hill that something occurs to me. We are, after all, riding in a bus with Prodigal Son on the front and Jehovah on the back. Given the religious propensities of this little island, might the man simply have been conversing with his god?
In the meantime, the afternoon has become very hot and I’m not at all sorry to be seated and in the shade; quite a lot of shade, in fact, as the side and rear windows of this bus are heavily tinted. They also have engraved scrolls in the corners reminiscent of the kind you used to see on very old hearses and travellers’ caravans. The statutory sign says 14 passengers max as usual but in place of No eating or drinking it has No indecent language although how anyone could possibly hear any I can’t imagine. The pulsating music making the interior throb is gospel and while the man behind the wheel drives flat out for Jesus a small, scrubbed schoolgirl at the front sings along to every hymn, accompanied intermittently by several of the matrons sitting behind her.
Back in town we find the other supermarket, the source of confusion between the woman and her nephew in the police station when we cleared in. It is new and heavily air-conditioned, and we emerge with a bargain purchase pack of fifteen chicken drumsticks at a ridiculously-low price. They will stay at a safe temperature against our new and wonderful refrigerator plate, although fifteen large drumsticks is still a lot to get through. I figure chicken in thyme, honey and lemon juice with fresh vegetables for one meal; cacciatore with spaghetti for another; fried with ratatouille and potatoes and then the odd three cooked in curry sauce with the meat then sliced from the bone and served with rice. Very versatile, chicken.
36
Pinney’s Beach
A few more days and we begin to think about a change of scenery. Our water tanks are also running low so we decide to combine firing up the water maker a few miles offshore with a trip up the coast to the northern end of the island. When we reach Tamarind Bay, its anchorage turns out to be very small and already full of local boats. Oualie Beach is very shallow – only 1.6 metres even some wa
y out – and it has buoys everywhere. So we settle on Pinney’s Beach, just along the coast from our previous anchorage. I make ratatouille for later in the week and what turns out to be a very tasty chicken cacciatore for dinner tonight. We have it with a glass of red as the sun goes down with Gladys Knight & the Pips singing Midnight Train to Georgia. Not a spectacular day in terms of activity or achievement, and yet we feel we’ve had a really lovely one.
We have a number of lovely days on Nevis. This island is the closest we come to our Caribbean idyll: a solitary boat anchored off coral sand fringed by tall, spindly palm trees. Three glorious miles of it, in fact, running past our door and with nobody here but us. Warmth. Sunrises and sunsets. The daily arrival of fresh water, the company of pelicans and civil people when the need for supplies drives you ashore.
Although I admit to being a little intimidated, the first time we take the dinghy onto Pinney’s Beach, by the sheer power of the surf. It is beautiful to watch from Voyager’s cockpit, crashing and fuming against the land, but something else entirely when you come to thrust a small aluminium dinghy into it. But we land in good order and walk along the beach to have a look at the abandoned Four Seasons Hotel, a victim of Hurricane Lenny.
Its jetty hangs in tatters. The beach has been driven upwards and thrust into the buildings closest to the sea. Along with the sand it has lifted the large concrete blocks containing the beach showers and thrust these at the seafront buildings, too. Further back, what has escaped the sea, the wind has destroyed. Large numbers of local people, someone in town tells us, have lost their jobs.
Not long ago we spent some weeks in the Canaries, waiting out the hurricane season. While we did so, Hurricane Lenny was causing this kind of havoc through the Caribbean, at times reaching 155mph. The eighth hurricane of the season and a category 4, it took everyone by surprise: not only by arriving after the season was supposed to be over but by travelling west to east, instead of the other way around as hurricanes normally do. Since most development in East Caribbean islands occurs on their usually more protected western shores, Lenny’s effect on homes, jobs and tourism was devastating. And it added even more rain to the severe flooding in the Leeward Islands already caused by Hurricane José less than a month earlier.
Although Lenny, the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded in November, had caused some damage on Antigua, we did not see it. This is our first experience of the kind of devastation a hurricane can leave in its wake. Thanks to the Luftwaffe there were quite a few bombsites littering our early childhood but once the areas were rebuilt that was it. I simply can’t imagine what it must be like to have one’s home and livelihood under threat annually by an irresistible force of nature. And not just once a year either. The 1999 Atlantic hurricane season, June to November, produced 16 tropical storms, half of which developed into hurricanes. We retrace our steps along the lovely coral beach and paddle our dinghy back through the surf to Voyager.
Tired of being the junior member of this little two-island country, and dominated by the larger St Kitts, Nevis had at one time considered seceding, concluding ultimately that a population of 9,000 was a bit small for a nation state. Gazing about me at the blissful isolation of our present location I ask David if Voyager might constitute a nation state of two and what we needed to do to legitimise our sovereignty.
He says print some stamps. I ask if we’d need an army but he says he would simply tank me up and send me out. He reckons two small beers and half a bottle of red and we would be in nuclear deployment mode. I remind him that he would need to deploy me before the inevitable migraine set in and made me ineffective for two days and slightly muted for a third. He says that would be a national secret we could never divulge as the enemy would then know it only had to wait 24 hours for us to be defenceless. I wander off to the galley to contemplate UDI and make a chicken curry for tomorrow from our bargain purchase at the new supermarket. Like casseroles and chilli, curry is always tastier a day or two after cooking.
