Grenada 2006
Third and last in a series…
Them’s good eatin…
A few things we discovered on Grenada that are good to eat:
Mahi-mahi of course, described earlier. I had it on four separate occasions and enjoyed it most grilled and dressed with a generous dollop of Nantais butter (the mahi-mahi, that is, not me);
Swordfish. It’s not rare, neither is it unique to Grenada, but the onset of barbecue season is a good time to be reminded that this is a fish that cooks to the density of a pork chop and is fabulous in just about any grilled configuration you find. I had it for brunch at a lovely getaway spot on Grenada’s Atlantic side, la Sagesse, a resort that sits alone on a bay that looks like it could have served as a local stand-in for Tahiti in Marlon Brando’s or Mel Gibson’s “Mutiny on the Bounty”.
Pumpkin soup, in this case curried with coconut milk. Lush and creamy, it seemed the sort of dish that would be more at home on a table where, just outside, it is a cold winter’s night. But it was so good it sent me to Google when I got home, in search of some recipes to try. It was also a la Sagesse offering.
A couple things that were interesting but “iffy”:
It makes sense that hamburger, on an island where meat is pretty well all imported, would obviously be stretched with a seasoned cereal filler in one place where we tried it. But it rates as “interesting” because it worked. The seasonings in this case made it very flavourable.
One item we tried because it appears on many travel websites with some captioned variation of the identifier “Grenada’s tempting specialty” was something called callaloo soup. Callaloo, it turns out, is pretty close to spinach but I suspect it needed more of a search than we gave it during our short stay there to find a treatment I would call “tempting”. The soup was a green so dark it was almost black, but another of those full-bodied purées that I would classify as a winter soup. (If you’ve ever had fiddlehead soup, it’s in the family.) In another meal, callaloo was served to us as a side dish but it was well-boiled with an overpowering garlic flavouring that made any detection of the flavour of the green itself all but impossible.
Roadside roast corn. Forget what your North American mind recalls as a “corn roast”, which turns out a really tender product. On Grenada, there are lots of places along its byways where a roadside hibachi will be set up, no doubt to help supplement a meagre family income. And Grenadian corn thus grilled has been slow cooked to a consistency that is chewy to say the least. But its flavour was great and not surprisingly, considering it had been done to a toasty dryness, it echoed popcorn in taste.
Name dropping and people spotting.
Octopus: I’ll save you the trouble and point you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht_Octopus
It’s amazing what money will buy. In this case, $200 million up front and $20 million annually in operating costs will buy you a floating palace. The property of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Octopus was anchored just off the Grand Anse Beach for much of the time we were there. One evening, while we were at dinner at the Coconut Beach beachside restaurant, we noticed a long table with seating for 18 had been set up in the sand. A few minutes after we got there, a trio of matching Zodiacs motored right up onto the beach to disembark the dining party. The boats’ colours placed them among Octopus’ ancillary vessels and the youth of the 18-person party suggested some sort of extremely generous corporate rewards program was at work. Next day, we toyed briefly with the idea of kayaking out to Octopus and asking for the latest Windows upgrade, but decided against it. (Given that subsequent Googling has turned up the information that several of her crew are ex-US Navy SEALS, this probably was a wise decision.)
On our return flight, we changed planes in the San Juan (Puerto Rico) airport with enough time for lunch. While we were sitting in a restaurant / bar, Sir Richard Branson suddenly bustled through, obviously looking for someone who turned out not to be there, but triggering a chain reaction of recognition among all of us gawking tourists.
Music finds, courtesy of Grenada.
The Reggae bus and the spillover thumping sound of a reggae band coming from an open air club far down the beach one Saturday night sent me in search of some likable reggae when I got home. “Likable” because being a typical grey-haired older white guy, I wasn’t looking for angry cop-killer rap or rage for any reason. And I now have three new albums added to my music shelves, each representative of a different reggae style:
“The Best Reggae Album in the World… Ever” is reggae I would describe as safe, because many of its songs have made the crossover and also become rock hits in North America – UB40’s “I Got You, Babe”, Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger’s duet, “Don’t Look Back” and a disco classic, Boney M’s “(By the) Rivers of Babylon”. But even “safe”, it’s a great reggae album and will happily sustain any party – especially if you’re piping the music into a set of outdoor speakers and sitting around a campfire or just back-porching it. Rum punch would make a fabulous accessory.
In a similar spirit is the grossly misnamed “MADNESS” by a group called The Dangermen. Actually, its full title is “MADNESS: The Dangermen Sessions Volume 1” but these guys are anything but mad and dangerous. The album style is ska, which is frequently described as “reggae’s precursor”. And it, too, is a lot of fun. The Dangermen cover several rock tunes in a light reggae style, including José Feliciano’s “Rain”, The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and The Kinks’ “Lola” . (On a digressionary note, have you ever listened to the lyrics to “Lola”? I hadn’t, not really, until I Googled them while playing the album recently. In a nutshell, it’s about a guy who gets picked up by a transvestite. The last line is the kicker:
“Well I'm not the world's most masculine man,
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man.
And so is Lola. (L-O-L-A, Lola… etc)”
Finally, because I had to get hold of at least one of the harder pounding collections that would forever recall the reggae bus, I bought a great album by an artist named Super Cat entitled “The Struggle Continues”. Oddly enough, its message is one of peace, despite the much sharper aural edges that seem to drive the music.
Check out this poetry in Super Cat’s “Every Nigger is a Star”, whose root message (from the very first wordplay that makes “Dedicated” into “Livicated”) is that war and killing won’t solve anything (It’s included here in its entirety hopefully to impart a sense of amazement that all of what follows, with four repetitions of the chorus, is staccatoed out in a little over three minutes of playing time. Perry Como this guy ain’t.):
Every Nigger Is A Star
(Livicated to Mr. Nelson Mandela And The People's Fight For Freedom... The Struggle Continues...)
Jah Rastafari
Well me look an' me tell dem seh Rude Boy
And me look an' me tell dem
I and I seh a kingdom that is divided by itself must fall
All for one and one for all
I and I shall be like a green tree that's planted by the river bank of Dunns River Falls
A weh me tell dem Rude Boy
African People come follow me
Hear this
(Chorus)
Well Every Nigger is an African and also a star
And We know where We coming from and know who We are
Every Nigger is an African and also a star
A no brag We a brag and a no blar We a blar
Teeth white like a snow skin black like a tar
And anytime dem see We a de show We a Star
Africans oonu better cut out de war !
United We stand and divided We fall
Oonu hear me Africans oonu better cut out che war
United We stand and divided We fall
Because !
