There are 32 islands and cays in St. Vincent in the Grenadines, and I stepped foot on five of them. The main island, St. Vincent, is 9 miles wide and 16 long, with a dense population of 102,000. People refer more to the "windward" and "leeward" sides of the island and less to "east" and "west." The Atlantic side has rougher water and is rockier, while the west, or leeward, side is calmer with more beaches. The average high in January and February is 84 degrees, while from May through October it’s 88 degrees. Homes don't have (or need) water heaters, though Enos, our guide hiking St. Vincent’s volcano, mentioned that it’s chilly not having hot water in January (when the average low is 75). The temperature of the sea water varies from 81 to 84 degrees. Technically hurricane season begins June 1, but really through June (when we were there) the risk is very slim.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines has French and English colonial history, and while the official language is English, Vincentian Creole is used informally, in the home and among friends. They drive on the left-hand side of the road.
We arrived from Barbados on a Friday morning, and we had much to do to prepare for our week of sailing. We had both a boat briefing (locating valves and switches and safety info and such) and a chart briefing (with suggestions for where to anchor and get the best ice cream and such), and we shopped for food and all the other provisions we would need, from toilet paper to tequila. Phyllis, who would become our taxi driver for a couple of days, took us to the Sunrise grocery store and then her suggested liquor store, coming inside to wait for us. We hauled all our purchases, including six five-liter jugs of water, down a steep hill to the dock, where we loaded up our dinghy and headed out to stock up the Amaryllis, our catamaran for nine days.
Jeff waiting to spin the wheel in hopes of a prize at the grocery store. (He won a pen!)
From our boat in Blue Lagoon
I began to learn my way around the boat, including how to flush a toilet, how to run the refrigerator (only when the engine is on, which you run for an hour in the morning and then again in the evening if you haven't been running it otherwise), how to raise and lower the dinghy, and on-the-spot training on how to get in through a hatch in the galley if you leave the keys inside. The rest of the crew wasn't arriving until Saturday night, so we spent our first night on the boat on our own. We kept the porthole above our bed open to keep the cabin a little less stuffy, and I could see the mast, clouds, and sometimes even the moon as I looked up from our small bed. Once in a while we needed to close the hatch because it started to sprinkle, and once in a while I could hear a rooster from land.
Because we had some time to kill on Saturday, we arranged for Phyllis to drive us to Soufriere, St. Vincent's active volcano. She arranged a guide to take us to the top. Hiking the volcano was a highlight of the trip, but just getting to the trail was also a treat. It was an hour and fifteen minute drive north, and Phyllis sped through the hilly and windy terrain, covered in palm trees, banana trees, and beautiful flowers. We often wound near the coastline, sometimes seeing black-sand beaches.
The views were beautiful, but the people-watching was also fantastic, and the area was fairly well populated. People sat or walked on the side of the road, a few cows munched on grass on the hills, chickens and dogs wandered here and there, goats were chained at the road's edge, and people waited at bus stops ("bus sheds"). A man sat eating out on the porch of an unfinished three-story home, still mostly a concrete shell. He clearly lived in the first floor, and his laundry hung near him on the porch. I wondered if the home was his or if he'd just taken advantage of an available shelter. We passed a small cemetery covered in modest, white wooden crosses. White hearts covered the area where the pieces of wood crossed, and all of them began with a brief "In loving memory of...," handwritten. Cars zoomed past each other, and at one point I could hear the bass booming from a taxi van chock-full of people behind us, waiting to pass. "Are there any straight roads on this island?" Jeff asked, and Phyllis just laughed. Not long after that Jeff likened the ride to a Formula One experience.
Once in a while as we cruised along we'd hear someone call out Phyllis's name in greeting, or we'd get a quick beep from a car horn. Phyllis was the first woman on St. Vincent to start her own taxi service, and she clearly carries clout. (Her brother Charles owns another taxi service, and he drove us from the airport.) Jeff asked Phyllis what she was doing when the volcano last erupted, in 1979. She was very matter-of-fact. "I was driving a taxi," she said, and I could tell it would have taken more than a volcanic eruption to keep her from her work.
