TriumphAnt

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.

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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”.)

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.