Deep down in a Africa We fore parents roam
When We never did have no need fe no scissors nor comb
When de animals Were tamed and We shared de same home
We use to walk up on silver and cook up on gold
Drink de cow's milk and den we suck de honey comb
But that was in the days of beginning and old
When exploiter they came with religion unknown
They robbed Us our culture an' our kings they dethrone
And they carry Us in a Babylon true We strong bone
But no matter what they do Jah Jah guiding Us home
We a go chase dem crazy bald head out of We town
A We plant de corn and build de cabin alone
(Chorus)
Oonu see the coming of Jah Jah it is not very far
Him nah go drop out a sky like a falling star
Nor appear like a soldier from 1JR
Him nah go come in a no jet nor na big fast car
Him a go come like a thief in a de night from a far
Wid de fire in a Him eye like a burning cigar
Hair white like a snow - feet like a brass bar
Nah go come with no 'matic and a no SLR
Hear me now super - you haf fe hear me now star
When Jah Jah come a brimstone fire war
Him nah contribute to no skin color bar
Neither take no side with no guy weh preach war
(Chorus)
Because !
This is not He Man and this is not Thundar
Neither Superman nor the one Skeletar
This is not Tarzan make believe jungle star
These are the African children wearing the African scar
Ancient motherland and she so pretty and far
Millions of children were stolen from her
Bought into slavery and sold like a car
Fe cut sugar cane, cotton and quail cigar
Under Jah moon and Jah sun and Jah star
Hear me now super you haf fe hear me now star
A no brag me a brag no blar me a blar
Them never make no weapon fe go fight no war
(Chorus)
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And a non-Grenada closing note, but one coincidentally à propos, given the “Tarzan” reference ten lines or so above…
Call me startled. A chimpanzee dubbed “the world’s oldest” was the subject of a CBC-TV news item on April 10. “Cheeta” turned 74 and celebrated with sugar-free cake and diet soda at a party in Palm Springs, California.
What surprised me about this story was the added fact that this particular chimpanzee starred under his own name in a dozen Tarzan films in the 1930s and 1940s before he headed into retirement. The best-known ones featured Johnny Weissmuller as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape-man, movies I figure I’ve seen about four times each on countless Saturday morning black-and-white movie times while growing up. (Tarzan and Cheeta take on Nazis, for example, in 1943’s “Tarzan Triumphs”, and tackle New York City in the previous year’s “Tarzan’s New York Adventure”.)
Here’s a family photo (I’m pretty sure Cheeta’s the one on the left.): http://www.meredy.com/tarzan4.jpg
Not one to just fade away, Cheeta returned for another kick at celluloid fame in 1967 to play opposite Rex Harrison in Dr Doolittle, and is also considered an accomplished artist in the world of simian painters, with two of his works hanging for a time in the National Museum in London. (Although one suspects there is not a huge pool of competing talent against which to measure the performance that earned him the adjective “accomplished”.)
Cheeta has also received a special comedy award from the International Comedy Film Festival of (wait for it)
Peniscola, Spain.
There’s no follow-up possible to that, so until next time…
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Grenada 2006 (Two of however many it takes…)
Jenny’s Place in Grenada is home to two residents that don’t make it into the brochures – their guard dogs.
Grenada doesn’t seem like the sort of place that suffers from a high degree of residential theft, but it does seem that almost every home that reflects any degree of wealth is surrounded by an extremely well-constructed fence behind which prowl any number up to about half a dozen seriously angry guard dogs. (Actually, now that I think of it, that probably closes the circle and explains why Grenada is not the kind of place that suffers from a high degree of residential theft.)
At Jenny’s Place, their resident canine security comes in the form of a young Alsatian (a breed of German Shepherd) and an enormous Rottweiler. The Alsatian, Brandy, is still not much beyond puppyhood. (Not too far off Rockefeller, here, in appearance: http://www.theusyellowpages.com/german-shepherds/images/rockefelleraug2005.gif ) Certainly she is full-grown but that’s only recent, and her approach to life is still very much that of a puppy. The Rottweiler, on the other hand (paw?) is every inch and every pound a fully-developed adult watchdog. And yet in all defiance of the image she presents, she answers to the name Shirley. After encountering her shortly after we arrived, comfortably restrained on her owner’s leash, I concluded it was actually “Surely”, as in, “If you step on this property after dark and you are not supposed to be here, you will be surely ripped to shreds.”
That “not supposed to be here” qualifier is very much ingrained into the dogs’ training. There was, in fact, one occasion where a small band of boys was walking past outside the property fence as my wife and I returned from an excursion. The sound of their passage obviously triggered a “Gotta check this out” alarm in Brandy because, just as my wife and I got three steps through the gate, Brandy suddenly appeared in full charge from around the corner of the house. Seeing us, she quite literally did that cartoon thing where the animal’s front legs shoot out as it skids to an “urk-urk-urk” halt. One quick sniff of us, however, must have registered as “OK”, because she then immediately re-accelerated and tore off to the perimeter fence where the boys were passing, there to unleash a torrent of barks by way of asserting her property’s boundaries.
The passage of kids just outside the fence was a daily event. A couple of enormous mango trees grow immediately next to Jenny’s Place and knocking the fruit from the tree, when it’s ready, is a daily expedition for the boys.
Which, I guess, is why it’s perfectly OK for a great many people in Grenada, including boys as young as 7 or 8, to casually carry wicked-looking machetes with them wherever they go – in case they should come upon a fruit tree.
We were advised that if we walked anywhere a couple hours after the sun had gone down, we should stick to the main road. If we chose to walk on the beach, we were told, and someone or ones should attempt to harrass us, “then just run into the water”. (“Why?” “Because locals won’t go there at night.”) I was going to further explore “Why?”, but I began to harbour a wild fear that not too far along we would be told, “Because that’s when the sharks come in close to shore.” So I left that bit of curious thirst unslaked.
Back to the dogs.
We were free to pat Brandy whenever we encountered her and she was fawningly friendly to all of the guests. Shirley, however, was a bit “skittish” around people, we were told, so patting was discouraged in her case. And it turns out she comes by her skittishness honestly. She still bears the scars of several vicious machete cuts she received a couple years earlier.
One day, my wife and I were enjoying one of our bob-around-the-Caribbean dips. Brandy, who just loves the ocean, was playing with us in the water and demonstrating a surprising lack of fatigue even after long minutes of dog-paddling all around us. Suddenly, her ears pricked up and she turned towards the beach. A group of local kids, with their dog, was passing by and Brandy obviously had interpreted this as a violation of part of her guard dog mandate. Whoops. A shouted, “Brandy, no!” from me had no effect whatsoever as she splashed out of the surf onto the sand. Even worse, I watched in stomach-sinking fear as one of the kids casually raised the two-foot long machete he was carrying and swung it sharply down at the young, charging and growling Alsatian. But rather than what I expected, what I heard was the resounding “smack” as the flat of the blade landed along her side. Brandy, lesson learned, scuttled back through the gate on her side of the fence and proceeded to bark vigorously.
Just another day on the beach for the kids. In Grenada, c’est la vie. For me – just another dozen grey hairs and a near-defibrillator moment for my heart.