Phyllis's taxi
We drove through Georgetown, the last town before the volcano, as one phase of their Carnival (a "Jump Up") was wrapping up. Here it was before 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and the town had already been partying that morning, trash littering the streets. Traffic was diverted onto the narrow side streets as people walked through the main roads, some of them looking a little dazed and some with white paint smeared on their faces. One woman rode on top of a man's shoulders as they laughed with other partiers. In Georgetown we picked up our guide, Enos, or "Bootcha." (He spelled it for me, and I think it may have been “Butcher,” which fits because he also sells pigs and cows and sheep.) We took a narrow road through acres of banana farms to get to our trail.
La Soufriere (the name for many volcanoes in the Caribbean, meaning “sulfur outlet” in French) stands 4,049 feet above sea level, and the trail to reach its rim is three-and-a-half miles long, according to Enos. We were there during rainy season, but with little rain and dry riverbeds. But based on what Enos said and the look of the rock that the rivers have carved as beds, the rivers seem to make a great showing when the rain hits. Soufriere has had five violent eruptions since 1718. An eruption in 1902 (hours before a separate eruption in Martinique) killed 1,680 people. Almost everyone in the “death zone” was Carib, and it wiped out the last significant remnant of the Carib culture.
When the volcano last erupted in 1979, it had 12 "episodes" on Easter Sunday, Phyllis said. (Enos told us that no one on St. VIncent knew the volcano was erupting until St. Lucia from the north called to let them know, but I also read that no one died because of advance warning.) The hot ash had killed the forested area we walked through, and bamboo, quick to grow in new forest, still covered much of the area. Enos explained that the government is working to develop a system to capture energy from the volcano.
Enos was pretty animated, and on the way up he said everything with a smile. I enjoyed the language he used. One year he'd been in Canada in the fall, when "the leaves jump off the trees," and at one point he said, "the sun is not going to get hot plenty today." Enos frequently asked if we needed to stop for breaks, but he made it clear that we couldn't tire him out. "I'm a very fit man," he said multiple times. "If you never tired, I'm never tired." He told us that he climbs the volcano every day of the week, both guiding people up it and maintaining it. Sometimes he makes the trip twice in a day. He is adamantly opposed to the idea of introducing monkeys to St. Vincent--there are none, nor are there other animals in the forest, he says. Monkeys are bad news. They eat your food, and "they slap you up!" He talked at length about how he would respond if he found a monkey in his kitchen, including chopping it up with a "ma-chett," starting with its tail and then going for the neck. Fortunately for monkeys it doesn't sound like the government is going to bring any to the island.
Clouds usually hover around the volcano and are sometimes too thick to get a view of the top or down into the crater. We were fortunate, as it was clear enough at the edge of the crater to get a beautiful view down to small crater lakes, a steaming fissure, and a smaller growing cone inside. It was windy and cool at the top, and we spoke with a man who was there with his son. The boy was fulfilling his wish, to climb Soufriere on his ninth birthday.
Steam
On the way back from Soufriere we headed to an ATM to get ECs, the Eastern Caribbean currency, and another grocery store in hopes of finding a few things we couldn't find at the first one, including eggs. We ended up buying eggs from a roadside stand, and much of our fruit and vegetables we bought from small stands in the crowded grocery store parking lot, with Phyllis’s help in judging quality.
Me with Phyllis
The yacht company, in Blue Lagoon, has a restaurant below it and showers available in the restroom, so as we waited for Jeff's family and Amy, a family friend, I took advantage of the opportunity for a last shower on land before using up our precious store of fresh water for washing on the boat.
The rest of the crew arrived, and we spent our first night together on the boat. Sunday morning we grabbed some snorkeling gear for those who didn't have it and a few bags of ice for the freezer (where nothing really freezes, but it's colder than the refrigerator), and we had breakfast at the restaurant. Oh, and Jeff did a lot of problem-solving, including from the dinghy under the boat, to fix a broken toilet.
Then we set sail for the Windward Islands to the south.
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