The vulnerability of the small and defenceless recurs, in a different form, just before sunset when we find ourselves in the centre of a life and death struggle. Alerted by a loud splash, followed by an agitated rustle, we find the water around us filled with millions of tiny, bluish almost transparent fish with shoals of large snapper-and trout-shaped fish leaping (the splash) and feeding on them. With every attack, the little fish turn en masse (the rustle) and rush away, but with nowhere safe to go.
‘Get into smaller groups and spread out,’ I yell at the little fish, appalled. ‘You’re too big a target!’ But they don’t listen. They simply leap sporadically in small groups but remain part of the great mass which changes direction endlessly only to be attacked again. The carnage goes on all night.
In our less dramatic moments we are re-reading Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat together. Reading aloud is not much done nowadays, I imagine. But on a boat, devoid of talk radio and television, it is a shared experience, a source of mutual enjoyment and quite often a subject for discussion. And as can be observed in cinema audiences, comedy is also keener when it is shared. Along with making us laugh, parts of this humorous and witty book are particularly pertinent: the uncluttered, un-materialistic lifestyle to which its three young oarsmen aspire, despite filling their boat to the gunnels with clutter they will never need; the changing conditions on the water from delightfully solitary to maddeningly overcrowded; and the occasional fretful behaviour of even the fondest people when pressed up close on a small boat.
Nevis has been a delight, but it is time to move on. We sail back to our original anchorage, which is handy for the dinghy dock, and clear out with the authorities. Then we have a last trawl around the new supermarket. Never miss an opportunity has become a motto of ours because you never know what you are going to.
When we get back to the waterfront with our shopping, the dinghy dock is being dismantled. I don’t think it is anything personal. It had always had a rather temporary look about it, the original undoubtedly a victim of Hurricane Lenny at the same time it devastated the Four Seasons Hotel along the coast. And presumably they are now preparing to build a more permanent structure. One can only hope that it will also be a bit more user-friendly.
If disembarking has been difficult, getting back down into our dinghy has been more so. Leap of faith are words that come to mind, requiring as it does hanging by my fingers from a wooden plank while David holds the dinghy steady with one hand and uses the other to guide my outstretched foot to where my weight, when I finally let go of the plank, won’t sink us.
As if this were not challenge enough, the dinghy dock is now partially-dismembered strips of timber, exposed nails and that fluttering tape that workmen use to stop people entering their workspace but which is simply another hazard because our little dinghy, down there among the wood fragments and sawdust, is our only means of getting home.
I put so much concentration into getting into the dinghy, without either falling backwards into it or capsizing it, that I am seated and ready to go before discovering that I forgot to undo the painter before making my descent. I’m just considering the best way to clamber back up again, now that my original foothold has been removed, when a workman appears from nowhere and very kindly unties us.
As we pull away I wonder briefly why we are so law-abiding; why we didn’t just tie up on the fishermen’s dock which is much more accessible, since despite being warned not to in the cruising guide other yachtsmen do. It is only later that we hear that one of them returned to find his dinghy trashed.
Back on Voyager, we set about raising our anchor. The water is so clear that even six metres down you can see it dug into the coral sand, and its chain snaking out along the seabed behind it. Then we set off for St Kitts.
ST KITTS
37
Brimstone Hill Fort
The capital of St Kitts is Basseterre. We anchor in its harbour and dinghy into the marina to clear in, as advised in the cruising guide. Hurricanes José and Len
ny have given this area of the harbour a thorough drubbing and, with only some wooden piles and a small shed remaining, it resembles a demolition site. The cruise ship wharf is completely wrecked and part of the wall that protects the marina has been destroyed. The marina itself seems to be undamaged although there is not a boat, not even another dinghy, in it.
We are greeted by two large cheerful men who say we must pay a US$5 security charge to leave our dinghy here. There is little alternative, any other access to land being through large areas of mud. The two men hover above us on a concrete dock around five feet high. I look around for a ladder of some kind. The two men drop to a crouch and extend a hand each. Foolishly, I grasp them. Within moments my arms feel as if they have left their sockets. By the time my feet touch the dock my rib cage seems to be a greater distance from my pelvis than it used to be.
We are directed into a very fancy marina building, with several very fancy secretaries, to pay. Although what they have to do all day I can’t imagine as the marina has no boats in it. We should like to see the island and visit Brimstone Hill Fort, but since getting ashore by dinghy is such a pain David asks one of the secretaries what the marina’s rate would be to berth Voyager. She quotes him their standard rate, which is expensive, but then adds that it would be triple that for a catamaran. The amount makes his eyes water. No wonder there are no boats in the marina.
In the meantime I hand over a five dollar bill to the other secretary. ‘What shall I put on the receipt?’ she says. ‘Under protest,’ I suggest. ‘Five dollars to tie up a dinghy while you clear in and get unloaded like a sack of coal is a disgrace!’ She looks upset. But not as upset as I am.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 23