- 0 -
A political snippet. A good many of Baby Duck’s readers might remember that Grenada was actually the site of a full-scale US military invasion in 1983. The Prime Minister at the time was Maurice Bishop and among ordinary Grenadians, he sits maybe a foot and a half below God on the staircase of reverence. He came to office after a “nearly bloodless” coup in the spring of 1979. Four years later, a second power struggle resulted in a somewhat less bloodless coup as Bishop and several members of his cabinet were executed.
That was declared to be a sufficient breakdown in civil order that the Governor General of the day, Paul Scoon, was deemed to have “invited” the Americans in to restore order, which they did in a little order-restoring process they called Operation Urgent Fury.
In many ways, Urgent Fury was for the Americans what the 1942 raid on Dieppe was for Canadians – a great many blunders became the source of valuable lessons that were to serve them much better in later invasions.
To cite just one example, during part of the battle a unit of elite US Navy SEALS was caught on the ground in a fairly sharp fight for possession of the Governor’s mansion. Pinned down and in desperate need of air support, they could actually see US helicopter gunships circling overhead, but their radios were incompatible with those in the helicopters. One unsung and, to this day, anonymous bright light actually did succeed in getting into the mansion and, on a whim, tried a telephone sitting on a desk. To his shock, he discovered the lines had not been cut and successfully placed a long distance call to his home base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. How in heck he managed to convince whoever picked up the phone in Fort Bragg that he wasn’t a lunatic is one of the untold stories of this war, but he had someone in Fort Bragg get in touch with whoever was in charge of the Grenada invasion air support gunships and deliver the message that a SEAL unit on the ground was taking heavy fire outside the Governor’s mansion and would really appreciate it, please and thank you, if somebody would bomb the s**t out of the bad guys.
If you’re really, really interested, a thorough military history of the invasion, warts and all, is here:
http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_159.shtml
(Hollywood has also created a film that centres on the invasion and it too deals with the blunders. “Heartbreak Ridge”, made in 1986, stars Clint Eastwood.
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Fort George in St George’s, where Maurice Bishop and his Ministers were executed (there are still official histories that describe their deaths as “caught in a crossfire”) is a fascinating place, but maddeningly bereft of onsite information. The first fort built on the site – a promontory overlooking the harbour – was erected in the mid 1600s. That alone would qualify it for National Historic Monument status in the US, but in Grenada the attempts to preserve its history are at best desultory. And for tourists who make the energy-sapping steep climb to the site, there is almost nothing to relate to you the history of the structure and the cannon arrayed along its parapets. Thankfully, there is Google and a nice history of the fort can be found at: http://www.forts.org/history.htm, which includes the heartbreaking note (for anyone with an interest in military artifacts) that in 1983 the fort was “strafed sporadically” because it housed anti-aircraft guns.
(Lord knows the history of a site has never kept the US and its allies from reducing it when it threatened more contemporary warriors: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/C/Cassino.asp. Or, for that matter, their enemies: http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm )
We saw one plaque on the site, a moving commemoration to Bishop and his seven colleagues, on the wall against which they were standing when they were shot. But given 400 or so years of history on that ground, surely something more than a sign welcoming you to the present-day Grenada Police Academy, located among the historic buildings, would seem appropriate.
- 0 -
Grenada is home to several “sugar” factories. The reason that’s in quotes is because not one of Grenada’s sugar factories makes sugar any more. They make its distilled by-product, rum. What this means to the local economy is that almost everything they consume, except rum and a locally brewed beer called Carib, has to arrive on the island from somewhere else. No surprise to discover, therefore, that rum is among the least expensive beverages sold in local stores, whereas soft drinks, fruit juices and even bottled waters are surprisingly – to us anyway – high-priced.
I’m not typically* a rum drinker, but I did discover a brand called “Old Grog” that, despite its name, was so fantastic that it could be consumed like a really fine brandy – sipped straight up in a small glass. It’s described quite concisely, but accurately, in a note about it how it came to be so named on the website of Clark’s Court, the distillery that produces it: “Old Grog Rum dates back from early days when the finest of Grenada's Rum was shipped to his Majesty George III of England. In order to identify the King's Rum, the casks were marked G.R.O.G., which is the abbreviation for Georgius Rex Old Grenada. Old Grog rum maintains Grenada's tradition of producing the finest blend rums. It is an aged spirit that is copper-gold in colour. Medium bodied, with a tropical fruit and spice flavour, with a long buttery finish, that is 40% alcohol by volume. Old Grog won awards at the Caribbean Rum Fest Competition in the following yearly Award Winner 2001.”
(Now if you’re willing to believe that “grog”, the term universally applied to harsh, cheap watered rum, derives from the Latin / English blend, “Georgius Rex Old Grenada”, then I know a Nigerian investor who wants to park several million dollars in your bank account, and who would be very interested in meeting you. Besides, everyone knows that “grog” is an abbreviation for “Great Rotgut to Oil the Goodtimes”.)
*Once you discover a cocktail called rum punch, you can never again deny being a rum drinker. Rum punch is delicious. Rum is to the Caribbean what vodka is to Russia, tequila to Mexico and bourbon to the US. It’s their regional hard liquor staple. In fact, for the first couple days whenever we decided to imbibe in a local bar, I never got anything other than rum punch or ice-cold Carib in response to a request for “the drink that best says ‘Welcome to Grenada’, please”.
Rum punch is like pizza in that its recipes are as many as the number of places selling it. Everyone will claim theirs is the best, with a “secret ingredient” whose identity is as fiercely protected as Colonel Sanders’ “secret mixture of eleven different herbs and spices”. There are some core ingredients: at least two – frequently three – kinds of rum (white, dark and coconut), angoustura bitters and some kind of sweetener like Grenadine or “simple syrup”, a dense cloying syrup made from a blend of water and dissolved sugar and then boiled down. From there, fruit juices are added. Orange and/or pineapple are the favourite choices. Finally, depending on the upscale-ness of your setting, various fresh fruit garnishes and serving containers up to and including a hollowed-out coconut shell can be presented as wholly unneeded accessories.
I found one recipe that called for Bacardi 151, a fearsome rum that derives its name from its proof. Yep – Bacardi 151 is 75.5 per cent alcohol and, in Ottawa, its label actually includes a prominently printed warning not to pour it anywhere near an open flame because it is “HIGHLY FLAMMABLE”.
- 0 -
Travelling Grenada roads by public transit is remarkably easy, as long as you know what number bus you need to get where you want to go.
A “bus” in Grenada is a “van” in North America. The only people who travel in what we call a “bus” are the medical students at St George’s University who are shuttled from residence to campus in one, and maybe the occasional tour group that arrives in a cruise ship and has signed up for one of the many trips that are offered departing from the cruise ship dock. Everybody else rides the reggae bus.
Grenada’s roads have occasional paved nooks on either side and that’s where the reggae bus stops. You either stand there and wait, or you walk along the road in the same direction as traffic until you hear a “beep beep” from behind. Grenadian drivers use their horns about as often as they exhale. The sound is a near constant on the streets and, after a time, you learn it means one of three things: “Hi”; or “Do you want a ride?”; or “PleaseGETOUTOFTHEWAY!!!” If you are looking for a ride, you just lift your arm and it’ll stop. It’s almost always full, but people will happily shove over to make room for one or two more.
Oh, why (you ask) is it called the reggae bus? Because, without exception, it always has reggae music thumping from a full set of interior speakers so loudly that it feels like you’re sitting inside a sub-woofer set to about 6 on the Richter Scale. It’s even more entertaining at night. A reggae bus is lit within by a very bright blue light (a lot like the poster blacklights of the psychedelic 60s), casting a weird blue tint on the faces of the riders. Watching these rolling discos approach from a distance is like watching something from another planet. (An image further enhanced by the fact that, as it approaches, the rhythmic thudding of the bass is felt long before the rest of the music catches up with it, sounding a lot like the engine noise generated by that alien probe in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home.
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Non-Grenada snip
There is a regularly enjoyable online ramble that keeps an eye on many things Atlantic Canadian – especially music, if one had to zero in on a topic that appears most frequently. But there is also lots of sidebar material presented with a sense of humour and a “Here’s who I am; take it or leave it” style that is just plain fun to read. I commend to you the website of one Darryl Wright.
Jenny’s Place in Grenada is home to two residents that don’t make it into the brochures – their guard dogs.
Grenada doesn’t seem like the sort of place that suffers from a high degree of residential theft, but it does seem that almost every home that reflects any degree of wealth is surrounded by an extremely well-constructed fence behind which prowl any number up to about half a dozen seriously angry guard dogs. (Actually, now that I think of it, that probably closes the circle and explains why Grenada is not the kind of place that suffers from a high degree of residential theft.)
At Jenny’s Place, their resident canine security comes in the form of a young Alsatian (a breed of German Shepherd) and an enormous Rottweiler. The Alsatian, Brandy, is still not much beyond puppyhood. (Not too far off Rockefeller, here, in appearance: http://www.theusyellowpages.com/german-shepherds/images/rockefelleraug2005.gif ) Certainly she is full-grown but that’s only recent, and her approach to life is still very much that of a puppy. The Rottweiler, on the other hand (paw?) is every inch and every pound a fully-developed adult watchdog. And yet in all defiance of the image she presents, she answers to the name Shirley. After encountering her shortly after we arrived, comfortably restrained on her owner’s leash, I concluded it was actually “Surely”, as in, “If you step on this property after dark and you are not supposed to be here, you will be surely ripped to shreds.”
That “not supposed to be here” qualifier is very much ingrained into the dogs’ training. There was, in fact, one occasion where a small band of boys was walking past outside the property fence as my wife and I returned from an excursion. The sound of their passage obviously triggered a “Gotta check this out” alarm in Brandy because, just as my wife and I got three steps through the gate, Brandy suddenly appeared in full charge from around the corner of the house. Seeing us, she quite literally did that cartoon thing where the animal’s front legs shoot out as it skids to an “urk-urk-urk” halt. One quick sniff of us, however, must have registered as “OK”, because she then immediately re-accelerated and tore off to the perimeter fence where the boys were passing, there to unleash a torrent of barks by way of asserting her property’s boundaries.
The passage of kids just outside the fence was a daily event. A couple of enormous mango trees grow immediately next to Jenny’s Place and knocking the fruit from the tree, when it’s ready, is a daily expedition for the boys.
Which, I guess, is why it’s perfectly OK for a great many people in Grenada, including boys as young as 7 or 8, to casually carry wicked-looking machetes with them wherever they go – in case they should come upon a fruit tree.
We were advised that if we walked anywhere a couple hours after the sun had gone down, we should stick to the main road. If we chose to walk on the beach, we were told, and someone or ones should attempt to harrass us, “then just run into the water”. (“Why?” “Because locals won’t go there at night.”) I was going to further explore “Why?”, but I began to harbour a wild fear that not too far along we would be told, “Because that’s when the sharks come in close to shore.” So I left that bit of curious thirst unslaked.
Back to the dogs.
We were free to pat Brandy whenever we encountered her and she was fawningly friendly to all of the guests. Shirley, however, was a bit “skittish” around people, we were told, so patting was discouraged in her case. And it turns out she comes by her skittishness honestly. She still bears the scars of several vicious machete cuts she received a couple years earlier.
One day, my wife and I were enjoying one of our bob-around-the-Caribbean dips. Brandy, who just loves the ocean, was playing with us in the water and demonstrating a surprising lack of fatigue even after long minutes of dog-paddling all around us. Suddenly, her ears pricked up and she turned towards the beach. A group of local kids, with their dog, was passing by and Brandy obviously had interpreted this as a violation of part of her guard dog mandate. Whoops. A shouted, “Brandy, no!” from me had no effect whatsoever as she splashed out of the surf onto the sand. Even worse, I watched in stomach-sinking fear as one of the kids casually raised the two-foot long machete he was carrying and swung it sharply down at the young, charging and growling Alsatian. But rather than what I expected, what I heard was the resounding “smack” as the flat of the blade landed along her side. Brandy, lesson learned, scuttled back through the gate on her side of the fence and proceeded to bark vigorously.
Just another day on the beach for the kids. In Grenada, c’est la vie. For me – just another dozen grey hairs and a near-defibrillator moment for my heart.
- 0 -
A political snippet. A good many of Baby Duck’s readers might remember that Grenada was actually the site of a full-scale US military invasion in 1983. The Prime Minister at the time was Maurice Bishop and among ordinary Grenadians, he sits maybe a foot and a half below God on the staircase of reverence. He came to office after a “nearly bloodless” coup in the spring of 1979. Four years later, a second power struggle resulted in a somewhat less bloodless coup as Bishop and several members of his cabinet were executed.
That was declared to be a sufficient breakdown in civil order that the Governor General of the day, Paul Scoon, was deemed to have “invited” the Americans in to restore order, which they did in a little order-restoring process they called Operation Urgent Fury.
In many ways, Urgent Fury was for the Americans what the 1942 raid on Dieppe was for Canadians – a great many blunders became the source of valuable lessons that were to serve them much better in later invasions.
To cite just one example, during part of the battle a unit of elite US Navy SEALS was caught on the ground in a fairly sharp fight for possession of the Governor’s mansion. Pinned down and in desperate need of air support, they could actually see US helicopter gunships circling overhead, but their radios were incompatible with those in the helicopters. One unsung and, to this day, anonymous bright light actually did succeed in getting into the mansion and, on a whim, tried a telephone sitting on a desk. To his shock, he discovered the lines had not been cut and successfully placed a long distance call to his home base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. How in heck he managed to convince whoever picked up the phone in Fort Bragg that he wasn’t a lunatic is one of the untold stories of this war, but he had someone in Fort Bragg get in touch with whoever was in charge of the Grenada invasion air support gunships and deliver the message that a SEAL unit on the ground was taking heavy fire outside the Governor’s mansion and would really appreciate it, please and thank you, if somebody would bomb the s**t out of the bad guys.
If you’re really, really interested, a thorough military history of the invasion, warts and all, is here:
http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_159.shtml
(Hollywood has also created a film that centres on the invasion and it too deals with the blunders. “Heartbreak Ridge”, made in 1986, stars Clint Eastwood.
- 0 -
Fort George in St George’s, where Maurice Bishop and his Ministers were executed (there are still official histories that describe their deaths as “caught in a crossfire”) is a fascinating place, but maddeningly bereft of onsite information. The first fort built on the site – a promontory overlooking the harbour – was erected in the mid 1600s. That alone would qualify it for National Historic Monument status in the US, but in Grenada the attempts to preserve its history are at best desultory. And for tourists who make the energy-sapping steep climb to the site, there is almost nothing to relate to you the history of the structure and the cannon arrayed along its parapets. Thankfully, there is Google and a nice history of the fort can be found at: http://www.forts.org/history.htm, which includes the heartbreaking note (for anyone with an interest in military artifacts) that in 1983 the fort was “strafed sporadically” because it housed anti-aircraft guns.
(Lord knows the history of a site has never kept the US and its allies from reducing it when it threatened more contemporary warriors: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/C/Cassino.asp. Or, for that matter, their enemies: http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm )
We saw one plaque on the site, a moving commemoration to Bishop and his seven colleagues, on the wall against which they were standing when they were shot. But given 400 or so years of history on that ground, surely something more than a sign welcoming you to the present-day Grenada Police Academy, located among the historic buildings, would seem appropriate.
- 0 -
Grenada is home to several “sugar” factories. The reason that’s in quotes is because not one of Grenada’s sugar factories makes sugar any more. They make its distilled by-product, rum. What this means to the local economy is that almost everything they consume, except rum and a locally brewed beer called Carib, has to arrive on the island from somewhere else. No surprise to discover, therefore, that rum is among the least expensive beverages sold in local stores, whereas soft drinks, fruit juices and even bottled waters are surprisingly – to us anyway – high-priced.
I’m not typically* a rum drinker, but I did discover a brand called “Old Grog” that, despite its name, was so fantastic that it could be consumed like a really fine brandy – sipped straight up in a small glass. It’s described quite concisely, but accurately, in a note about it how it came to be so named on the website of Clark’s Court, the distillery that produces it: “Old Grog Rum dates back from early days when the finest of Grenada's Rum was shipped to his Majesty George III of England. In order to identify the King's Rum, the casks were marked G.R.O.G., which is the abbreviation for Georgius Rex Old Grenada. Old Grog rum maintains Grenada's tradition of producing the finest blend rums. It is an aged spirit that is copper-gold in colour. Medium bodied, with a tropical fruit and spice flavour, with a long buttery finish, that is 40% alcohol by volume. Old Grog won awards at the Caribbean Rum Fest Competition in the following yearly Award Winner 2001.”
(Now if you’re willing to believe that “grog”, the term universally applied to harsh, cheap watered rum, derives from the Latin / English blend, “Georgius Rex Old Grenada”, then I know a Nigerian investor who wants to park several million dollars in your bank account, and who would be very interested in meeting you. Besides, everyone knows that “grog” is an abbreviation for “Great Rotgut to Oil the Goodtimes”.)
*Once you discover a cocktail called rum punch, you can never again deny being a rum drinker. Rum punch is delicious. Rum is to the Caribbean what vodka is to Russia, tequila to Mexico and bourbon to the US. It’s their regional hard liquor staple. In fact, for the first couple days whenever we decided to imbibe in a local bar, I never got anything other than rum punch or ice-cold Carib in response to a request for “the drink that best says ‘Welcome to Grenada’, please”.
Rum punch is like pizza in that its recipes are as many as the number of places selling it. Everyone will claim theirs is the best, with a “secret ingredient” whose identity is as fiercely protected as Colonel Sanders’ “secret mixture of eleven different herbs and spices”. There are some core ingredients: at least two – frequently three – kinds of rum (white, dark and coconut), angoustura bitters and some kind of sweetener like Grenadine or “simple syrup”, a dense cloying syrup made from a blend of water and dissolved sugar and then boiled down. From there, fruit juices are added. Orange and/or pineapple are the favourite choices. Finally, depending on the upscale-ness of your setting, various fresh fruit garnishes and serving containers up to and including a hollowed-out coconut shell can be presented as wholly unneeded accessories.
I found one recipe that called for Bacardi 151, a fearsome rum that derives its name from its proof. Yep – Bacardi 151 is 75.5 per cent alcohol and, in Ottawa, its label actually includes a prominently printed warning not to pour it anywhere near an open flame because it is “HIGHLY FLAMMABLE”.
- 0 -
Travelling Grenada roads by public transit is remarkably easy, as long as you know what number bus you need to get where you want to go.
A “bus” in Grenada is a “van” in North America. The only people who travel in what we call a “bus” are the medical students at St George’s University who are shuttled from residence to campus in one, and maybe the occasional tour group that arrives in a cruise ship and has signed up for one of the many trips that are offered departing from the cruise ship dock. Everybody else rides the reggae bus.
Grenada’s roads have occasional paved nooks on either side and that’s where the reggae bus stops. You either stand there and wait, or you walk along the road in the same direction as traffic until you hear a “beep beep” from behind. Grenadian drivers use their horns about as often as they exhale. The sound is a near constant on the streets and, after a time, you learn it means one of three things: “Hi”; or “Do you want a ride?”; or “PleaseGETOUTOFTHEWAY!!!” If you are looking for a ride, you just lift your arm and it’ll stop. It’s almost always full, but people will happily shove over to make room for one or two more.
Oh, why (you ask) is it called the reggae bus? Because, without exception, it always has reggae music thumping from a full set of interior speakers so loudly that it feels like you’re sitting inside a sub-woofer set to about 6 on the Richter Scale. It’s even more entertaining at night. A reggae bus is lit within by a very bright blue light (a lot like the poster blacklights of the psychedelic 60s), casting a weird blue tint on the faces of the riders. Watching these rolling discos approach from a distance is like watching something from another planet. (An image further enhanced by the fact that, as it approaches, the rhythmic thudding of the bass is felt long before the rest of the music catches up with it, sounding a lot like the engine noise generated by that alien probe in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home.
- 0 -
Non-Grenada snip
There is a regularly enjoyable online ramble that keeps an eye on many things Atlantic Canadian – especially music, if one had to zero in on a topic that appears most frequently. But there is also lots of sidebar material presented with a sense of humour and a “Here’s who I am; take it or leave it” style that is just plain fun to read. I commend to you the website of one Darryl Wright.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Grenada 2006
(One of several…)
Picture this, and several Grenada notes to come, as a textual photo album. Oh sure, I could go for a conventional narrative structure. But, my never having been to Grenada before, our trip probably made more of an impression on me as a series of perceptions of images and single events, rather than a tale flowing chronologically from its beginning through a middle to its end. (But don’t worry; I’ll let you know when you reach the end. Even if I have to wake you up to do so.)
Orienting yourself: On this map [ http://www.skyviews.com/grenada/grenadamap.html ], most of these “snapshots” are set almost at the very bottom of the island, on the left side where you see “Grand Anse Bay” and that beach umbrella symbol traveling about an inch and a half (more or less, depending on the size of your monitor) roughly towards two o’clock from the Point Salines International Airport runway. Our bed ‘n’ breakfast, Jenny’s Place, was at the northern end of that crescent-shaped beach, just about where you see the little dot with the word “Golflands” beside it.
Introduction
You can Google forever under whatever variation or combination of “Grenada” and “ambassador” you want. I am here to tell you that there is one heck of a fine Grenadian ambassador who will not appear in any such search. It’s an unofficial designation, but my wife and I both agree that not only is it wholly appropriate, its failure to appear in any official record is a gross oversight and very much the Grenadian government’s loss.
Ian Forde is a Grenadian tour guide who works under the larger umbrella of one of Grenada’s many tour companies. We first met Ian serendipitously by contacting the tour company to request a driver for a particular excursion. He proved to be such a fantastic host that, for the two subsequent trips for which we needed motorized wheels, we specifically requested him. So in the many following written “snapshots” that make up the album of our Grenadian sojourn, much of the information about Grenada appears courtesy of the voluminous oral resource that is Ian Forde.
- 0 -
First of all (because I have no doubt this is a burning question on everyone’s mind), it’s “gren-AY-da”. Its people, with impeccable logic, call themselves “gren-AY-dee-ans”. (Unlike we “Can-AY-dee-ans” who, with no logic whatsoever, hail from “CAN-ah-dah”.)
- 0 -
Thank you 9-1-1 terrorists. We encountered just one delay on our whole travel experience there and back. On the flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Grenada, take-off was delayed because the crew was unable to lock the door between the flight crew in the cockpit and the passenger compartment. And apparently under US law since 9-1-1, an aircraft without the ability to have that door locked cannot take off. It took about 20 minutes to bring a mechanic out from the terminal to the aircraft, and have him repair the lock. (Or apparently so. When we landed and said good-bye, my wife overheard one of the cabin crew telling another passenger that the pilot was seriously angry about having had to fly with that door’s not having been successfully locked.)
On a funnier note, before we left Grenada en route back to the San Juan airport on our return trip, the security guard scanning my carry-on asked me if I had a nail clipper in my carry-on backpack, because something that looked very much like one had appeared on the x-ray. Not only did I have one, I told him to keep it if it was a problem. (Even though my wife had read a recent travel advisory which specifically permitted nail clippers in carry-on, I was not about to make an issue of a nail clipper.) Nonetheless, the security guard called a more senior looking guard over and the two of them spent several seconds studiously examining the nearly inch-and-a-half long nail file blade. Finally, the senior guard gave it a gruff OK and walked away. The security guard who had first spotted it on the x-ray leaned conspiratorially towards me as he handed back my nail clipper. “Actually, I already knew it was OK,” he said quietly, “but that [he nodded towards the senior staffer’s back] is my supervisor and I wanted to show him I am on the ball.”
That’ll teach me. Next time I’ll take my Cutex brand nail clippers, instead of the “Swiss Army Deluxe Box-Cutter with Specially Concealed Bowie Knife and Cockpit Door Lock Pick” brand I was carrying on this trip.
- 0 -
From the moment you arrive on Grenada, you’re confronted by evidence of the destructive power unleashed by Hurricane Ivan when it smashed into the island in September 2004. (“On” Grenada, because it is a small island. “In” Grenada would probably work, but when the air force brat in me first looked at the diminutive map dot that was our destination, I concluded that landing at its airport might well be akin to touching down on the deck of an aircraft carrier. And unless one is a kamikaze pilot, one never lands “in” an aircraft carrier. But I digress.)
Although you wouldn’t know it when you first see the lush greenery on Grenada’s hilltops, Ivan absolutely devastated the island’s rain forest and its staple spice crop producer – its nutmeg trees. We found this out at breakfast one morning when we mentioned to the property-manager-cum-tour-advisor at our bed ’n’ breakfast that we planned an inland hike through the rain forest to a pair of waterfalls that together made up two of the “Seven Sisters”. His response was to snicker and tell us that would be lovely, except for the fact that there isn’t any rain forest.
We snickered back because we had seen the absolutely lavish stands of greenery on the hills around us. “Look again,” he said. “It’s all vines.” Lesson 1 in tropical flora. When it is in place, the so-called “canopy” of a rain forest is a major growth inhibitor for vines. In fact, a great many of the hillside homes and smaller trees that we saw were, pre-Ivan, completely masked by the lavishly-leaved trees of the forest.
But Ivan crossed Grenada like God’s own scythe and carried off the entire forest at the point on most trees where their trunks splay out to branches and leaves. And sure enough, on a closer look we realized the vast majority of green we could see was indeed provided by the vines that ran wild after the sun-blocking canopy did its David O Selznick act. With the treetops gone with the wind, the vines simply erupted from the forest floor and scaled the tree trunks the way you and I use a stepladder. In 2006, that’s what is making Grenada’s forests green. There were, in fact, many places where we saw really sad palm trees that resembled telephone poles. In those places, removed a few hundred yards from the main forest, the vines hadn’t quite made the trip to the trees and two years later in one of the lushest growing environments on Earth they still stand like gently bowed hydro poles, with no leaves at all on them.
- 0 -
In Grenada, the term “restaurant” or “dining room” often requires some tweaking of a typical North American’s understanding of the term.
At our bed ’n’ breakfast, the “dining room” was a deck, removed from the main house by a distance of about 15 yards. It sat at the property’s edge, bordering one end of Grand Anse Beach. Because it marks an end point of the beach, where many walkers stop and turn around, it is appropriately enough named The Turning Point. But gaining access to the restaurant, always in the evening but even occasionally in the afternoon, requires that you notify the owners or manager in advance if you plan to eat there. Otherwise they simply don’t open their kitchen. There were several times when my wife and I were gently bobbing in the warm Caribbean waters and we would watch as scorched beachwalkers paused at the gate, no doubt hoping for the opportunity to enjoy a rum punch or a cold Carib beer (about which I’ll say more later), only to be confronted with a red and white “Closed” sign.
We did have a thoroughly enjoyable dinner on the premises one evening, but we had notified our host and hostess in advance that we’d be there.
Another place recommended to us was called Le Chateau, whose location has to be experienced to be believed. We had been told they did really good things with seafood for reasonable prices, and it was not too far from where we were staying. Following the walking directions we were given, we arrived at a delta of land in the middle of where Grenada’s main road split in a “Y”– one direction heading towards the airport, and the other turning a little farther south where the road then u-turned and swept up the Atlantic side of the island. And Le Chateau sits in the middle of that heavy traffic-bracketed “Y”.
Grenada is either temperate or hot year round and “al fresco” is the order of the day with most of its restaurants. But with Le Chateau, being outside meant that the “dining room” was separated from the flow of traffic streaming by on either side by only the very flimsiest of lattice walls. It’s as if you looked at a patch of land located where the exit ramp of a major highway like Ottawa’s Queensway turns off and decided that you should put a restaurant and patio bar smack between the highway and the exit ramp. Granted, it’s not quite a four-lane road crossing you need to execute, but it is two lanes, and two lanes of quite busy traffic.
(Further complicating the bumper-pool exercise of crossing the street is the fact that Grenada’s strongest political roots are British and so they drive on what we Canadians call the “other” side of the road when we’re feeling charitable, and curse as the “wrong” side of the road when we’ve just narrowly missed being clocked by a speeding compact car that blew past after coming from the right, the direction we hadn’t looked first as we stepped off the curb.)
But on the more restful side of the same “al fresco” coin was a delightful beachside restaurant called the Coconut Beach. There, about a third of its tables are actually out on the beach and I can’t begin to tell you how much fun dinner is when your appetizer is served as you’re burrowing your toes into the sand.
A Grenadian seafood rule of thumb: “Catch of the day” is almost always mahi-mahi. Although officially called a “dolphin fish”, mahi-mahi is not porpoise and thus, as we were re-assured on at least one occasion, we were not “eating Flipper”. (Plus, despite the glorious descriptions of iridescence that appear in write-ups about it, [ http://sarasota.extension.ufl.edu/fcs/FlaFoodFare/MahiMahi.htm ] it is really an ugly looking thing, with a face like a Warner Brothers cartoon bulldog. Yanking it from the ocean and rendering it as fresh fillets is, therefore, actually doing it a big favour.) For someone like myself who enjoys seafood but who is violently allergic to shellfish, “catch of the day” is pretty well the part of the menu to which you have to restrict yourself.
That being said, mahi-mahi is served on Grenada in a sufficient variety of ways that even four mahi-mahi meals in a row can still seem like four different kinds of fish. (In, for example, a tomato-based creole sauce, or grilled with garlic butter, or pan-fried and served with an unbelievably wonderful sauce called Nantais butter – a vinegary-tanged butter simply awash in fresh-chopped shallots – or even lightly breaded with one or another of those same three sauces).
- 0 -
If you’re a first-time visitor to Grenada and choose to move around by means of renting a car, just skip the preliminaries, drive straight to the nearest psychiatric hospital and check yourself in, because you’re barking mad. Further to my previous note about Grenada’s driving being British in nature, add to the mix the fact that Grenadian roads aren’t anywhere near wide enough to have lane stripes and many of its intersections are wholly unmarked versions of Britain’s gift to highway insanity, the roundabout. Even as a passenger in our guide’s van, I found myself shrinking in fear about 20 times per hour as we boiled around a corner to find ourselves face-to-face with something oncoming. In my mind, I would call frantically for a shift to the right, because that’s what we do here in Canada. But of course among drivers who drive on the… *ahem*… “other” side of the road, that will put you head-to-head with the oncoming machine. And on Grenada these days, that’s quite likely to be a large dump truck with a rear box full of construction workers heading off to their day-end bottles of Carib. That’s a crew in whose way you don’t ever want to be.
More to come, fer shure.
(One of several…)
Picture this, and several Grenada notes to come, as a textual photo album. Oh sure, I could go for a conventional narrative structure. But, my never having been to Grenada before, our trip probably made more of an impression on me as a series of perceptions of images and single events, rather than a tale flowing chronologically from its beginning through a middle to its end. (But don’t worry; I’ll let you know when you reach the end. Even if I have to wake you up to do so.)
Orienting yourself: On this map [ http://www.skyviews.com/grenada/grenadamap.html ], most of these “snapshots” are set almost at the very bottom of the island, on the left side where you see “Grand Anse Bay” and that beach umbrella symbol traveling about an inch and a half (more or less, depending on the size of your monitor) roughly towards two o’clock from the Point Salines International Airport runway. Our bed ‘n’ breakfast, Jenny’s Place, was at the northern end of that crescent-shaped beach, just about where you see the little dot with the word “Golflands” beside it.
Introduction
You can Google forever under whatever variation or combination of “Grenada” and “ambassador” you want. I am here to tell you that there is one heck of a fine Grenadian ambassador who will not appear in any such search. It’s an unofficial designation, but my wife and I both agree that not only is it wholly appropriate, its failure to appear in any official record is a gross oversight and very much the Grenadian government’s loss.
Ian Forde is a Grenadian tour guide who works under the larger umbrella of one of Grenada’s many tour companies. We first met Ian serendipitously by contacting the tour company to request a driver for a particular excursion. He proved to be such a fantastic host that, for the two subsequent trips for which we needed motorized wheels, we specifically requested him. So in the many following written “snapshots” that make up the album of our Grenadian sojourn, much of the information about Grenada appears courtesy of the voluminous oral resource that is Ian Forde.
- 0 -
First of all (because I have no doubt this is a burning question on everyone’s mind), it’s “gren-AY-da”. Its people, with impeccable logic, call themselves “gren-AY-dee-ans”. (Unlike we “Can-AY-dee-ans” who, with no logic whatsoever, hail from “CAN-ah-dah”.)
- 0 -
Thank you 9-1-1 terrorists. We encountered just one delay on our whole travel experience there and back. On the flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Grenada, take-off was delayed because the crew was unable to lock the door between the flight crew in the cockpit and the passenger compartment. And apparently under US law since 9-1-1, an aircraft without the ability to have that door locked cannot take off. It took about 20 minutes to bring a mechanic out from the terminal to the aircraft, and have him repair the lock. (Or apparently so. When we landed and said good-bye, my wife overheard one of the cabin crew telling another passenger that the pilot was seriously angry about having had to fly with that door’s not having been successfully locked.)
On a funnier note, before we left Grenada en route back to the San Juan airport on our return trip, the security guard scanning my carry-on asked me if I had a nail clipper in my carry-on backpack, because something that looked very much like one had appeared on the x-ray. Not only did I have one, I told him to keep it if it was a problem. (Even though my wife had read a recent travel advisory which specifically permitted nail clippers in carry-on, I was not about to make an issue of a nail clipper.) Nonetheless, the security guard called a more senior looking guard over and the two of them spent several seconds studiously examining the nearly inch-and-a-half long nail file blade. Finally, the senior guard gave it a gruff OK and walked away. The security guard who had first spotted it on the x-ray leaned conspiratorially towards me as he handed back my nail clipper. “Actually, I already knew it was OK,” he said quietly, “but that [he nodded towards the senior staffer’s back] is my supervisor and I wanted to show him I am on the ball.”
That’ll teach me. Next time I’ll take my Cutex brand nail clippers, instead of the “Swiss Army Deluxe Box-Cutter with Specially Concealed Bowie Knife and Cockpit Door Lock Pick” brand I was carrying on this trip.
- 0 -
From the moment you arrive on Grenada, you’re confronted by evidence of the destructive power unleashed by Hurricane Ivan when it smashed into the island in September 2004. (“On” Grenada, because it is a small island. “In” Grenada would probably work, but when the air force brat in me first looked at the diminutive map dot that was our destination, I concluded that landing at its airport might well be akin to touching down on the deck of an aircraft carrier. And unless one is a kamikaze pilot, one never lands “in” an aircraft carrier. But I digress.)
Although you wouldn’t know it when you first see the lush greenery on Grenada’s hilltops, Ivan absolutely devastated the island’s rain forest and its staple spice crop producer – its nutmeg trees. We found this out at breakfast one morning when we mentioned to the property-manager-cum-tour-advisor at our bed ’n’ breakfast that we planned an inland hike through the rain forest to a pair of waterfalls that together made up two of the “Seven Sisters”. His response was to snicker and tell us that would be lovely, except for the fact that there isn’t any rain forest.
We snickered back because we had seen the absolutely lavish stands of greenery on the hills around us. “Look again,” he said. “It’s all vines.” Lesson 1 in tropical flora. When it is in place, the so-called “canopy” of a rain forest is a major growth inhibitor for vines. In fact, a great many of the hillside homes and smaller trees that we saw were, pre-Ivan, completely masked by the lavishly-leaved trees of the forest.
But Ivan crossed Grenada like God’s own scythe and carried off the entire forest at the point on most trees where their trunks splay out to branches and leaves. And sure enough, on a closer look we realized the vast majority of green we could see was indeed provided by the vines that ran wild after the sun-blocking canopy did its David O Selznick act. With the treetops gone with the wind, the vines simply erupted from the forest floor and scaled the tree trunks the way you and I use a stepladder. In 2006, that’s what is making Grenada’s forests green. There were, in fact, many places where we saw really sad palm trees that resembled telephone poles. In those places, removed a few hundred yards from the main forest, the vines hadn’t quite made the trip to the trees and two years later in one of the lushest growing environments on Earth they still stand like gently bowed hydro poles, with no leaves at all on them.
- 0 -
In Grenada, the term “restaurant” or “dining room” often requires some tweaking of a typical North American’s understanding of the term.
At our bed ’n’ breakfast, the “dining room” was a deck, removed from the main house by a distance of about 15 yards. It sat at the property’s edge, bordering one end of Grand Anse Beach. Because it marks an end point of the beach, where many walkers stop and turn around, it is appropriately enough named The Turning Point. But gaining access to the restaurant, always in the evening but even occasionally in the afternoon, requires that you notify the owners or manager in advance if you plan to eat there. Otherwise they simply don’t open their kitchen. There were several times when my wife and I were gently bobbing in the warm Caribbean waters and we would watch as scorched beachwalkers paused at the gate, no doubt hoping for the opportunity to enjoy a rum punch or a cold Carib beer (about which I’ll say more later), only to be confronted with a red and white “Closed” sign.
We did have a thoroughly enjoyable dinner on the premises one evening, but we had notified our host and hostess in advance that we’d be there.
Another place recommended to us was called Le Chateau, whose location has to be experienced to be believed. We had been told they did really good things with seafood for reasonable prices, and it was not too far from where we were staying. Following the walking directions we were given, we arrived at a delta of land in the middle of where Grenada’s main road split in a “Y”– one direction heading towards the airport, and the other turning a little farther south where the road then u-turned and swept up the Atlantic side of the island. And Le Chateau sits in the middle of that heavy traffic-bracketed “Y”.
Grenada is either temperate or hot year round and “al fresco” is the order of the day with most of its restaurants. But with Le Chateau, being outside meant that the “dining room” was separated from the flow of traffic streaming by on either side by only the very flimsiest of lattice walls. It’s as if you looked at a patch of land located where the exit ramp of a major highway like Ottawa’s Queensway turns off and decided that you should put a restaurant and patio bar smack between the highway and the exit ramp. Granted, it’s not quite a four-lane road crossing you need to execute, but it is two lanes, and two lanes of quite busy traffic.
(Further complicating the bumper-pool exercise of crossing the street is the fact that Grenada’s strongest political roots are British and so they drive on what we Canadians call the “other” side of the road when we’re feeling charitable, and curse as the “wrong” side of the road when we’ve just narrowly missed being clocked by a speeding compact car that blew past after coming from the right, the direction we hadn’t looked first as we stepped off the curb.)
But on the more restful side of the same “al fresco” coin was a delightful beachside restaurant called the Coconut Beach. There, about a third of its tables are actually out on the beach and I can’t begin to tell you how much fun dinner is when your appetizer is served as you’re burrowing your toes into the sand.
A Grenadian seafood rule of thumb: “Catch of the day” is almost always mahi-mahi. Although officially called a “dolphin fish”, mahi-mahi is not porpoise and thus, as we were re-assured on at least one occasion, we were not “eating Flipper”. (Plus, despite the glorious descriptions of iridescence that appear in write-ups about it, [ http://sarasota.extension.ufl.edu/fcs/FlaFoodFare/MahiMahi.htm ] it is really an ugly looking thing, with a face like a Warner Brothers cartoon bulldog. Yanking it from the ocean and rendering it as fresh fillets is, therefore, actually doing it a big favour.) For someone like myself who enjoys seafood but who is violently allergic to shellfish, “catch of the day” is pretty well the part of the menu to which you have to restrict yourself.
That being said, mahi-mahi is served on Grenada in a sufficient variety of ways that even four mahi-mahi meals in a row can still seem like four different kinds of fish. (In, for example, a tomato-based creole sauce, or grilled with garlic butter, or pan-fried and served with an unbelievably wonderful sauce called Nantais butter – a vinegary-tanged butter simply awash in fresh-chopped shallots – or even lightly breaded with one or another of those same three sauces).
- 0 -
If you’re a first-time visitor to Grenada and choose to move around by means of renting a car, just skip the preliminaries, drive straight to the nearest psychiatric hospital and check yourself in, because you’re barking mad. Further to my previous note about Grenada’s driving being British in nature, add to the mix the fact that Grenadian roads aren’t anywhere near wide enough to have lane stripes and many of its intersections are wholly unmarked versions of Britain’s gift to highway insanity, the roundabout. Even as a passenger in our guide’s van, I found myself shrinking in fear about 20 times per hour as we boiled around a corner to find ourselves face-to-face with something oncoming. In my mind, I would call frantically for a shift to the right, because that’s what we do here in Canada. But of course among drivers who drive on the… *ahem*… “other” side of the road, that will put you head-to-head with the oncoming machine. And on Grenada these days, that’s quite likely to be a large dump truck with a rear box full of construction workers heading off to their day-end bottles of Carib. That’s a crew in whose way you don’t ever want to be.
More to come, fer shure.
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